This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. The candor on the tarmac Sunday night at Joint Base Andrews, under the wing of the presidential aircraft, came without any flinch of self doubt. “This is retaliatory,” President Donald Trump told reporters, essentially summing up his first two weeks in office in the most inelegant but honest bit of sloganeering. He was talking about tariffs against U.S. neighbors but he just as plausibly was describing his posture toward all corners of his new empire. Gag orders. Mass firings. Legally questionable buyouts. Foiled breaches of classified data and personnel files. A game of chicken over sanctions. Purged people and websites alike. The anxiety across the civil service at this hour is rightly earned and has no sign of slackening. If you’re a career federal worker, you’re marking your time in hours at this point as Trump is looking to shed professional expertise in favor of political hacks. Trump has begun his one-sided war against his foes, and the costs are just starting to be counted. Just ask the feds who found themselves put on leave as punishment for having attended diversity training during the first Trump term. The whole pile-up of chaos over the weekend left Washington insiders trying to figure out just how to triage the waves of norm-breaking headlines flowing from the White House without any real push-back from Republicans. Democrats, left in the minority for at least the next two years, tried to summon an opposition but found themselves once again stumbling over each other with so many competing theories about how to blunt the Trump aggressions in any meaningful way. The Democratic National Committee has a new chief, but there are no signs a shift in leadership is going to be anything passing for sufficient to counter the turmoil being cooked from the West Wing. The bipartisan Establishment can only shake its head at the massive break from the way things have rolled in the post-World War II cadences. When a veteran FBI agent calls for colleagues to “dig in” against the coming purges, it’s tough to argue that there is an over-reaction. The weekend’s roll of maddening moves came quicker than most could handle. Chasing the developments was like tracing buckshot. Tariffs here and sanctions there. Calls to re-take the Panama Canal would have been banner headlines for typical administrations yet amounted to also-ran stories this weekend. Calls went out for whistleblowers to speak out against the new administration’s attacks on the civil service, but it’s not clear the hotlines had enough manpower to accommodate all the reports of intimidation and bullying. While Hill Democrats’ offices were ready to listen to the horror stories—putting out word to union allies that they want it all—it’s not evident that they have much more power than naming and shaming. After all, even a shocking mid-air collision between a military helicopter and an American Airlines regional jet last week turned into a political proving point, with Trump blaming diversity, equity, and inclusion programs for the fiery and fatal crash over the Potomac River. His loyalists were on TV on Sunday repeating his fact-free assertion that D.E.I. programs were to blame for the bodycount. Given a chance to make anything into a piece of the culture wars, the Trumpists missed no opening, leaving opponents shouting back with facts about a durable credible workforce but not getting nearly as much attention. And, returning to Washington Sunday evening, Trump took a chance to double-down on the flurry of fancy, defending his empowerment of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, to take a hatchet to the whole of government. “I think Elon is doing a good job. He's a big cost-cutter,” Trump said at Andrews. “He's very much into cutting the budget of our federal government.” Musk, who has been raging against anyone who dares to get in his way, is smashing through agencies so quickly that Washington is struggling to fully understand what is happening in real time. A top Treasury official found out what saying no to Musk cost; having denied Musk access to the sensitive system overseeing trillions of dollars in payments, he was placed on leave and then retired suddenly, allowing Musk’s team to get what it wanted. Separately, the heads of security at U.S. Agency for International Development, the nation’s marquee foreign aid arm, were put on leave after they refused to give Musk and his functionaries access to an internal data system that holds the nuts and bolts of a roughly $40 billion pile of cash that handles health care, disaster relief, and foreign assistance programs. The U.S. AID website went offline wholesale, and staffers are bracing for deep cuts and an end to its stand-alone status. Staffers were well aware that Musk had deemed it a “criminal” enterprise that needed to “die.” Given the chance to calm those jitters, Trump did the opposite on Sunday, saying the flagship foreign aid shop is “run by radical lunatics.” Neither he nor Musk mentioned that it is the world’s largest provider of food assistance. That push from Musk, under the auspices of the self-created Department of Government Efficiency—or DOGE, like the crypto trinket—is barrelling over the typically staid career staff that is tasked with keeping the cogs of bureaucracy going across administrations. In fact, that Musk regime seems to be spreading with little regard for what has been long-standing expectations inside the federal workforce. In this environment, career feds see their time as limited. Trump has made clear he has little regard for their work, offering as many as two million the chance to end their career with a six-letter reply-all: “Resign.” He also hinted that loyalty tests were in the offing for those who chose to stay in their jobs. Staying may prove insufferable for those who opt against wearing the red MAGA caps. It’s why feds around town were looking at what is unfolding at U.S. AID as a warning for what is to come more broadly. If Trump and Musk are able to dismantle a popular piece of bureaucratic backwater without much of an objection from the Republican majority, there’s no worry that they could move more forcefully elsewhere. Trump has made clear he wants the federal workforce to reflect his values and any holdouts or remnants of a more professional era are only nuisances. Now that he and Musk have started the hollowing out of the professional spine of the federal government, there’s no telling just how far Trump would go.

