Preview: What's happened is something worse than the worst-case scenario.

Preview: China's Foreign Ministry on Saturday said "the market has spoken" following the U.S. imposition of sweeping new tariffs.

Preview: With the Nasdaq closing its worst week since the Covid pandemic and several tech companies delaying IPOs, Silicon Valley's Trump bet is looking shaky.

Preview: Ford and Stellantis are offering employee-pricing programs, while Hyundai said it would not raise prices for at least two months to ease consumer concerns.

Preview: Stock market indices have sharply fallen on the heels of President Trump imposing higher tariffs on more than 180 countries.

Preview: President Donald Trump's tariffs will raise the prices on some goods more dramatically than others. See which items will suffer the biggest jumps.

Preview: Warren Buffett went on the record to deny social media posts shared by Trump that included a false endorsement from the "Oracle of Omaha."

Preview: Beijing's measures come in the wake of duties imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump's administration earlier this week.

Preview: A report said the trade-weighted average tariff rates in most countries are much lower than the figures used by the Trump administration.

Preview: After President Donald Trump's tariffs crushed stocks, CNBC's Jim Cramer said next week's earnings will provide a look at how CEOs are dealing with the fallout.

Preview: • Fox-Dominion trial delay 'is not unusual,' judge says • Fox News' defamation battle isn't stopping Trump's election lies

Preview: The judge just announced in court that a settlement has been reached in the historic defamation case between Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems.

Preview: A settlement has been reached in Dominion Voting Systems' defamation case against Fox News, the judge for the case announced. The network will pay more than $787 million to Dominion, a lawyer for the company said.

Preview: • DeSantis goes to Washington, a place he once despised, looking for support to take on Trump • Opinion: For the GOP to win, it must ditch Trump • Chris Christie mulling 2024 White House bid • Analysis: The fire next time has begun burning in Tennessee

Preview: • 'A major part of Ralph died': Aunt of teen shot after ringing wrong doorbell speaks • 20-year-old woman shot after friend turned into the wrong driveway in upstate New York, officials say

Preview: Newly released body camera footage shows firefighters and sheriff's deputies rushing to help actor Jeremy Renner after a near-fatal snowplow accident in January. The "Avengers" actor broke more than 30 bones and suffered other severe injuries. CNN's Chloe Melas has more.

Preview: It's sourdough bread and handstands for Jake Gyllenhaal and Jamie Lee Curtis.

Preview: A tiny intruder infiltrated White House grounds Tuesday, prompting a swift response from the US Secret Service.

Preview: An arrest warrant has been issued for controversial Biden administration official Sam Brinton in connection with a second alleged theft at an airport in Las Vegas. Brinton, who works for the Department of Energy, was already placed on leave after he allegedly stole a woman’s luggage at Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) International Airport late last month. ...

Preview: Inside the Illinois State Capitol sits a display of several religious exhibits for the holiday season, which includes a Jewish menorah, the Christian nativity scene, and the “Serpent of Genesis” from the Satanic Temple, as reported by local radio media. Consisting of a leather-bound copy of astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus’ “De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium” — which ...

Preview: The latest release of the “Twitter Files” Thursday evening revealed that leftists at the highest level of the company, who have all since been fired or been forced to resign, targeted one of the most popular right-wing accounts on the platform with repeated suspensions despite the fact that they secretly admitted that she did not ...

Preview: The second installment of the so-called “Twitter Files” was released Thursday evening after the company turned over documents to a journalist who then started to publish the findings on the platform. Musk released internal company communications through journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday about the company’s censorship of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story ...

Preview: The transgender community has turned on a once revered surgeon specializing in sex change surgeries after a patient posted graphic photos of an allegedly botched operation. Dr. Sidhbh Gallagher, a Miami-based surgeon specializing in double mastectomy surgeries for transgender-identifying patients, has been heavily criticized for performing the elective surgery on minors. She has also earned ...

Preview: Video emerged Thursday afternoon of Brittney Griner being swapped on a runway for convicted Russian terrorist Viktor Bout after Democrat President Joe Biden agreed to the trade. The video showed Griner, who is wearing a red jacket, walking across the tarmac with three men while Bout walked toward her with a man standing next to ...

Preview: After a woman claimed to be the daughter of a serial killer in a recent interview, a search of the supposed location of buried remains has turned up nothing. Federal, state, and local authorities did not find any evidence or remains after scouring the earth for several days in Thurman, Iowa, a small town just ...

Preview: A FedEx contract driver strangled a 7-year-old girl after hitting her with his van in Texas late last month, according to arrest warrant documents. Tanner Horner, a 31-year-old from Fort Worth, has been arrested and charged with capital murder of a person under 10 years old and aggravated kidnapping in the death of Athena Strand, ...

Preview: Disabled veteran Congressman Brian Mast (R-FL) took issue with fellow Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) over the way she chose to transport her American flag while she was moving from one office to another. Mast, who lost both legs and his left index finger in 2010 when he stepped on an improvised explosive device (IED) while ...

Preview: Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, slammed President Joe Biden Thursday for releasing notorious terrorist Viktor Bout in exchange for Brittney Griner. Griner, who has a criminal record in the U.S. stemming from a domestic violence incident several years ago, was arrested in Russia back in February on drug charges, ...

Preview: STOCK MARKET HAS LOST $11 TRILLION SINCE INAUGURATION DAY... (Top headline, 1st story, link) Related stories: WORST TWO-DAY WIPEOUT IN HISTORY! When Do Circuit Breakers Kick In? Hedge funds hit with steep margin calls... CNBC CRAMER WARNS 'CRASH'... SAUDI FIRST: TRUMP FOCUSED ON GOLF DURING SPIRAL... 'He Doesn't Give a F**k'... Conservative Group Tries to Stop Him in Court... 60% chance of recession... MORE Traders buying dips and getting burned... USA hands China most golden opportunity...

Preview: WORST TWO-DAY WIPEOUT IN HISTORY! (Top headline, 2nd story, link) Related stories: STOCK MARKET HAS LOST $11 TRILLION SINCE INAUGURATION DAY... When Do Circuit Breakers Kick In? Hedge funds hit with steep margin calls... CNBC CRAMER WARNS 'CRASH'... SAUDI FIRST: TRUMP FOCUSED ON GOLF DURING SPIRAL... 'He Doesn't Give a F**k'... Conservative Group Tries to Stop Him in Court... 60% chance of recession... MORE Traders buying dips and getting burned... USA hands China most golden opportunity...

Preview: When Do Circuit Breakers Kick In? (Top headline, 3rd story, link) Related stories: STOCK MARKET HAS LOST $11 TRILLION SINCE INAUGURATION DAY... WORST TWO-DAY WIPEOUT IN HISTORY! Hedge funds hit with steep margin calls... CNBC CRAMER WARNS 'CRASH'... SAUDI FIRST: TRUMP FOCUSED ON GOLF DURING SPIRAL... 'He Doesn't Give a F**k'... Conservative Group Tries to Stop Him in Court... 60% chance of recession... MORE Traders buying dips and getting burned... USA hands China most golden opportunity...

Preview: Hedge funds hit with steep margin calls... (Top headline, 4th story, link) Related stories: STOCK MARKET HAS LOST $11 TRILLION SINCE INAUGURATION DAY... WORST TWO-DAY WIPEOUT IN HISTORY! When Do Circuit Breakers Kick In? CNBC CRAMER WARNS 'CRASH'... SAUDI FIRST: TRUMP FOCUSED ON GOLF DURING SPIRAL... 'He Doesn't Give a F**k'... Conservative Group Tries to Stop Him in Court... 60% chance of recession... MORE Traders buying dips and getting burned... USA hands China most golden opportunity...

Preview: CNBC CRAMER WARNS 'CRASH'... (Top headline, 5th story, link) Related stories: STOCK MARKET HAS LOST $11 TRILLION SINCE INAUGURATION DAY... WORST TWO-DAY WIPEOUT IN HISTORY! When Do Circuit Breakers Kick In? Hedge funds hit with steep margin calls... SAUDI FIRST: TRUMP FOCUSED ON GOLF DURING SPIRAL... 'He Doesn't Give a F**k'... Conservative Group Tries to Stop Him in Court... 60% chance of recession... MORE Traders buying dips and getting burned... USA hands China most golden opportunity...

Preview: SAUDI FIRST: TRUMP FOCUSED ON GOLF DURING SPIRAL... (Top headline, 6th story, link) Related stories: STOCK MARKET HAS LOST $11 TRILLION SINCE INAUGURATION DAY... WORST TWO-DAY WIPEOUT IN HISTORY! When Do Circuit Breakers Kick In? Hedge funds hit with steep margin calls... CNBC CRAMER WARNS 'CRASH'... 'He Doesn't Give a F**k'... Conservative Group Tries to Stop Him in Court... 60% chance of recession... MORE Traders buying dips and getting burned... USA hands China most golden opportunity...

Preview: 'He Doesn't Give a F**k'... (Top headline, 7th story, link) Related stories: STOCK MARKET HAS LOST $11 TRILLION SINCE INAUGURATION DAY... WORST TWO-DAY WIPEOUT IN HISTORY! When Do Circuit Breakers Kick In? Hedge funds hit with steep margin calls... CNBC CRAMER WARNS 'CRASH'... SAUDI FIRST: TRUMP FOCUSED ON GOLF DURING SPIRAL... Conservative Group Tries to Stop Him in Court... 60% chance of recession... MORE Traders buying dips and getting burned... USA hands China most golden opportunity...

Preview: Conservative Group Tries to Stop Him in Court... (Top headline, 8th story, link) Related stories: STOCK MARKET HAS LOST $11 TRILLION SINCE INAUGURATION DAY... WORST TWO-DAY WIPEOUT IN HISTORY! When Do Circuit Breakers Kick In? Hedge funds hit with steep margin calls... CNBC CRAMER WARNS 'CRASH'... SAUDI FIRST: TRUMP FOCUSED ON GOLF DURING SPIRAL... 'He Doesn't Give a F**k'... 60% chance of recession... MORE Traders buying dips and getting burned... USA hands China most golden opportunity...

Preview: 60% chance of recession... MORE (Top headline, 9th story, link) Related stories: STOCK MARKET HAS LOST $11 TRILLION SINCE INAUGURATION DAY... WORST TWO-DAY WIPEOUT IN HISTORY! When Do Circuit Breakers Kick In? Hedge funds hit with steep margin calls... CNBC CRAMER WARNS 'CRASH'... SAUDI FIRST: TRUMP FOCUSED ON GOLF DURING SPIRAL... 'He Doesn't Give a F**k'... Conservative Group Tries to Stop Him in Court... Traders buying dips and getting burned... USA hands China most golden opportunity...

Preview: Traders buying dips and getting burned... (Top headline, 10th story, link) Related stories: STOCK MARKET HAS LOST $11 TRILLION SINCE INAUGURATION DAY... WORST TWO-DAY WIPEOUT IN HISTORY! When Do Circuit Breakers Kick In? Hedge funds hit with steep margin calls... CNBC CRAMER WARNS 'CRASH'... SAUDI FIRST: TRUMP FOCUSED ON GOLF DURING SPIRAL... 'He Doesn't Give a F**k'... Conservative Group Tries to Stop Him in Court... 60% chance of recession... MORE USA hands China most golden opportunity...

