Trump live: Mike Pence slams tariff plan in major intervention against former ally
Former Vice President Mike Pence has rebuked Donald Trump 's sweeping tariffs and the White House 's 'wavering support' for Ukraine in a bruising CNN interview.
A day after receiving the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for his actions concerning the January 6 insurrection, Pence sat down with Kaitlin Collins Monday to deliver one of his most wide-ranging critiques of the president's second administration.
While the former vice president said he supports using tariffs to pressure China into trade talks, he argued Trump's broader levies on allies and trade partners will 'ultimately harm the American economy.'
Pence also expressed disappointment in Trump's support of Kyiv, warning that Russian President Vladimir Putin 'doesn't want peace. He wants Ukraine' and that the Trump administration 'has only emboldened Russia.'
It came as Trump doubled down on his plans to resurrect Alcatraz as a prison after it had been shuttered for decades in an Oval Office press conference Monday. 'I mean, it represents something very strong, very powerful, in terms of law and order. Our country needs law and order,' he said.
Trump's former VP Mike Pence scorches president's sweeping tariffs
Donald Trump's former Vice President Mike Pence has the commander-in-chief's sweeping tariffs in a blistering CNN interview.
Pence sat down with Kaitlin Collins on Monday to deliver one of his most wide-ranging critiques of the president's second administration.
While the former vice president said he supports using tariffs to pressure China into trade talks, he argued Trump's broader levies on allies and trade partners will 'ultimately harm the American economy.'
'The administration is advancing policies that are not targeted at countries that have been abusing our trade relationship, but rather are essentially new industrial policy that will result in inflation, that will harm consumers and ultimately harm the American economy,' he said.
'My view always is free trade with free nations – that we ought to be engaging our trading partners across the free world to lower trade barriers, lower nontariff barriers and subsidies.'
Pence added that the U.S. 'ought to get tough' with authoritarian regimes
James Liddell6 May 2025 09:14
Trump announces Alcatraz reopening hours after 'Escape from Alcatraz' airing
Good morning and welcome to The Independent 's live blog.
During a Sunday evening blitz of social media posts, Donald Trump demanded that one of the most notorious prisons in American history be reopened.
Incidentally, the president's sudden push for the tourist destination of Alcatraz to once again become a maximum-security prison complex came just hours after a South Florida PBS station aired the 1979 classic film Escape from Alcatraz. The president spent the past weekend at his Mar-a-Lago resort, which is located in Palm Beach.
During an Oval Office press conference Monday, the president was asked why he decided that he needed to resurrect Alcatraz as a prison after it had been shuttered for decades, prompting Trump to deliver a rambling response that included him touting his own cinematic vision.
'Well, I guess I was supposed to be a moviemaker,' Trump — who recently announced his intention to implement 100 percent tariffs on foreign films — declared
Justin Baragona has more:
Trump announced Alcatraz reopening hours after 'Escape from Alcatraz' aired on PBS
The 1979 film starring Clint Eastwood about the daring 1962 escape attempt aired on the local PBS channel just six hours before the president made his demand that the prison be reopened
James Liddell6 May 2025 09:10
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The Independent
24 minutes ago
- The Independent
Veterans slam Trump's ‘political' deployment of Marines and National Guard to LA: ‘Citizens are not enemy combatants'
Donald Trump 's deployment of National Guard troops and U.S. Marines to Los Angeles is a thinly veiled 'authoritarian' and politically motivated attempt to inflame protests and crush dissent, veterans and legal experts warn. Trump is relying on federal law that allows the president to call up the National Guard to respond to domestic unrest, an action known commonly as federalizing the normally state-authorized Guard. Even then, those troops have only a limited mission in supporting federal law enforcement agents and federal buildings at the center of protests against the administration's mass deportation agenda. But now, with his National Guard deployment combined with sending some 700 Marines to L.A., veterans groups, military law experts and Democratic officials fear the president is testing the limits of his authority to send active-duty military into American streets — and violating service members' commitments to stay out of domestic politics. 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'The idea that Marines would be deployed to suppress the very people we're meant to protect is a disgrace. It's un-American,' Marine Corps veteran and Common Defense organizer Jojo Sweatt added. The last time a president federalized the National Guard against the will of a state governor was in 1965, when then-President Lyndon Johnson deployed troops to protect civil rights advocates marching from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery — two weeks after the violence of 'Bloody Sunday' on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Johnson did so after Alabama's segregationist Gov. George Wallace told the president that his state 'refuses to provide for the safety and welfare' of the marchers, according to Johnson's proclamation. But 60 years later, Trump is deploying troops not to defend civil rights activists but to protect law enforcement and federal property. Activating troops against the wishes of California Gov. Gavin Newsom 'is bad for all Americans concerned about freedom of speech and states' rights,' retired Major Gen. Randy Manner said in a statement to Fox News. 'There are over a million badged and trained members of law enforcement in this country for the governor to ask for help if he needs it,' he added. 'While this is presently a legal order, it tramples the governor's rights and obligations to protect his people. This is an inappropriate use of the National Guard and is not warranted.' Trump's open-ended memo invoking military deployment does not single out Los Angeles or even California. It empowers the Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth 'to employ any other members of the regular Armed Forces as necessary.' Carrie A. Lee, a former associate professor at the U.S. Army War College, called Trump's actions 'massive overreach' and 'crazy broad,' seemingly paving the way for the administration 'to use military force against protestors on American soil anywhere they want.' Invoking 'protective power' authority without any geographical limits effectively creates an unprecedented and 'dangerous' nationwide order, according to Lee. Trump has not invoked the Insurrection Act, though the president and administration officials have repeatedly labeled protesters 'insurrectionists' and 'seditionists' — sparking fears that the president is laying the groundwork for mass deployment of military assets across the country. Instead, Trump is currently relying on a far more limited statute that taps his 'protective power' authority, which does not allow the military to conduct law enforcement activities — unlike the Insurrection Act, which is excluded from federal statute that bars federal troops from participating in civilian law enforcement. 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NBC News