Inflation-weary consumers chose Donald J. Trump for President in part because they were sick of seeing prices continue to rise. Now, in the first few weeks of the Trump Administration, prices for homes, cars, fuel, and food are expected to jump once again because of the tariffs Trump announced Feb. 1 on Mexico, Canada, and China. Mexico said Feb. 3 that it had reached a deal with the U.S. to delay its tariffs for a month as the two countries negotiate on border security, but the blanket 25% tariffs Trump threatened could still hit later. Trump also struck a deal with Canada to delay his 25% tariffs on Canadian goods (10% on oil and natural gas) for a month. But 10% tariffs on China are expected to go into effect Feb. 4. Experts say consumer prices on a number of goods are almost sure to rise if these tariffs are in effect for more than a few months. The right-leaning Tax Foundation estimates that the proposed tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China could add more than $800 of costs to each U.S. household in 2025. Here are some of the products that could be most impacted: Housing Home prices shot up in 2020 and have barely moderated since, but there’s more pain to come for potential buyers, experts say. Materials for homebuilding are getting more and more expensive, and the tariffs won’t help: more than 70% of imports of softwood lumber comes from Canada, according to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB). The 25% tariff on softwood lumber comes on top of a 14.5% tariff already in place, according to the NAHB. Mexico supplies the U.S. with gypsum, a building material used for drywall, and the price of it is expected to climb when those tariffs go into effect. Tariffs on lumber “increase the cost of construction and discourage new development,” said Carl Harris, chairman of the National Association of Home Builders, in a statement. Consumers may end up paying in the form of higher home prices, which are already up about 40% since 2020. America has a chronic shortage of homes, and many experts say building houses is the key to easing costs. Last year was already a slow time for homebuilding; construction was started on only about 1.4 million units, the lowest level since 2019 and a 4% decline from 2023. That’s partly because of costs. Inputs to residential construction—essentially labor and materials—are up more than 30% since Jan. 2021. The Trump Administration’s round-up of migrants will also drive the cost of labor up, says Jeff Schott, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Peterson Institute for International Economics. The roundups will leave fewer construction workers available, he says. Autos There are few industries with supply chains that straddle borders as much as automobiles. Parts can be sent across the border to Canada and other countries and then back again numerous times as a car is made, says William Reinsch, senior advisor at the nonprofit Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Even if the tariffs are just on Canada, this is going to royally mess up automobile supply chains,” he says. The U.S. and Canada have had a free trade agreement on automobiles that goes back to the 1970s and predates NAFTA, Reinsch says. The tariffs on Mexico and Canada could increase the price of a sedan by around $2,000, says Michael Hicks, an economist at Ball State University in Indiana. The cost of a big SUV would go up even more because it has so many different electronic components, he says, estimating that a $50,000 U.S. made car could see its prices increase by $5,000 because of the tariffs. Energy Canada is a big supplier of energy, including crude oil, natural gas, and hydropower. Although the energy tariffs on Canadian imports are a bit lower, at 10%, that will still have an impact, says Reinsch. This could lead to pain at the pump in the Midwest, he says, where crude oil from Alberta is sent to refineries which turn it into gasoline. Gas prices in the Midwest peaked in June 2022 at nearly $5 per gallon, according to the Energy Information Administration. They’ve come down since but started ticking up again in January. “These refineries can’t easily shift to another kind of oil,” Reinsch says, meaning they’ll continue to import Canadian crude and pay the tariffs. Read More: The Age of Scams. The energy tariffs could also bump up energy prices in New England and New York, which get some of their electricity from Canadian hydropower. About 53% of Hydro-Quebec’s sales outside of Quebec came from New England in 2023, and 10% came from New York, according to the company’s annual report. The New England Independent Systems Operator, which operates the region’s electricity transmission network, said in a statement that about 9% of electricity demand in New England was met through imports from Canada and New York. Food The U.S. grows a lot of food, but it is increasingly reliant on Mexico and Canada for fresh produce, according to the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. The volume of imported fresh vegetables alone rose