Preview: U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy rode the New York City subway with Mayor Eric Adams as the Trump administration pledges to help the city fight transit crime.

Preview: A Catholic priest died in Kansas after being shot at his church’s rectory in an incident a fellow pastor said has left his parish in a "state of shock."

Preview: Theories on Charles Manson's motive for the infamous cult killings are investigated in a new Netflix documentary about the notorious Manson Family murders in California.

Preview: Ten of 16 jurors have been selected for Karen Read's second murder trial in the death of Boston cop John O'Keefe as the court breaks for its first weekend.

Preview: A Florida man was arrested on Friday after allegedly making posts on social media in which he threatened to kill President Donald Trump, according to police.

Preview: A YouTube influencer visiting a remote Indian island, where he allegedly tried to make illegal contact with indigenous people, has been arrested, according to global reports.

Preview: Massive potential cuts within the U.S. Army, reported by Military.com, would lead to a "leaner, more lethal, and larger" combat force, an Army spokesperson told Fox News Digital.

Preview: A Florida woman explains how she wrestled with an alligator that had grabbed ahold of her pet dog Kona's head while they were on a walk.

Preview: The Texas teenager accused of fatally stabbing 17-year-old Austin Metcalf at a high school track meet on Wednesday allegedly confessed to the crime to a responding officer.

Preview: A Salvadoran illegal immigrant has been arrested and charged after allegedly stabbing a Virginia man to death in a stranger's home on March 27.

Preview: Trump’s ‘reciprocal’ tariffs aren’t quite what they seem. Here’s the real story  CNN Small manufacturers offer up-close view of Trump's tariffs  Axios US starts collecting Trump's new 10% tariff, smashing global trade norms  Reuters President Trump’s Tariff Formula Makes No Economic Sense. It’s Also Based on an Error.  American Enterprise Institute The Latest: Trump's tariffs unleash trade war and calls for negotiations  ABC News

Preview: 'Your RIF notice is not cancelled.' Inside a chaotic week of massive layoffs at HHS  NPR Kennedy says he plans to reinstate some personnel and programs severed in massive HHS layoffs  CNN RFK Jr. scrambles to rehire some public health officials after firing them  MSNBC News Trump Is on Shaky Legal Ground With Mass Layoffs at H.H.S., Experts Say  The New York Times RFK Jr. said HHS would rehire thousands of fired workers. That wasn’t true.  Politico

Preview: Senate GOP adopts budget blueprint for Trump agenda — but hurdles loom  Politico Senate GOP pushes Trump budget framework through after marathon vote series  Fox News Senate GOP passes budget plan, setting up a critical next phase for Trump agenda  NPR Republicans Advance Trump’s Tax Cuts After Late-Night Session  WSJ Senate Dems blast GOP over late-night passage of blueprint to protect Trump agenda  The Hill

Preview: Massive anti-Trump protests expected Saturday in DC and across US  The Guardian Saturday’s ‘Hands Off!’ Anti-Trump Protests Try to Reach the Newly Alarmed  The New York Times ‘Hands Off!’ protests against Trump and Musk are planned across the US  AP News Thousands expected to gather at multiple protests in the DC area Saturday  WTOP 'There's a movement bubbling up': Anti-Trump protests planned nationwide Saturday  USA Today

Preview: More than 500 firms sign brief in support of Trump-targeted law office  Al Jazeera Hundreds of law firms back Perkins Coie in fight against Trump sanctions  The Washington Post An attack on the Constitution? Why Trump's moves to punish law firms are causing alarm  USA Today Hundreds of law firms, former judges sign onto briefs in support of Perkins Coie  The Hill Big Law Firms Struck a Truce With Trump—and Set Off a Clash With Recruits  WSJ

Preview: Man mistakenly deported to El Salvador must be returned, judge orders  Axios Trump Admin Dismisses Judge’s Order to Bring Back Man Accidentally Sent to El Salvador  Rolling Stone Inside the Trump Administration’s Deportation of a Migrant to El Salvador  The New York Times My comment is that according to the court document you apparently didn’t read he was a convicted MS-13 gang member with no legal right to be here. My further comment is that it’s gross to get fired up about gang members getting deported while ignoring citiz  x.com Federal judge rules return of Maryland man mistakenly deported to El Salvador prison  The Guardian

Preview: Supreme Court OKs Trump’s cuts to teacher training grants in California  Los Angeles Times 5-4 Supreme Court allows Trump to freeze roughly $65 million in teacher training grants  CNN Supreme Court sides with administration over Education Department grants  NPR Supreme Court Lets Trump Suspend Grants to Teachers  The New York Times John Roberts Sides With Supreme Court Liberals Against Donald Trump  Newsweek

Preview: Canada says its friendship with the US is ‘over.’ Now what?  Politico Canada’s Carney Puts Tariffs on U.S.-Made Cars as Stellantis Plant Pauses Production  The New York Times Canada’s Joly Aims for Maximum Pressure on Trump, Europe Pivot  Bloomberg USMCA Exemption Continues for Canada, Mexico, White House Says  WSJ Canada and Mexico leaders take credit for dodging latest US tariffs  Financial Times

Preview: Maya Angelou memoir, Holocaust book are among those pulled from Naval Academy library in DEI purge  AP News Naval Academy tosses 400 books from library following Trump DEI expulsion orders  Fox News Display of Jewish women graduates restored after US Naval Academy says it was ‘mistakenly removed’  CNN US naval academy pulled exhibit for female Jewish graduates ahead of Hegseth visit  The Times of Israel These Are the 381 Books Removed From the Naval Academy Library  The New York Times

Preview: Jerry Nadler on Trump’s university attacks: ‘He doesn’t give a damn about antisemitism’  The Guardian Trump’s Fight Against Antisemitism Has Become Fraught for Many Jews  The New York Times Trump’s Jewish Cover Story  The Atlantic This Is Not About Antisemitism, Palestine, or Columbia. It’s Trump Dismantling the American Dream.  The Intercept It’s Time for Jews to Refuse Trump’s ‘Protection’  New York Magazine

Preview: Senate Democrats on Saturday blasted their GOP colleagues after the upper chamber advanced a budget blueprint overnight seeking to protect President Trump's legislative agenda. The resolution passed in the upper chamber early Saturday morning by a 51-48 vote, after the upper chamber held an hours-long "vote-a-rama" on a series of amendments. The blueprint outlines plans...

Preview: President Trump's tariffs are expected to drive up prices, and some consumers are trying to get ahead of the action.

Preview: Artificial intelligence could be the final nail in the coffin of educational excellence, by removing the “rote work” from learning and creating an educational environment in which critical thinking is replaced with automation.

Preview: A new study finds poor air quality is linked to a heightened risk for depression. Depression is a classified as a mood disorder.

Preview: Businesses, consumers and foreign leaders are trying to assess just how set in stone President Trump’s tariffs are, as the administration and its allies send mixed signals about whether the measures are being used for leverage. Some Trump allies touted the tariffs — which have led to a massive stock market selloff and heightened fears of a recession...

Preview: The Elon Musk effect is being hotly debated in Republican circles this weekend, even as the reverberations from President Trump’s tariff policies dominate the headlines. Put simply, the question is whether Musk is an asset or liability to Trump. Speculation is rife once again that Musk could leave his role at the quasi-official Department of...

Preview: Black veterans are warning that the Trump administration's effort to purge the Defense Department of its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) content is sending a negative message that could impact recruitment efforts. The Pentagon has faced backlash in recent weeks after efforts to comply with President Trump’s executive order banning DEI in the military resulted...

Preview: Senate Republicans voted early Saturday morning to pass a budget resolution that will be critical to advancing President Trump’s legislative agenda, but the measure breaks with House Republicans on several big issues, setting the stage for a showdown between the two chambers later this year. The Senate voted 51-48 to pass the measure after a...

Preview: Several Republicans have broken with their party and voted for Democratic amendments are part of a marathon series of votes Friday night. None of the Democratic amendments have passed, but Democrats went into the vote series, known as a vote-a-rama, with the goal of putting GOP lawmakers in a bind on tough issues. The amendment...

Preview: Over half of Americans, 52 percent, disapprove of President Trump’s handling of the economy, marking a 12 percent uptick from his approval in October 2024. In a survey a published by the Wall Street Journal on Friday, just a quarter of people said they approve of Trump's handling of the economy during his first 100...

Preview: Derek Thompson tore apart investor Kyle Bass for arguing in favor of Donald Trump's "thoughtful" tariffs.

Preview: "THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO GET RICH," Trump wrote from Mar-a-Lago as Wall Street continues to panic over his tariffs.

Preview: The actor, in a viral TikTok clip, claimed the fan physically assaulted him at a New York City movie theater.

Preview: CNN's Kasie Hunt asked Rep. Tim Burchett whether the president made a "line in the sand" between him and Joe Biden following his tariffs announcement.

Preview: The official claimed that "bad news stories" don't faze the president as he faces backlash over his "liberation day" tariffs reveal.

Preview: On a day where global markets were plunging, the president somehow thought a cryptic five-word all caps post on his Truth Social platform would ease minds.

Preview: President Donald Trump promised that his "policies will never change" as the market plunged following the announcement of massive tariffs.

Preview: 9021-whoooa!

Preview: The judges on a New York appeals court realized within seconds that the man addressing them from a video screen not only had no law degree, he didn't exist at all.

Preview: The New Jersey senator saw significant changes in his heart rate, stress score and movement throughout his historic speech.

Preview: Shares of memory-chip maker Micron Technology Inc. jumped in extended trading Thursday after the company’s fiscal second quarter showed that it is still seeing a boost from AI, with its highest-capacity memory products surging in growth.

Preview: The battle over the agency centers around what’s taught in K-12 schools, but one of its main functions is sending out funds to schools and colleges.

Preview: FedEx cuts its profit outlook for the third time in a row, thanks to “continued weakness and uncertainty in the U.S. industrial economy.”

Preview: Shares of Nike Inc. moved higher after hours on Thursday after the sneaker maker reported fiscal third-quarter results that beat Wall Street’s estimates, as the company tries to focus more deeply on the needs of athletes.

Preview: March 20 is the 25th anniversary of the 2000 dot-com bust.

Preview: Wondering what fixing the program will look like? A new report gives us a clue.

Preview: U.S. government debt rallied Thursday, pushing yields lower across the board, on the Federal Reserve’s base-case view about the likely transitory nature of tariff-driven inflation.

Preview: Crude futures notched back-to-back gains on Thursday, with prices finding support from growing tensions in the Middle East that raise the risk of supply disruptions in the oil-rich region.

Preview: March Madness numbers to know include $3.1 billion in wagers and nearly $5 million in earnings for one player.

Preview: Be careful what you wish for, Mr. President.

Preview: Maine Gov. Janet Mills apparently hurt Donald Trump's feelings in February. The result has been a multifaceted offensive against the Democrat's home state.