26 minutes ago
- NBC News
Harvard gets new legal backing from 5 Ivies and over 12,000 alumni
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'We embrace our responsibility to stand up for our freedoms and values, to safeguard liberty and democracy, and to serve as bulwarks against these threats to the safety and well-being of all.' The amicus briefs aim to provide expertise or insight to the court, but the schools and individuals are not parties in the lawsuit itself. The filings come after Harvard in April rejected the government's list of 10 demands, including auditing viewpoints of the student body, a move that the administration says is aimed at addressing antisemitism on campus. After the government threatened to freeze $2.2 billion in multiyear grants and $60 million 'in multi-year contract value,' Harvard hit back with a lawsuit. The brief filed by the universities included other prominent institutions like Georgetown, Johns Hopkins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The only Ivy League schools missing were Cornell and Columbia universities. The schools argued that the partnership between the government and academia has long led to critical advancements, from the The Human Genome Project to the Covid-19 vaccine. And that funding cuts to one school could endanger research at others. Harvard, MIT and Princeton, for example, have received funding from the National Institutes of Health for a project that could potentially yield tools to treat Alzheimer's disease. 'The work cannot continue at individual sites; MIT cannot use machine learning to uncover patterns, for example, without data from Princeton and Harvard,' the brief said. The universities said in the brief that the cuts would only cause more harm to the United States' ability to compete in science and academia. 'These cuts to research funding risk a future where the next pathbreaking innovation — whether it is a cure for cancer or Alzheimer's, a military technology, or the next Internet — is discovered beyond our shores, if at all,' the brief said. 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Telegraph
29 minutes ago
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LA police shot my photographer in the head
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On Monday evening, the smell of paint lingered in the air in Los Angeles as teenagers spray painted the pavements, walls and bus stops with slogans such as 'fight hate with hate' and 'I'll be here till I decide not to be'. Snipers stationed on the roof of the Federal Building watched through binoculars as protesters climbed traffic lights and revved their motorcycles. A black Cybertruck graffitied with 'f--- ICE' [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] was filmed driving around the protest with a Mexican flag attached to the back. On Sunday, demonstrators torched self-driving cars, threw Molotov cocktails, fireworks and scooters at police officers. Officers have fired non-lethal rounds into crowds, and in at least one instance were filmed firing pepper ball rounds (small plastic bullets filled with irritant) point blank at a protester before hitting him with batons. 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When all the deployed officers arrive, it will mean there are more than 4,000 troops in Los Angeles, more than double the number of US troops in Syria. The news of yet more reinforcements further inflamed tensions between Gavin Newsom, the California governor, and Mr Trump, who continued to publicly attack each other on Monday. Mr Newsom, who has sued the administration to try and block the deployment of marines and troops, accused the Trump administration of mistreating those already in the city, of which only 300 have so far have been deployed. Sharing a picture of troops dressed in fatigues sleeping on the floor, Mr Newsom wrote: 'If anyone is treating our troops disrespectfully, it is you.' He urged the US president to 'grow up' and urged him 'get it over with, arrest me, move on, if you need some head to scalp do it with me'. Justifying the decision to deploy troops to Los Angeles, Kristi Noem, secretary of homeland security, claimed ICE agents were targeting the 'worst of the worst' – criminal illegal immigrants hiding among law-abiding communities. But advocates for immigrants' rights have argued that day labourers being detained outside Home Depot stores suggests otherwise. Julie Flores, 21, wrapped herself in a Mexican flag as she stood on the bonnet of a black car sprayed with the words 'f--- ICE'. The student told The Telegraph the protests 'hit close to home' because her father Jerry Flores, 39, who is originally from Guerrero in Mexico was detained by agents when she was at middle school. 'My grandma would probably not like me being out here... we're out here showing our support, doing the best we can do,' she said. On Monday, Karen Bass, the Los Angeles mayor, condemned the ICE raids, claiming they had brought 'fear and terror' to the streets of Los Angeles and were to blame for the unrest. Yurien, 20, found out ICE agents were targeting her father Mario's work at Ambiance Apparel when he messaged her to tell her he was hiding. 'I said 'OK dad, I love you, don't make any noise… I told him I loved him again. He said 'me too, I love you guys…' and since then, I haven't had communication with him,' she told The Telegraph. Yurien, who did not want to give her last name, said she raced to the workplace in downtown Los Angeles and saw her father, who is from Mexico and has lived in the US for decades, being escorted to a van and driven away. 'I felt devastated, mad, angry... because there was nothing I could do to stop it,' she said, clutching a poster which read 'dad, come back home'. University student Montserrat Arrazola, 22, also saw her father being detained by ICE agents on Friday after she rushed to Ambiance Apparel when she saw the raid was happening on TikTok. Speaking to The Telegraph after a press conference outside the clothing manufacturer on Monday morning, she said: 'I felt powerless. I felt like I had my hands tied because I couldn't do anything.' She has managed to speak to her father, Jorge, who moved to the US from Mexico 'many years ago' on the phone once since then. He said he was okay. 'I have a lot of emotions running through me. I can't really explain,' she said, adding that she had not been to any of the protests that have broken out in response. Joanna Lopez, 17, discovered three of her uncles, who had all moved to the US from Mexico as teenagers, had been detained on Friday after she also saw it unfold on social media. 'I just feel for everybody whose families are being taken away right now,' she said. Ms Lopez, who attended the protest later that day, said she was 'very disappointed' in the people who had turned to violence and vandalism, adding that it portrays the scores of peaceful protesters in a bad light.