Preview: The New York Times reported Thursday that the European Union may soon levy penalties against Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, under an E.U. law aimed at curbing disinformation, hate speech and other harmful content.

Preview: We didn’t get March Madness as much as we got March predictability. In the men’s and women’s tournaments, there have been few surprises or upsets.

Preview: “You can’t really watch the stock market,” Donald Trump said last month. As retirement accounts take a severe hit, it's a little late for that.

Preview: After President Donald Trump “liberated” Americans from a strong economy Wednesday, the Senate held an extraordinary vote.

Preview: Florida police recently arrested a transgender woman for using the women’s restroom in the state Capitol in Tallahassee, in what is believed to be the first such arrest in a state with an anti-trans bathroom ban.

Preview: The Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration Friday in litigation over education-related grants, splitting 5-4 with Republican appointees in the majority.

Preview: President Trump is using war powers to stifle freedom of speech and due process for immigrants. It's only logical to fear that U.S. citizens could be next.

Preview: It doesn’t look great for Donald Trump to take a golf trip after setting much of the economy — and your retirement account — on fire, but he’s doing it anyway.

Preview: Some of those fired by the Department of Health and Human Services have been rehired. Amid layoffs throughout the Trump administration, this keeps happening.

Preview: The UFC is back at the warehouse for UFC Vegas 105.

Preview: Does Michelle Williams get her happy ending in the new FX on Hulu show?

Preview: H&R Block Tax Software Deluxe is affordable, simple, and super thorough

Preview: A term-limited Queens pol claims "disgraced" ex-honchos of the borough’s Republican machine are conspiring to help a Democrat win his City Council seat -- at the expense of two candidates he’s backing.

Preview: Socialist mayoral wannabe Zohran Mamdani's Soviet-style pledge to bring government-owned-and-operated supermarkets to the Big Apple is getting plenty of pushback from grocery industry leaders, who contend the biggest losers would be customers.

Preview: NYPD K-9 Officer Katarina Narvaez knew from the moment her father was killed in the line of duty in Brooklyn that she wanted to follow in his footsteps – but she didn’t know she’d also find a new best friend.

Preview: An arrest affidavit obtained by The Post indicated investigators estimate temperatures inside Moshe Ehrlich's Toyota van reached the mid-90s on March 18.

Preview: Out of 2,000 workers surveyed by Unmind, a startling 35% overall said they would willingly undergo the "Severance" procedure.

Preview: Patricia Raad said her husband, Michel, spent a lifetime working his way up as a businessman after immigrating to the United States from their native Lebanon, amassing millions he left in trust for their kids.

Preview: "I hope I don't get in trouble," said the CBS Mornings host after quoting queer comedian Matteo Lane.

Preview: President Trump’s tariffs are scrambling the Republican plan for the economy, long centered on tax cuts and growth.

Preview: With stocks in a steep decline and tariffs inducing recession jitters, the patience of investors may be tested.

Preview: These businesses, including e-commerce platforms and payment processors, are pulling back on public offering plans and bracing for pain.

Preview: The amount of manufactured goods exported from Africa to the United States is minuscule. But for Lesotho, the impact of a stunning 50 percent tariff is enormous.

Preview: The firing of the head of the National Security Agency was only the latest move that has eroded the country’s fortifications against cyberattacks, especially those targeting elections.

Preview: President Trump has always solicited information from dubious sources. But now, in his second term, he has fewer people around him who try to keep those voices away.

Preview: As the Trump administration pulls government websites and data offline, it is selectively stripping away the public record, letting the president declare his own version of history, archivists and historians said.

Preview: Job and program cuts at the Department of Health and Human Services have teed up court challenges and prompted bipartisan criticism in Congress.

Preview: President Trump has shown a willingness to fracture the trans-Atlantic alliance with his tariffs and demands for higher military spending.

Preview: The U.N. has said Israel killed the workers. The video appears to contradict Israel’s version of events, which said the vehicles were “advancing suspiciously” without headlights or emergency signals.

Preview: Take a quick break with our daily 5x5 grid.

Preview: How Zohran Mamdani is winning over New York City.

Preview: What might be the most frightening tariff fact this week is what it revealed about how a decision like this gets made.

Preview: Will the party do something with this momentum?

Preview: The tariffs could cause a recession, even if Trump can’t legally impose them.

Preview: Some questionable math went into Trump’s plan for global tariffs.

Preview: Enya Umanzor and Drew Phillips face backlash thanks to…Greta Thunberg?

Preview: Minecraft has been turned into a film starring Jack Black and Jason Momoa.

Preview: The federal courts can’t let Republicans get away with this.

Preview: The Supreme Court’s next big abortion decision might barely mention the word abortion.

Preview: Because of the century-old Jones Act, U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico must use overpriced, outdated ships to import American LNG—while the Dominican Republic enjoys cheaper energy from the same source.

Preview: The campaign to make America dry is as dubious as the campaign for the food pyramid.

Preview: 4/5/1982: Justice Abe Fortas dies. The post Today in Supreme Court History: April 5, 1982 appeared first on Reason.com.

Preview: Donald Trump isn't the first president to send detained migrants to the U.S. detention center in Cuba.

Preview: "The Case for Non-Confirmation"

Preview: What's on your mind?

Preview: From Judge Arun Subramanian's order today in Khalil v. Trustees of Columbia Univ. (S.D.N.Y.): Plaintiffs are students who say the… The post Columbia Students' Lawsuit Potentially "Raises Serious Questions" Under the First Amendment appeared first on Reason.com.

Preview: Moreover, challenges to spending belong in the Court of Federal Claim, not in Federal District Court.

Preview: What will Justice Barrett do next?

Preview: Although the president's pride in his negotiation skills could save us, it is hard to see what sort of deal would address his grievance about the consequences of economic freedom.

Preview: See who's running

Preview: All four cases explained

Preview: The Crossword

Preview: Start the day smarter ☀️

Preview: After Hurricane Idalia made landfall on Wednesday, Florida communities are emerging to see its destruction with hopes and plans to recover.

Preview: Downgraded to a tropical storm, what had been Hurricane Idalia powered across Georgia and the Carolinas on Wednesday evening.

Preview: The 81-year-old Republican Senate minority leader struggled to answer reporters' questions in Kentucky, requiring help and drawing questions about his health

Preview: Nebraska volleyball set a women's sports attendance record Wednesday night as 92,003 fans descended on Memorial Stadium to watch the match vs. Omaha.

Preview: At least 73 people died when a fire ripped through a multi-story building in Johannesburg overtaken by homeless people, authorities said Thursday.

Preview: As the storm moves away from the shore, it can cause an additional life-threatening hazard: inland flooding. Georgia and the Carolinas are at risk.

Preview: A person looking at brain scans on computers. Anyone who has watched a loved one descend into the fog of dementia knows the tremendous toll that neurodegenerative diseases of aging can exact.  Dementia currently afflicts over 55 million people worldwide; in the US, more than 6 million people — about 1 out of 10 of those 65 years or older — live with dementia. The economic cost of treating and the often uncompensated cost of caring for those sufferers is now more than $600 billion a year. As our population ages, that number will only grow, with one estimate projecting that the number of people with dementia will double by 2060. It is a fate that many of us will one day suffer — according to one recent study, adults over 55 have a nearly one in two chance of eventually developing dementia. But this week delivered one of the brightest spots in an otherwise dark field. According to a study that followed more than 280,000 people in Wales, older adults who received a vaccine against shingles were 20 percent less likely to develop dementia in the seven years that followed vaccination than those who did not receive the vaccine.  This could be a big deal. There are very few, if any, treatments that can prevent or slow down dementia, beyond good lifestyle habits like getting enough sleep and exercise. The possibility that a known, inexpensive vaccine could offer real protection is enormously meaningful. We have good reason to be confident in the findings: While this study is perhaps the most prominent to show the protective effects of the shingles vaccine, other studies of the vaccine have come to similar conclusions.  Beyond the promise of preventive treatment, the new study adds further evidence to a growing body of research raising the possibility that we have been thinking about neurodegenerative diseases like dementia and Alzheimer’s all wrong. It’s possible these horrible conditions are caused by a virus — and if that’s the case, eliminating the virus could be enough to prevent or treat the diseases. How the study worked To understand why the new shingles vaccine study is such a big deal, it helps to know a little bit about how medical studies are carried out. The gold standard for research is a randomized control trial (RCT). That’s when scientists randomly assign patients to two different groups — one that receives an experimental treatment and another that doesn’t — in order to test the effectiveness of a treatment or intervention. Such RCT trials minimize bias or other complicating factors, allowing scientists to be reasonably confident that any differences between the two groups — like the likelihood of developing a disease — are due to the treatment being studied. In the real world, RCTs are often difficult and expensive to carry out. For one thing, you need a large sample size to be confident of your results, and the control group can’t receive the treatment being studied, which creates ethical issues.  So a lot of big medical research involves observational studies, which is a fancy term for scientists observing things happening in the real world and drawing conclusions from their research. The upside is you don’t need to go through the time and trouble of gathering a big study group and randomly dividing them in two. The downside is you’re much less certain that any observed effect is due to the variables you’re studying because you don’t control the study; you just observe it, The new study, though, took advantage of a quirk in Welsh health policy to do something better. Beginning on September 1, 2013, anyone in Wales who was 79 became eligible to receive a free shingles vaccine. (Those who were younger than 79 would become eligible once they turned that age.) But anyone who was 80 or older was not eligible on the grounds that the vaccine is less effective for the very old.  The result was what is known as a “natural experiment.” In effect, Wales had created two groups that were essentially the same — save for the fact that one group received the shingles vaccine and one group did not.  The researchers looked at the health records of the more than 280,000 adults who were 71 to 88 years old at the start of the vaccination program and did not have dementia. They focused on a group that was just on the dividing line: those who turned 80 just before September 1, 2013, and thus were eligible for the vaccine, and those born just after that date, who weren’t. Then, they simply looked at what happened to them. By 2020, seven years after the vaccination program began, about one in eight older adults, who by that time were 86 and 87, had developed dementia. But the group that had received the shingles vaccine were 20 percent less likely to be diagnosed with the disease. Because the researchers could find no other confounding factors that might explain the difference — like years of education or other vaccines or health conditions like diabetes — they were confident the shingles vaccine was the difference maker. A new paradigm in dementia research? As Paul Harrison, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the study, told the New York Times, the research indicates that the shingles vaccine appears to have “some of the strongest potential protective effects against dementia that we know of that are potentially usable in practice.”  But this is a vaccine originally designed to prevent shingles. Why does it also appear to help with dementia? Scientists theorize it could be related to inflammation. Shingles, or herpes zoster, is caused by the same virus responsible for chickenpox, which lies dormant in nerve cells after an initial infection and can reawaken decades later, causing painful rashes. That reactivation creates intense inflammation around nerve cells, and chronic inflammation is increasingly recognized as a major factor in cognitive deterioration. By preventing shingles, the vaccine could indirectly protect against the neural inflammation associated with dementia. What about the amyloid and tau protein plaques that tend to be found in the brains of people suffering from Alzheimer’s, which have long been thought of as the primary cause of the disease? It’s possible that these may actually be the body’s response to an underlying infection. That could help explain why treatments that directly target those plaques have been largely ineffective — because they weren’t targeting the real causes.   As promising as the new research is, we’re still a long way from finding a silver bullet against Alzheimer’s and dementia. One double-blinded RCT — the gold standard of the gold standard in medicine — that is underway now is examining whether valacyclovir, an antiviral used against the virus that causes shingles, could slow cognitive decline in people with early-stage Alzheimer’s. That would be a true game changer. A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!

Preview: Glaringly bright, blue-hued headlights filled my hatchback earlier this year as I drove 80 miles an hour on the highway between San Antonio and Austin. The headlights shone so brightly that their reflection in my rearview mirror burned my eyeballs, causing me to look away from the road and rapidly slow down. The large luxury SUV behind me began riding my tail — causing an even more intense glare to engulf my car — before aggressively whipping around to pass me. For a moment, all was fine. My eyes adjusted. And I began to pick up speed again — only to be visually assaulted by a lifted truck with even brighter headlights and flood lights atop its roof, then an electric vehicle with the whitest lights I’d ever seen, and an onslaught of others. Fearing my car being slammed from behind every time I was forced to slow down and look away from the road, I got off the highway and took an alternative route.  The headlights felt like they’d become especially hard on my eyes in recent years. Maybe I was just getting old, I thought, or my eyes had been weakened by working on a computer for a living.  Then a listener of Vox’s Explain It to Me podcast named Reed called and asked, “Am I going crazy? Or does every new car on the road have the world’s brightest headlights? I’m wondering why this is suddenly happening? And are there any limits? Can people just put whatever they want on the front of their car and blind everyone else?”  He wasn’t alone. Our show has received multiple emails with similar inquiries from listeners and Vox readers. And there’s even a subreddit dedicated to the topic, where people complain, make jokes, and work together to find solutions. So in hopes of helping Reed, myself, and the many other upset drivers, Explain It to Me took on Reed’s question.  Are car headlights getting brighter?  There are two ways to answer that question, lighting scientist John Bullough, who leads the Light and Health Research Center at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told Vox.   The first has to do with the color of LED lights, the kind now overwhelmingly used in car headlights. “You’ve probably noticed that a lot of them look a lot more of a bluish white compared to the yellowish white of halogen headlights,” Bullough said, which used to be more common in headlights. The concepts we use to measure light intensity — lumen and candela — were created by scientists long ago, and don’t fully align with how different parts of our vision have different sensitivities to different-colored lights, Bullough said. That means that even though a light meter might say a pair of halogen headlights has the same light intensity as a pair of LED headlights, our eyes will see the bluish LED one as brighter because it’s more likely to be picked by our peripheral vision, making our brains prioritize it as important or alarming.  The second factor, Bullough said, is that the intensity of headlights really has increased over the last 10 to 20 years. “If we think about the reason we have headlights, they’re not to create glare — they’re to help us see things along the road so that we can avoid collisions,” he said. But the result has been that moves to make cars safer for their occupants, like the ever-increasing size of American vehicles and the increasing intensity of headlights, have created a new set of safety problems for anyone outside the car.  Who’s responsible for the brighter lights?  “Headlight intensities have actually been increasing in part because of things like the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety‘s safety ratings,” which the insurance company-backed nonprofit doles out to help customers choose which car to buy, Bullough said. Carmakers also use the ratings as a selling point.  When IIHS first started evaluating headlights nearly a decade ago, “they were giving headlights pretty poor grades in terms of their ability to help us see things at night.” Of 95 car models tested by IIHS in 2016, just two earned a good rating. A desire to improve safety ratings, combined with the growing dominance of LEDs in the broader lighting market, has driven carmakers to rapidly brighten their lights. “LEDs are a new technology that took over pretty much everything in the lighting world in the last 15 years. It’s arguably the biggest change in lighting technology since they first fired up an incandescent light bulb,” said Nate Rogers, a freelance writer who wrote an extensive story in 2024 about headlight brightness. “LEDs are more energy efficient. They last longer. It was a total sea change in the lighting world when LEDs came out, and over time they’ve started to replace pretty much everything, and that includes car headlights.” But Rogers also believes the federal highway safety czars, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), share some of the responsibility for why bright LED lights have become the norm on roads. “They are the ultimate authority,” he said. “Any car that is driving on the road has to meet NHTSA standards.” “Several people I spoke to [from NHTSA] told me that the most complaints from drivers that the NHTSA gets are about car headlights [and] headlight brightness,” Rogers said. But NHTSA has not created rules to limit the intensity of bright lights.” Nor do federal safety ratings for car models consider the safety of anyone outside the car, as Vox contributor David Zipper explained last year — only the safety of a given car’s occupants is included.  Are brighter lights actually dangerous?  During his reporting, Rogers said, he never really found anyone disputing safety concerns tied to headlight glare. While he was often pointed to an IIHS study finding a 19 percent reduction in crashes for cars that have good safety ratings for their headlights, he added, it’s really hard to track whether or not someone else got into a crash after being blinded by another driver’s headlights. “Without that strict measurement of how dangerous car headlight brightness is, it seems that NHTSA is a little stuck and a little unsure about how to fix it,” he said.  Driver safety is just one aspect of the problem. The other has to do with people sharing the roads — pedestrians and cyclists. The number of people killed by cars while walking has risen precipitously in the US in the last decade: According to a new report from the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA), pedestrian deaths are up 48 percent from 2014. Another GHSA report found that in 2022, “approximately three-quarters (77%) of pedestrians killed in fatal crashes were struck at night.” Mark Baker, founder and president of the advocacy group the Soft Lights Foundation, which aims to protect people from the harmful effects of LED lighting, thinks headlight intensity, in addition to the increasing prevalence of large cars on American roads, might be linked to the uptick pedestrian deaths at night. He theorizes that drivers blinded by bright headlights at night struggle to see pedestrians, and pedestrians may struggle to see as well. “There’s just way too much light now,” he said. “Nobody can see you.” Baker has lobbied Congress to get a hearing on the adverse impacts of LED headlights, and he’s tried working with states to pass laws limiting headlight intensity. He has yet to score a victory, but has gotten more than 70,000 people to sign a petition called “Ban Blinding Headlights and Save Lives!” “I have filed two petitions to the federal government: one to set a limit on maximum intensity,” Baker said. “Right now there is no overall limit on maximum intensity. And then there’s no limit on the blue wavelength light. That’s the most debilitating light. It causes glare in your eyes. It’s harder to see. It’s also hazardous to our eyes.”  The fight is personal for Baker. “I got knocked out of teaching,” he said. LED headlights on the road and in his classroom tormented him — an experience that eventually led to a diagnosis of mild autism. “I couldn’t go to work,” he said. “So I started devoting my time to try and figure out what’s wrong with these LEDs. I’ve since met other people that have similar reactions so severe that they’re considering thoughts of suicide because it’s just it’s torture for those of us that have autism.” Will we ever stop headlight glare? So if safety ratings incentivize carmakers to equip new cars with bright LED headlights, what do we do?  There are a couple of solutions that could help protect drivers from glare, Bullough said. The first has to do where headlights are aimed. The light that comes from low-lights, the lights we drive around with most often, should be pointed down and toward the road, and not into the rear window of cars. But headlights can become misaligned after they’ve been replaced, or after accidents. “Headlight aim is something that some states, but not most, actually require as part of their safety inspections,” Bullough said. “So drivers could ask their mechanic once a year to have their headlight aim checked and to adjust it if needed.” Headlight aim is often especially poor with older cars that have aftermarket LEDs on their cars, automotive and tech journalist Tim Stevens said. He thinks better enforcement of traffic safety laws could help. “A lot of states like Michigan, for example, don’t have any kind of annual inspection at all,” he said. “So it becomes an issue for the police to basically pull someone over if they think that someone’s headlights are too bright.” NHTSA could also create headlight intensity limits, which state and local authorities could then use as a baseline for enforcement, Bullough and Baker pointed out. “Certainly what could be done is some upper limits on the overall intensity from low-beam headlights,” Bullough said.  Stevens said carmakers are introducing new technologies that could help with the problem, like high beam assist or adaptive beam technology, which are supposed to dim headlights instinctively and automatically when the cars are coming up on traffic, pedestrians, and dark corners. “It’s been available in Europe and in the rest of the world for quite a few years,” Steven said. “It’s only been made legal in the US since 2022, but because it takes a long time for auto manufacturers to bring new technology to market, it’s still taking some time for them to be able to bring these new headlights to the American market.” For now, he added, the tech “is only going to be on the newest and highest-end cars. So it’s going to be a long time before we see this on the majority of cars on the road.” There are other tools and techniques that the average person can use to deal with headlight glare, like looking down and to the right while driving when there are bright lights passing you, or picking up a pair of blue light-blocking glasses. But Baker believes meaningful change will only come through civic action.  “The empowerment comes from listeners contacting the government, contacting me, joining up with the Soft Lights Foundation, and getting involved,” he said. “Let’s fix this systemic problem.”

Preview: It was a big week for the global economy — and for gamers. On Wednesday, President Donald Trump unveiled sweeping tariffs that have sent markets spiraling worldwide. On the same day, Nintendo also announced its much-anticipated handheld gaming console, the Switch 2.  It would be priced at $450, or $500 for a bundle including the latest Mario Kart game, the company said. Preorders on the Nintendo website would open in early May to only the most dedicated users of the first-generation Switch, with a June 5 release date.  By Friday, however, Nintendo had scrapped those plans.  The company said in a statement that it needed to “assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions,” leaving open the possibility of a price hike and delaying the preorder date.  More than 46 million Switch consoles have been sold in the US as of November 30, 2024, and the backlash has been swift. Gamers were already complaining about how expensive the Switch 2 was before the possibility of a price hike. By Friday, some suggested in a Discord chat for Switch users that they might go across the border to Canada to avoid even higher US prices for the next-generation system.  Ultimately, the Switch 2 is a luxury item. It shouldn’t be anyone’s first priority, given that Trump’s tariffs are expected to increase prices even for basic necessities and upend global supply chains broadly.  However, it’s an example of how Trump’s tariffs are wreaking havoc in an economy where Americans are accustomed to relatively low prices for imported goods, especially consumer electronics.  “It’s a pricing issue that is a direct response to the tariffs,” said Shihoko Goto, a senior fellow at the Mansfield Foundation specializing in trade and economic interests across the Indo-Pacific. “This is just one example of one product from one company being hit by tariffs, and we’re going to see price increases all across the board.” Why Nintendo might increase its prices Nintendo, a Japanese company, took preemptive steps to avoid tariffs during the first Trump administration. In 2019, it started moving some of its Switch production from China to Vietnam as the US imposed tariffs on Chinese imports.  Now, the US is effectively punishing companies like Nintendo that took Trump’s incentives to leave China for friendlier partners like Vietnam, which is a large producer of consumer electronics, shoes, and clothes.   Vietnam was hit with 46 percent tariffs, one of the highest rates on the schedule that the White House unveiled Wednesday. That’s because Trump has sought to target Vietnam and other countries that have a high trade surplus with the US, believing that they’re “cheating” America.  However, he ignores the reason why Vietnam has a trade surplus with the US: It is relatively poor and cannot afford to buy many American-made goods. Trade analysts have also argued that Vietnam’s exports benefit both the country itself and its trading partners. At a lower cost, it has produced high-demand goods that were traditionally made in China.  “One of the reasons why we can have fairly affordable shoes and textiles is because they are imported from places in South and Southeast Asia,” Goto said. In slapping tariffs on goods from Vietnam and other manufacturing hubs, the cost of producing and exporting goods to the American market will go up. Companies like Nintendo are expected to pass that on to the consumer in the form of higher prices. As a result, consumers may ultimately decide they can no longer afford optional goods like the Switch 2. “There’s going to be a lot of belt tightening on optional consumer goods, especially on consumer electronics,” Goto said. Why the onshoring promised probably won’t happen Trump’s plan is that, in the long run, companies will want access to the American market and move their production to the US, reviving domestic manufacturing. However, that doesn’t seem likely to occur in many industries, including consumer electronics.  Daniel Ahmad, a gaming industry analyst, posted on X that Nintendo would “need to spend billions to open a factory in the US.” Getting a factory up and running would likely take four to five years, by which time there could be another US president who rolls back the tariffs. But if they remain in place, source components for the Switch, such as GPUs, are made outside the US and are subject to tariffs, leading to increased costs. Labor costs would also be as much as 15 times higher in the US than in Vietnam.  Add all that up, and the cost of the Switch becomes much higher than $450. Americans aren’t likely to accept those kinds of price increases, especially given that they were already struggling to keep up with higher prices post-pandemic. “We want high-quality, low-cost goods, and it’s going to be difficult to make that in the United States,” Goto said.

Preview: Laura Loomer shows up in support of President Donald Trump in 2023 when he was scheduled to appear in federal court for his arraignment on charges including possession of national security documents after leaving office, obstruction, and making false statements.  | Stephanie Keith/Getty Images This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here. Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump’s tariffs, and the economic havoc they’re wreaking, are still dominating the headlines. But today I want to focus on a story I worry is going under the radar: the president outsourcing national security staffing decisions to a far-right conspiracy theorist. What’s the latest? Trump fired Gen. Timothy Haugh, the head of the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command, on Thursday. Haugh and several other high-ranking national security officials were booted after Trump met with Laura Loomer, who urged him to purge “disloyal” figures from his national security team. Loomer took credit for the firings, while Trump denied she was involved. Who is Laura Loomer? She’s a far-right activist and social media personality known for her embrace of conspiracy theories, her self-described Islamophobia, and her loyalty to Trump. She has claimed 9/11 was an inside job, that Joe Biden was behind the July attempt to assassinate Trump, and that multiple school shootings were staged. Who is Haugh? He’s a four-star general whom Joe Biden nominated to lead NSA. The Senate confirmed him in 2023 with overwhelming bipartisan support. Before that, he co-led a 2018 effort to prevent Russian interference in the midterms. Why does it matter who directs the NSA? The agency has extraordinary power to wiretap Americans and engage in cyber espionage, and its leader has great influence over whether that power is abused. Is this legal? Yes. The NSA director serves at the pleasure of the president. So what’s the big picture? Trump says Loomer was not involved in the firings, but that’s not credible, given their timing and his track record with the truth. So it appears that a conspiracy theorist was given significant influence over leadership of agencies that have the power to infringe on civil liberties. And with that, it’s time to log off… I hate being bored. I’m not great at sitting still, and I get anxious when I have to do so. At even a hint of boredom, I reflexively reach for my phone, which too often ends in time wasted on games or passive scrolling, and that somehow only makes me more bored. So I was really grateful for this article about how boredom isn’t a punishment — it’s a tool. Boredom, my colleague Allie Volpe writes, can help you know “when you’ve gone off track from what you value and what you care about and what you can give to the world.” Take good care this weekend, and I’ll see you back here on Monday.

Preview: President Donald Trump gestures while speaking during an executive order signing event in the Oval Office of the White House on March 31, 2025, in Washington, DC. Donald Trump’s tariffs were at once predictable and shocking. Predictable, in the sense that Trump had been crystal-clear about wanting across-the-board tariffs during the campaign. Shocking, because they have been implemented in a manner that appears extreme and incompetent even by previous Trump standards. As a result, the world is historically unsettled: One metric of global economic uncertainty shows higher levels of concern than at any point in the 21st century, worse than the 2008 financial crisis and even the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. It turns out that this combination, both predictable and shocking, has become a bit of a theme for the Trump team lately. Consider two other news stories, both of which would be headline-grabbing scandals if it weren’t for the tariffs. First, Trump has empowered Laura Loomer, a 9/11 conspiracy theorist and self-described “proud Islamophobe,” to purge top government officials. The head of the National Security Agency, his top deputy, and six staffers on the National Security Council have all been fired this week — seemingly at Loomer’s behest. Second, the Department of Health and Human Services started layoffs on Tuesday that are expected to hit about 10,000 workers. By the end of it, about a quarter of the department’s staff will have been cut amid a worrying measles outbreak and the real risk of a bird flu pandemic. Trump telegraphed these moves during the campaign — promising to root out the “the deep state” and vowing to let Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “go wild” at HHS. But they are shocking, nonetheless. Putting Laura Loomer, of all people, in charge of sensitive national security decisions is nothing short of astonishing. And the sheer scope of the HHS cuts, given the current public health challenges, led my colleague Dylan Scott to describe the situation as an “unfolding catastrophe.” This, it seems, is the week where we saw the Trump administration’s true and unvarnished face. It’s not that what happened this week was necessarily worse than what came before it, though the tariffs might well prove to be. Rather, it’s that the week revealed the true scope and nature of our Trump problem — with even some of his supporters starting to openly worry that things have gone badly wrong. Put differently, the last week has shown, in no uncertain terms, that Trump is acting like a mad king.  What we just learned Trump had done shocking and surprising things pretty much since he entered office on January 20. His blatantly political assault on universities, his decision to send innocent Venezuelans to a Salvadoran gulag, his bizarre crusade to make Canada “the 51st state,” his unlawful efforts to shut down entire federal agencies like USAID — all of this made clear that we were in for an unhinged approach to governance. But even after all that, some people thought there still might be constraints.  Previous rounds of tariffs on China, Mexico, and Canada did not lead Wall Street to panic — partly because they were moderated or walked back after implementation. Many conservatives alarmed by Trump’s policies reassured themselves that his national security team, like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and national security adviser Mike Waltz, hailed from the GOP’s more traditional internationalist wing. Now, there is panic even in these quarters. Wall Street is horrified; the S&P 500 lost more value this week in absolute terms than it did during the entire 2008 financial crisis. Republican stalwarts like Ben Shapiro and Erick Erickson are warning of dire economic and political consequences if Trump stays the course on tariffs. And the notion that the GOP national security “professionals” might check any of this is no longer credible: This week, Waltz was made to sit in an Oval Office meeting during which Loomer listed off staff members of his to be fired. Even Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said that the tariffs could well be “terrible for America.” The point is not merely to mock these people or say, “I told you so.” Rather, it’s to illustrate that even those who wore blinders about Trump are starting to see what’s happening.  And what’s happening is this: government by mad king.  The phrase “mad king” has been tossed around a lot in the past few weeks, but I think it’s worth offering a more precise definition. A mad king, in my sense, is not merely a leader who makes bad decisions. Nor is it a literal king who assumed office through heredity rather than, say, free and fair elections. Instead, it’s one who makes them based on reasons that are out of touch with reality, making sense only in their own mind. And it’s one who is able to do so with little-to-no constraint — thanks, in our case, to the dangerous concentration of power in the executive branch. The events of this week show conclusively that the president fits the definition. Trump decided to detonate the global economy because of his decades-old belief, in defiance of a consensus of economists, that tariffs are the key to American prosperity. No one, not even his previously demonstrated concern for the stock market, could stop him from acting on it. A mad king economic policy. Trump has given partial control over the national security bureaucracy of the world’s greatest military power to a demonstrably unstable conspiracy theorist who once chained herself outside of Twitter’s headquarters. The people who were supposed to keep Trump in bounds were proven powerless, and (in Waltz’s case) outright humiliated. A mad king national security policy. Trump has outsourced public health decisions to an unqualified nepo baby who has embraced nearly every unfounded health theory out there. He then allowed that man to decimate the ranks of our public health bureaucracy in the midst of at least two serious public health crises. The traditionally credentialed individuals in Trump’s health team, like NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, have proven no constraint at all. A mad king public health policy. When I say this is “the week that Trump became unglued,” I thus do not mean that this is the first week where we could see that things are bad — or even that we had a mad king problem. Rather, I mean that this is the week where the full scope of the mad king problem so undeniable that even some of Trump’s allies on the right began to see it. The only question now is how the country — and particularly key members of the Trump coalition — will react.

Preview: President Donald Trump speaks to reporters and signs an executive order about enforcement in the concert and entertainment industry on March 31, 2025. | Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images On Thursday, one day after President Donald Trump announced sweeping new tariffs, what appears to be the first lawsuit challenging those tariffs was filed in a federal court in Florida. That alone isn’t particularly surprising. The tariffs are expected to drive up the costs of goods in the United States, and have already sent the stock market into a nose dive. That means that a lot of aggrieved potential plaintiffs have standing to challenge the tariffs in court. What is surprising is that the plaintiff in this particular case, known as Emily Ley Paper v. Trump, is represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), a right-wing legal shop that previously backed Trump’s efforts to expand executive power. NCLA is part of what appears to be a growing effort among prominent right-leaning intellectuals and commentators to challenge Trump’s tariffs.  At the Volokh Conspiracy, an influential right-libertarian legal blog, George Mason law professor Ilya Somin is actively recruiting plaintiffs to file a similar lawsuit challenging the tariffs (Somin has long been a principled libertarian critic of Trump). Ben Shapiro, the one-time Breitbart writer who is also a lawyer, criticized Trump’s tariffs as a “massive tax increase on American consumers,” and has gently advocated for Trump to change course. Richard Hanania, a writer best known for his baroque criticisms of “wokeness,” responded to a pro-Trump member of Congress’ praise of the tariffs with “we’re ruled by morons.” All of this matters because conservative-minded judges, including the six Republicans who dominate the Supreme Court, are often highly responsive to public statements from conservative legal and media elites. During President Barack Obama’s first term, for example, liberal lawyers and legal scholars were often flabbergasted by how quickly conservative judges rallied behind a weak legal case against the Affordable Care Act — eventually persuading four Republican justices to vote to repeal the law altogether. Their mistake — one I made as well — was assuming that judges would be persuaded by the kind of careful, precedent-focused legal reasoning that earns you top grades in law school, rather than by what they were hearing from legal and political elites that they viewed as ideological allies. As Yale law professor Jack Balkin wrote about that error, a legal argument can “move from off the wall to on the wall because people and institutions are willing to put their reputations on the line and state that an argument formerly thought beyond the pale is not crazy at all.” In the end, many judges cared more about what they heard on Fox News or at an event hosted by the Federalist Society, than they did about what the Supreme Court said in Gonzales v. Raich (2005). If you take the Court’s recent precedents seriously, there is a very strong legal argument against the tariffs At least on the surface, anyone who wants to challenge Trump’s tariffs faces a far more favorable legal landscape than Obamacare opponents faced in 2010. During the Obama and Biden administrations, Republican justices fabricated novel new legal doctrines, such as the so-called major questions doctrine, in order to strike down Democratic policies they deemed too ambitious. They also threatened to revive old, once-discredited ideas like the “nondelegation doctrine,” which was used to frustrate President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Both of these doctrines are grounded in the idea that the judiciary has broad power to strike down policies established by the executive branch of the federal government, even if the executive can point to an act of Congress that explicitly gives them the power to do what they want to do. The primary reason to be skeptical that the Supreme Court will actually apply one of these doctrines to strike down Trump’s tariffs is that the Republican justices’ rollout of their new approach to executive power has been so partisan that it is hard not to suspect that they are acting in bad faith.  The same six Republican justices who said that Democratic President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program was an egregious power grab, despite the fact that that program was authorized by a federal statute empowering the executive to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to the student financial assistance programs,” also said that Republican President Donald Trump is allowed to use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes. Similarly, the best legal argument against Trump’s tariffs is rooted in the Court’s major questions doctrine, which holds that judges should cast a skeptical eye on executive branch actions “of vast ‘economic and political significance’” According to the Budget Lab at Yale, the tariffs are expected to reduce the average American household’s real annual income by nearly $3,800. That seems like a matter of vast economic and political significance. But the short history of this major questions doctrine would give any serious legal scholar great pause. The idea that programs of “vast economic and political significance” are suspect was first articulated in Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA (2014), in order to criticize a hypothetical Environmental Protection Agency regulation that was never enacted, that no one ever proposed, and that likely would have shut down all construction of hotels in the United States if it had ever actually existed. A year later, the Court used the major questions doctrine again to repudiate an imaginary health regulation that would have collapsed the individual health insurance markets in most states. Having used these strawmen to invent a completely new legal doctrine that appears nowhere in the Constitution or in any statute, the Court let this major questions doctrine lay dormant for Trump’s entire first term — only to revive it with a vengeance once a Democrat became president. To date, the doctrine has only been used to strike down actual, rather than theoretical, policies during the Biden administration. One of the most important questions looming over Trump’s second term is whether a Republican Supreme Court will apply the same rules it invented to thwart Democratic administrations to Trump and his subordinates. We do not know yet how the justices will answer this question. But, as Balkin writes, the answer is likely to be shaped by how elite conservatives in the legal profession, the media, and in elected office urge the justices to behave. One of the most important questions is whether elected Republicans join groups like NCLA or commentators like Shapiro in criticizing the tariffs. “What really accelerates the movement of constitutional arguments from off the wall to on the wall is neither intellectuals nor social movements,” Balkin wrote about the Obamacare fight. Instead, the most important factor is often what Republicans in political office want the courts to do.  “When establishment politicians — who, after all, have to stand for election and don’t want to be thought out-of-touch to their constituents — get behind a constitutional argument, they often help move it forward quickly,” Balkin wrote. For now, it remains to be seen whether members of Congress, governors, and other top elected Republicans will speak out against the tariffs once their constituents start to experience the pain of higher prices. But if you are hoping to see these tariffs go away, you should take the fact that the first spear targeting the tariffs was thrown by a prominent right-wing legal shop as a very positive sign.

Preview: A man walks past a screen showing stock movements at a securities office in Beijing on April 3, 2025. | Adek Berry/AFP via Getty Images President Donald Trump’s new tariff chart, which he unveiled Wednesday at the Rose Garden, had a mixture of surprising and predictable countries on the list. A high tariff on China? Not so surprising. But among the top 10 countries on his chart, eight are in Asia. Many close US allies like South Korea and Japan were stunned by the steep rate increases applied to their exports.  Since the announcement, markets in Asia have tumbled. Japan’s chief cabinet secretary has called the tariffs “extremely regrettable.” South Korea’s acting president called an emergency meeting to strategize a response.  As stunned as these US allies were at the steep increase in tariffs levied against them, they weren’t caught totally offguard. Just a few days before Trump’s tariff announcement, Japan, China, and South Korea’s trade ministers met in Seoul for the first time in five years to discuss coordinating a response.  Mike Bird, Wall Street editor at The Economist and a former correspondent based in Asia, talked with Today, Explained’s Noel King how US allies in Asia are responding to the tariffs and how China may be poised to lead new alliances on the continent. Click the link below to hear the whole conversation. The following is a transcript edited for length and clarity. We’ve got China, Taiwan, Japan, India, South Korea, Thailand. What are we hearing today from leaders of those countries? Anything notable? There’s a big range of reactions, and I think that reflects the difference in both relationships with the US and some different strategies going on. So the Chinese government reaction, to note that the tariffs are deeply unreasonable, that it’s a sort of attack on the rest of the world, is probably the least surprising. I think it’s more interesting to break down the countries that are much closer diplomatically to the US. So Taiwan called the Trump tariffs “deeply unreasonable” and “highly regrettable.” South Korea said that they were studying what was happening. The Japanese trade minister called the move “extremely regrettable.“  But a lot of these countries are a little bit more circumspect and a little bit quieter, precisely because they have these very tight security relationships with the US and they’re very, very keen not to upset DC. So when Trump held up his chart, it showed that Vietnam, for example, levies a 90 percent tariff on goods coming from the US. South Korea, 50 percent tariff. Donald Trump is saying these countries put tariffs on American goods and I’m going to fix it. Is he right? And if so, why was this going on? So to be clear, we should start by saying there are trade restrictions that other countries put on the US. In some cases, they’re steeper than the ones going in the other direction. That is a reasonable thing for US policymakers to be upset about.  But what became very clear in the immediate aftermath of the announcement is that the figures being used weren’t drawn from any meaningful measure of, for example, the rates that Vietnam tariffs US goods. There was no relationship with that data. What seems to have happened is there’s been a reverse engineering of a figure via the trade deficits and surpluses that individual countries have with the US.  Basically, they’ve taken the trade surplus that Vietnam has with the US and they’ve divided it by the figure for Vietnamese exports to the US. It’s a sort of Excel spreadsheet job. And it bears almost no relationship to how these countries actually limit US trade. It’s a very strange measure to have used to decide which countries have been hit hardest.  Trump put big tariffs on Japan and South Korea. Do you think that this move forces them to rethink how they deal with the United States? I think it will change the attitude quite a bit. One thing that the US government has tried to do a lot in the past few years is get cooperation from the Japanese and Korean governments in particular on things like export controls of semiconductors to China. That’s going to be a lot more difficult to execute if you are putting really, really steep tariffs on them.  I was reading over the weekend that Japan, South Korea, and China met for the first time in about five years to talk about trade. Do we know what goes on in a meeting like that? Does a meeting like that make America nervous? This question of closer trilateral cooperation between China, Korea, and Japan has been going on for a long time, and it’s always been frustrated to some degree by the fact that these are three countries where usually, at any given time, someone’s upset with someone else. Whether that’s Japan and South Korea — they have a very fractious relationship — or whether it’s South Korea and China, whether it’s Japan and China, there’s usually someone that’s upset about something, and it’s limited the trilateral cooperation.  There’s always been discussion of a potential Japan, South Korea, China free trade area, and it’s never really come to fruition. Now, if you wanted to make it come to fruition, what you would want is an external threat that was common to all of those countries. Huh. I’m not sure there’ll be a trade agreement of that nature, but if I wanted to force one through, these are exactly the circumstances which I’d create to try and do that.  If China becomes a more trusted trade partner to American allies than America is right now, what? What are the long-term implications of this for China? One thing the Chinese government has really struggled with in the past, and for good reason, is that they don’t really have a lot of natural allies or friends, even in Asia. I think the US seriously damaging its own relationships in the region does make things easier on that front.  If you listen to the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, they will tell you, and they have done for decades, that the US is a country that bullies smaller countries — it talks a high and mighty game about these lofty ideals of freedom and democracy and human rights, but in reality it’s just looking out for itself. I think these tariffs make that argument a lot easier to make in large parts of Asia. It’s a huge opportunity for them. You couldn’t have drafted these conditions better if you were a Chinese diplomat.

Preview: President Donald Trump delivers remarks on reciprocal tariffs during an event in the Rose Garden entitled “Make America Wealthy Again” at the White House in Washington, DC, on April 2, 2025. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images President Donald Trump’s tariffs are already wreaking economic chaos in the US and abroad.  On Wednesday, he announced a minimum 10 percent tariff on almost all imports, with dozens of countries facing even higher rates.  The stock market plunged in response when trading opened on Thursday, with the S&P 500 down more than 4 percent by the afternoon.  Some countries, including China, have promised retaliatory measures. Other US trading partners, including Japan, are seeking to negotiate with the Trump administration. But if the tariffs stay in place, US consumers are expected to soon pay more for everything from cars to sneakers to groceries as a result. Industries from car manufacturing to pharmaceuticals have been scrambling to respond. A producer of the Chrysler Pacifica minivan and Dodge’s electric Charger Daytona has already temporarily closed one of its factories in Canada, just across the border from Detroit. Whirlpool also announced layoffs Thursday of more than 650 American workers in Iowa, citing economic conditions in the US. Amid the economic uncertainty created by the tariffs, what is clear is that a global trade war may be just beginning. Here are some of your key questions about the tariffs, answered. What does Trump actually hope to achieve by this?  Trump celebrated April 2, the day that the tariffs were implemented, as “Liberation Day.” That’s because he sees the tariffs as a “declaration of economic independence” and a means of reviving American manufacturing, as he said during a Rose Garden event on Wednesday. “Our country and its taxpayers have been ripped off for more than 50 years, but this is not going to happen anymore,” he said. “We are finally putting America first.”  His hope is that, in making it more expensive to import foreign goods, companies will seek to invest in bringing their production to the US, therefore bringing prices down for American consumers in the long run. He also claims that the tariffs will stop other countries from “cheating” America with trade imbalances. Economists don’t think that the tariffs will achieve those goals. The Economist called the tariffs the “most profound, harmful and unnecessary economic error in the modern era,” based on an “utterly deluded” understanding of economics and history.  For one, the formula used to determine the “reciprocal” tariffs involves dividing a country’s trade surplus with the US by its total exports. That number was then divided in half to arrive at the tariff rate.  That’s not the more tailored approach that the administration had previously floated, which would have taken into account a complex array of factors. It also ignores the fact that many nations have a trade surplus with the US because they are relatively poor and cannot afford to buy American-made goods.  Do Americans support this move? Trump’s approval ratings have fallen to their lowest point since he assumed office amid the tariff furor. While Trump’s immigration policies remain relatively popular, buoying his overall approval ratings, that’s not the case when it comes to his economic policies.  Polls conducted over the last month indicate that between 37 percent and 45 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s performance on the economy. A majority of Americans said in a March 27 CBS News/YouGov poll that Trump is focusing too much on tariffs and not enough on reducing prices. A separate YouGov poll conducted shortly after Trump’s tariff announcement found that a majority of Americans disapproved of the tariffs, 40 percent strongly so. What products will be most affected? Perhaps a more apt question is what products won’t be affected, given that even many US manufacturers rely on imported goods and are expected to pass on increased costs to American consumers. Trump has announced a 25 percent tariff on all foreign-assembled cars and plans to introduce additional tariffs on certain car parts, including engines and transmissions.  Prices of consumer electronics are also expected to increase significantly, given that countries hit hard by the tariffs — China, Taiwan, and South Korea — are major producers of TVs, cellphones, and more.  Clothing and shoes will also likely become more expensive since China, Vietnam, and Bangladesh — all major exporters — now face steep tariffs.  What does this mean for the US and global economy? The White House had warned that Trump’s tariffs would inflict short-term pain — and that’s what America is getting, without any assurance that there will be a payoff in the long run.  The US dollar has declined in value against other benchmark currencies. Economists project that the tariffs will lead to a $3,789 decline in disposable income for the average US household, as well as a 0.87 percent decline in American economic growth in 2025. J.P. Morgan raised its odds of a recession from 30 percent to 40 percent between the beginning of the year and March 31 amid concerns about the impact of tariffs. The global economy is also reeling, with stock indices dropping worldwide on Thursday. Few countries will suffer as much as Cambodia and Vietnam, where many American companies, from Nike to Apple, have moved manufacturing. Notably, Trump did not hit Mexico or Canada with additional tariffs beyond those announced earlier this year.  Why were Russia and North Korea exempted? Russia and North Korea were also not on the list of countries facing additional tariffs, and exactly why is a bit of a mystery. The White House has reportedly argued that they are “already facing extremely high tariffs, and our previously imposed sanctions preclude any meaningful trade with these countries.” However, other countries facing significant US sanctions, including Venezuela, were hit with additional tariffs. Also, the US still trades significantly more with Russia than with other countries that were not spared, some of which are remote islands. After Russia’s 2021 invasion of Ukraine, the US imposed economic sanctions on Russia that caused trade between the two countries to fall from about $35 billion to $3.5 billion last year. Russia is currently in talks to lift those sanctions as part of an agreement to end the war in Ukraine.

Preview: US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is taking the agency in a radical new direction. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sought to be confirmed as Donald Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), he had to overcome a long record of fringe anti-science beliefs. He had indulged in conspiracies about chem trails, questioned whether HIV was the actual cause of AIDS, and, most notably, spread the repeatedly debunked theory that childhood vaccinations could lead to autism. In private meetings with senators and public confirmation hearings, he downplayed that record and claimed he wasn’t anti-vaccine: “I am pro-safety,” Kennedy said in his opening statement at one hearing. “I believe vaccines have a critical role in health care.” He gave assurances to Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, an MD and one of the last Republican holdouts on his nomination, that he would not change federal vaccine guidance  But less than two months into his term, Kennedy is blocking the release of pro-vaccine data amid a widening measles outbreak even as he puts into motion long-term projects that seem set to further erode Americans’ wobbly trust in childhood vaccination. Coupled with the massive staff cuts at HHS, a weakened federal health department is being remade in Kennedy’s anti-vax, anti-science image — an overhaul that could have dangerous consequences for Americans’ health for years to come. On Tuesday, the Trump administration began to lay off 10,000 workers across HHS, which includes the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health. Combined with workers who had already departed or were laid off earlier, the department’s overall headcount is expected to shrink from 82,000 to 62,000 people.  Many rank-and-file staff were simply let go; some senior leaders were offered reassignment in different roles, sometimes in a different part of the country, according to the New York Times. Subagencies focused on substance abuse and environmental health that were previously allowed some independence are being brought under HHS’s direct supervision. Top deputies who might have clashed with Kennedy — such as the FDA’s senior vaccine official, Peter Marks, one of the architects of the highly successful Operation Warp Speed in Trump’s first term — are being forced out. HHS touches the lives of Americans from birth to death: It oversees Medicaid and Medicare, which cover one in three Americans, it sets the standards for medical care across the health system, including vaccine schedules; and it is the biggest funder of the kind of vital medical research in the country that leads to new medical treatments.  Trump promised during the 2024 campaign to let Kennedy “go wild”; now he and his subordinates have the means to execute his vision. Some of the effects are being seen immediately as a massive measles outbreak spreads. Other reverberations in public health and medical research may not be fully felt for years. Former federal officials say the overhaul represents a fundamental reimagining of what HHS should be, a withdrawal from an active government role in the safeguarding of America’s health. We could be living with the consequences of these changes for a long time. “This is not a so-called restructuring. These are reckless, thoughtless cuts that will only make American communities less healthy and less safe,” Dr. Richard Besser, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and a former acting CDC director, said in a statement. “They represent an abdication of the department’s essential responsibility to promote and protect health.” More than an abdication, Kennedy’s new regime is steering the department in a radically new direction — one that seems poised to send American health backward.  The immediate dangers of RFK Jr.’s health care overhaul Kennedy’s leadership is already making the biggest US measles outbreak since 2019 worse. The number of cases across five states is nearing 500, twice as many as the United States saw in all of 2024, and two people, including an unvaccinated child, have died. Some experts believe it may take up to a year for the disease’s spread to be brought under control. Epidemiologist Michael Mina wrote this week in the New York Times that the US could see tens of thousands of cases. More people would die, and many of the ones who survived could be more vulnerable to other viruses in the future after the measles virus wipes out many of their preexisting antibodies. The response to the current measles outbreak is a good measurement of just how much Kennedy has changed things. During Trump’s first term, the president himself urged people to get vaccinated to stop a measles outbreak. Now, Kennedy, as the nation’s top health official, is instead using his enormous platform to undermine the importance of the measles vaccine while the virus rapidly spreads. (Measles vaccination is the best way to protect yourself against the virus, and health officials even encourage unvaccinated people who have already been exposed to get a shot because it could reduce their symptoms.) Kennedy has extolled vitamin A and cod liver oil as treatment options, but doctors caution that, while vitamin A could benefit someone who is vitamin-deficient when they contract the measles, almost no one in the US has a vitamin A deficiency.. A Texas doctor hawking those remedies to patients skeptical of vaccines said he has been in direct contact with the HHS secretary during the outbreak. Kennedy isn’t just using the bully pulpit to pitch pseudoscience. His department is now actively suppressing information about the value of the measles vaccine during the outbreak, according to ProPublica. A CDC forecast that would have shown the risk of catching measles is higher in less vaccinated areas was shelved, after the agency originally planned to release it as encouragement for people to get the measles shot. The CDC justified its scrapping of the report by claiming the data “does not say anything that the public doesn’t already know.” Even as the emergency grows more serious, Kennedy is reducing his own infectious disease staff: One workgroup focused on vaccinating underserved communities was eliminated as part of the layoffs. HHS has also pulled back grants that support the state and local health workers who are frontline responders. According to Reuters, health officials in Lubbock County, Texas, near the epicenter of the crisis, had their funding halted for several grants that were being used to support work on the outbreak. At the same time, Kennedy is launching a systemic analysis of any supposed links between childhood vaccines and autism — a link that has already been refuted by previous scientific analyses. He has placed a long-discredited anti-vaccine researcher in charge of it. Americans’ trust in vaccines had been slipping before the pandemic, and then widespread conspiracies about the Covid shots helped make those views even more mainstream. A federal probe that seems designed to sow distrust could drive vaccination rates lower.  The national measles vaccination rate has already slipped just below the 95 percent target that experts say is necessary to maintain population-level immunity. The speed of that decline has been alarming: In the 2019–2020 school year, 20 states were above the 95 percent vaccination rate threshold, and just three had dropped below 90 percent. But by the 2023–2024 school year, only 11 states had more than 95 percent of schoolchildren vaccinated against the disease, and 14 states had fallen under 90 percent. In individual communities, rates have slipped even lower, which creates the right conditions for an outbreak to explode; measles, after all, is one of the most contagious diseases known to humanity. In the Texas school district most affected by the current measles outbreak, the vaccination rate is under 50 percent.  What this means is that measles outbreaks could again become a recurring public health nuisance, 25 years after the US declared the virus was no longer spreading within the country.  At the same time measles is spreading, a potential H5N1 bird flu pandemic is brewing: The virus has been found in nearly 170 million birds and 1,000 livestock herds; 70 humans have been infected. On that disease, too, Kennedy is signaling a more hands-off approach: He has suggested allowing the virus to spread unchecked through factory farms, and the department is threatening to end a recent contract to develop a universal pandemic flu vaccine. One of the groups laid off this week were scientists testing pet foods for any trace of the virus. The long-term implications of RFK’s MAHA agenda Other long-running health campaigns will be jeopardized by the combination of HHS cuts and Kennedy’s fringe beliefs. In a 2021 book, Kennedy favorably presented the discredited theory that drug use, not HIV, was responsible for the development of AIDS. Now, despite Trump’s previous pledge to eradicate HIV completely, Kennedy’s department is pulling back on one of the defining health crises of the modern era.  Staff at the CDC Division of HIV Prevention office was cut in half as part of the mass layoffs. They had made great strides thanks to a muscular government approach: New HIV infections declined by 12 percent since 2010, aided by public health campaigns and direct subsidization of HIV treatment. Deaths have steadily fallen as better disease management allowed doctors to turn HIV into a chronic condition patients could live with, rather than a death sentence. Now the programs and medical research grants on the HIV crisis that made that progress possible are being cut. One analysis projected there would be 143,000 more HIV cases and 14,000 more deaths in the US by 2030 as a result, according to Anna Person, an HIV physician at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “Many people who have been living with HIV for decades are afraid we are returning to the 1980s era of HIV, when many buried countless friends and loved ones,” Person said in a media briefing this week. “They ask how it makes sense to cut prevention funds or endanger access to HIV medications? My answer: It doesn’t. These actions are inefficient and will lead to increases in health care costs.” The prospects for future drug development could also grow dimmer given the massive funding cuts at NIH. The federal government does not manufacture drugs itself, but the basic research supported by NIH is critical for identifying possible targets for pharmaceutical interventions that private companies then work to develop. The vast majority of prescription drugs approved in the US benefited from the kind of federal medical research funding that will be reduced by billions of dollars in the second Trump term. Other changes could further slow down drug approvals: Some of the FDA staff who were laid off had been dedicated to approving new medications. He could even reorient substance abuse treatment, just as the US is finally making progress in reducing the long-running scourge of fentanyl deaths. Kennedy, who is in recovery himself, has endorsed some unusual ideas for addiction care, such as sending people to so-called wellness farms where they would attempt to break their habit while participating in. It’s a concept that has failed in the past, and experts remain skeptical of its value today versus other more mainstream harm reduction strategies. Public health is often slow and steady work, except when there is an emergency. We saw the consequences of an ill-equipped federal government during Covid, and the measles outbreak will test what happens when federal authorities are disinterested in an ongoing public health threat. But it is in these longer-term trends, a lack of new scientific advances or the warping of public attitudes toward vaccines, where the department’s death by a thousand cuts may be felt most.

Preview: Pat McAfee is seen on the set of The Pat McAfee Show on February 5, 2025. In February, a group of men on a sports talk show casually spread a salacious and untrue rumor about the sex life of a teenage girl on national television, resulting in her being humiliated and relentlessly harassed. It felt as though it were 2007 again, and the talk show banter was a brief pause before our nation’s busy schedule of making fun of Britney Spears’s breakdown. On ESPN’s bro-y The Pat McAfee Show, the titular McAfee introduced a segment on NFL draft picks by gossiping about an undergraduate rumor he’d heard: that a sorority girl at the University of Mississippi had cheated on her fraternity boyfriend with his father. McAfee didn’t mention the young woman or her boyfriend by name, but later shared the clip on X to his 3.2 million followers (the post is still up, as of April 3). Barstool Sports personality Jack Mac then promoted a meme coin named after the girl in question: Mary Kate Cornett, a first-year college student. Cornett denies the rumor, but that hasn’t stopped it from spreading like wildfire.  As reported on the New York Times’ The Athletic, as the rumor spread, the harassment Cornett experienced ratcheted up. She had to leave her college dorm and move into emergency housing after campus police said she was at risk. Someone sent in a false tip to the police to have a SWAT team sent to her mother’s home. Cornett’s voicemail and text message filled up with degrading messages from strangers calling her a whore and telling her to kill herself; similar messages have also reached her 89-year-old grandfather. Cornett now says she intends to pursue legal action against McAfee and ESPN. ESPN and McAfee have declined to comment to The Athletic and other news outlets.  There’s something so 2000s about this story — the kind of thing you would read about on a feminist blog at the time. It has all the beats of a classic aughts slut-shaming: an anonymous teenage girl, the men on a talk show using her humiliation as idle chit-chat, the way that chit-chat picks up and runs rampant until the girl is getting anonymous threats from strangers. It’s very Swiffer Girl, in which a graphic tape an eighth-grader made for the boy she had a crush on went viral. It’s very Vanessa Hudgens in 2007, when she was forced to apologize to fans and scramble to save her Disney career when private nude photos of her were leaked. It’s basically all the episodes that the talk show hosts of the 2000s have by now apologized for. The only part that’s really new is the memecoin and the right-wing ecosystem of X that allows such gossip to flourish. Surely, a person might think, we have moved past this kind of national slut-shaming by now. We live in a post-MeToo world. The culture must have moved past the sexual humiliation of teen girls. Yet in a way, the Ole Miss story is the kind of thing that’s been a long time coming. The right has been interested in reviving Bush-era raunch (think Girls Gone Wild) and purity culture (think: the obsession with Britney Spears’s virginity) for years now. Purity culture and raunch culture walk hand in hand. The sexual objectification of raunch is enforced by the rigid shaming of purity. Both are united by the compulsory objectification and humiliation of women, whose bodies within this system are always controlled by men.  As sociologist Bernadette Barton showed in her 2021 book The Pornification of America: How Raunch Culture is Ruining Our Society, raunch has become fundamental to the self-conception of the post-Trump right. Barton notes the number of pro-Trump memes that “explicitly link provocative female bodies with Trump paraphernalia,” or that “contrast ‘sexy’ conservative women with ‘ugly, unfeminine’ liberal ones.”  “No longer are misogynists confined to the old dichotomy framing women as virgins or whores,” Barton observes. “Raunch culture has facilitated a new sexist dichotomy: hot or not.” The ideology claims all hot girls as their own and demands that they place themselves at the service of men, for their amusement. Taking on this position allows a woman a certain amount of cultural currency, which is why the right likes to crow that hot girls vote for Trump and only ugly girls are liberal. Yet being a hot girl also opens her up to the possibility of the kind of vicious, highly sexualized humiliation and harassment that Cornett is facing. That is the ideology that allowed the right to claim an apolitical figure like Hawk Tuah Girl as a MAGA symbol, and at the same time to smear Kamala Harris as “the original Hawk Tuah Girl.”  The point of it is to degrade, to dominate, to make it clear that sex exists to gratify men. Humiliating an anonymous teenager for fun is the natural endpoint of this ideology. It was always what was lurking under the hot girls for Trump jokes.

Preview: Banks are hoping to sell the X debt at around 90 to 95 cents on the dollar.

Preview: The Canadian government said it would provide extraordinary financing to Canada Post to avoid insolvency at the state-owned mail service.

Preview: Amazon.com said it is open to talks with officials from the Canadian and Quebec governments about the decision to shut down operations in the country’s French-speaking province, which would lead to 1,700 people losing their jobs.

Preview: Once a stalwart supporter of Black and LGBTQ rights, the retailer joined corporate America’s retreat from DEI initiatives.

Preview: Find insight on Cnooc, YTL Power International, Ampol, and more in the latest Market Talks covering energy and utilities.

Preview: Find insight on CSX, Givaudan, Rio Tinto and more in the latest Market Talks covering basic materials.

Preview: Read about CSX, Magna International, Alaska Air and more in the latest Market Talks covering the auto and transport sector.

Preview: Find insight on Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena’s bid for Mediobanca, Travelers and more in the latest Market Talks covering financial services.

Preview: Novo Nordisk shares rose sharply after the Danish pharmaceutical giant said an experimental weight-loss shot helped patients lose 22% of their body weight in a clinical trial.

Preview: The European Commission said that the parties’ offer to sell five of International Paper’s plants in Europe fully addresses its competition concerns over the deal.

Preview: The Senate early Saturday adopted changes to a House budget blueprint for enacting President Trump's agenda despite pushback from fiscal hawks in the lower chamber.

Preview: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday inaugurated construction work on a solar plant in neighboring Sri Lanka and witnessed the signing of energy and defense agreements seen as efforts to consolidate New Delhi's influence in the debt-stricken island nation.

Preview: When Lakota artist Marty Two Bulls Jr. looks at the Black Hills of South Dakota, he doesn't just see its natural beauty. He also sees a scar cut deep into the heart of the universe.

Preview: A Jupiter, Florida resident who posted on Facebook a threat to kill President Trump was arrested by local police on Friday.

Preview: Here's how a Georgia legislative session is supposed to end:

Preview: The death toll from a Russian missile strike in the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih has risen to 18, including nine children, regional governor Serhii Lysak said Saturday.

Preview: Iran's rial currency traded Saturday at a record low against the U.S. dollar as the country returned to work after a long holiday, costing over 1 million rials for a single greenback as tensions between Tehran and Washington likely will push it even lower.

Preview: Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet on Saturday presided over the opening of an expansion of his country's main naval base, which analysts and the U.S. government suspect will be used as a strategic outpost by China.

Preview: Jose Ramirez hit three homers for the second time in his career, Brayan Rocchio drove in three runs and the Cleveland Guardians snapped their three-game skid with an 8-6 victory over the Los Angeles Angels on Friday night.

Preview: With the upcoming canonization of its first millennial saint, the Catholic Church has turned to police in Italy to investigate the online sale of some purported relics of Carlo Acutis, who already has been drawing hundreds of thousands of pilgrims to his shrine.

Preview: BEND, OR — The leaders of River of Life Church were bewildered that the congregation's men appeared to be struggling spiritually more than ever despite the church holding a quarterly pancake breakfast.

Preview: WASHINGTON, D.C. — Following another round of aggressive media questions about his reasoning behind implementing sweeping tariffs on foreign goods, President Donald Trump allegedly leaned over and inquired to Vice President JD Vance if it was too late to find out what a tariff was.

Preview: TULSA, OK — Last Sunday morning's service at Church of the Promise was briefly disrupted when Pastor John Weber unexpectedly rescinded an earlier exhortation to "make a joyful noise unto the Lord" after hearing Tammy's singing voice.

Preview: Rancho Cucamonga, CA — A man who admitted being very concerned about the effect increased tariffs will have on the prices of everyday consumer goods said he was glad that he had just bought new underwear and wouldn't need to worry about that for another 15 years.

Preview: AVANT PRAIRIE, TX — In an ironic twist of fate, family members of a local doomsday prepper announced that he had died before the world ended.

Preview: WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump awoke this morning with a giddy schoolboy's excitement, knowing that the Tariff Fairy promises that she will magically leave new manufacturing jobs under the pillow of any good little president who raises tariffs on all the other countries.

Preview: Economists warn that, if left in place, Trump’s sweeping tariffs on U.S. trade partners will wreak havoc on households, businesses, and financial markets across the world, upending a global economic order that America benefited from and helped create. What do you think? The post Trump Tariffs Upend Global Economic Order appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: HUNTSVILLE, AL—In an effort to comfort the child by telling her the funds had gone to a far better place, local parents Blake and Allison McKee gently explained to their daughter Friday that their money was in heaven now, sources confirmed. “Honey, the reason we’re sitting you down today is because even though our life […] The post Parents Gently Explain To Child That Their Money In Heaven Now appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: LOS ANGELES—Expressing relief that they were both on the same page about custody, Megan Fox confirmed Friday that she and her new baby would be working together to co-parent Machine Gun Kelly. “The coming months are going to be exhausting, but knowing that I have this newborn by my side to help set a good […] The post Megan Fox Confirms She And New Baby Will Co-Parent Machine Gun Kelly appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: The post Climate Protestors Throw Paint On The Louvre’s 1988 Copy Of ‘Hustler’ Magazine appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: While trying to reassure a child she was caring for, a local Kansas babysitter was shocked to come face-to-face with a man when she aimed to show the kid there were no monsters under the bed. What do you think? The post Babysitter Finds Real-Life ‘Monster’ Under Child’s Bed appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: WASHINGTON—In a controversial move that has outraged those critical of President Trump’s agenda, Elon Musk announced Friday that all 340 million Americans must strip and take a turn pushing the Wheel of Pain. “Pulling off your garments and crawling into the pit in order to lash yourself to the Wheel of Pain is something that […] The post Musk Announces All 340 Million Americans Must Strip And Take Turn Pushing The Wheel Of Pain  appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has published a new book, Antisemitism In America. The Onion sat down with the politician to discuss his greatest achievements, Trump’s second term, and the future of the Democratic party. The Onion: Why did you allow the spending bill to pass? Chuck Schumer: I finally got a 7 p.m. […] The post The Onion’s Exclusive Interview With Chuck Schumer appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: MONTCLAIR, NJ—Declaring that this was no way to treat a Super Bowl winner and four-time league MVP, quarterback Aaron Rodgers told reporters Friday that he was furious the NFL hadn’t added an expansion team to sign him. “After everything I’ve done for this sport, the least they could do is create an entirely new franchise […] The post Aaron Rodgers Fuming That NFL Hasn’t Added Expansion Team To Sign Him appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: The post Heaven Enacts Retaliatory Tariffs On U.S.-Bound Miracles appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: The post Finance Guy Doing Cocaine In Sad Way This Time appeared first on The Onion.