nearly 200% over the past two decades. The tariffs on Canadian imports will affect prices of a few other foods in particular. About 75% of the world’s maple syrup is made in Canada, and the U.S. was the world’s top importer of the stuff in 2023, buying about $280 million dollars worth, according to the World Bank. Even maple syrup made in Vermont and other places in the Northeast could be affected by the tariffs; most of the equipment used in producing it is made in Canada. Companies in Vermont are frantically moving maple equipment over the border, according to the Maple News, a Vermont trade publication. The U.S. also imports about $17 billion worth of Canadian grain and grain products every year, according to the Grain Growers of Canada. The grain is used for products like bread, pasta, biofuels, feed, and brewing. “Whether you’re growing crops or buying groceries, these tariffs will make life more expensive at a time when most are already being priced out,” Tara Sawyer, an Alberta farmer and chair of the Grain Growers of Canada, said in a statement. Cheap Stuff Online Many economists aren’t thinking as much about how the 10% tariffs on China might affect consumers because those tariffs are relatively small compared to the ones announced on the U.S.’s North American counterparts. But there’s one part of the tariffs in particular that could have a big impact on stuff from China. It’s known as the de minimus provision. For years, companies sending cheap goods to U.S. consumers have been able to avoid tariffs because of the provision, which exempts goods that cost less than $800 from tariffs and inspection. That’s allowed Chinese retailers to send stuff directly to U.S. consumers and avoid taxes that would otherwise be levied on them. One Congressional report from June 2024 found that Chinese e-commerce sites Temu and Shein account for more than 30% of all packages shipped to the U.S. every day under the de minimus provision. The latest executive orders on tariffs, however, suspend the de minimis provision, saying that it has been used to funnel fentanyl into the U.S. One memo from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection office obtained by TIME said that, as of Feb. 4, 2025, “Requests for de minimis entry and clearance for ineligible shipments will be rejected.” This could mean that some of that stuff you’re buying on the Internet, from clothes and cheap electronics to furniture, is likely to become a little more expensive soon.

Schoolchildren in Massachusetts, Ohio and Pennsylvania are still about half a year behind typical pre-Covid reading levels. In Florida and Michigan, the gap is about three-quarters of a year. In Maine, Oregon and Vermont, it is close to a full year. This morning, a group of academic researchers released their latest report card on pandemic learning loss, and it shows a disappointingly slow recovery in almost every state. School closures during Covid set children back, and most districts have not been able to make up the lost ground. One reason is a rise in school absences that has continued long after Covid stopped dominating daily life. “The pandemic may have been the earthquake, but heightened absenteeism is the tsunami and it’s still rolling through schools,” Thomas Kane, a Harvard economist and a member of the research team, told me. In today’s newsletter, I will walk through four points from the report, with charts created by my colleague Ashley Wu. I’ll also tell you the researchers’ recommendations for what schools should do now. 1. State variation The new report — from scholars at Dartmouth, Harvard and Stanford — compares performance across states, based on math and reading tests that fourth and eighth graders take. (A separate report, on national trends, came out last month.) Today’s report shows a wide variety of outcomes. In the states that have made up the most ground, fourth and eighth graders were doing nearly as well last spring as their predecessors were doing five years earlier. But the overall picture is not good. In a typical state, students last spring were still about half a year behind where their predecessors were in 2019. In a few states, the gap approaches a full year.2. A blue-red divide Political leaders in red and blue America made different decisions during the pandemic. Many public schools in heavily Democratic areas stayed closed for almost a year — from the spring of 2020 until the spring of 2021. In some Republican areas, by contrast, schools remained closed for only the spring of 2020. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT This pattern helps explains a partisan gap in learning loss: Students in blue states have lost more ground since 2019. The differences are especially large in math. Eight of the 10 states that have lost the most ground since 2019 voted Democratic in recent presidential elections. And eight of the 10 states with the smallest math shortfalls voted Republican.I know some readers may wonder if blue states had bigger declines simply because they started from a higher point. After all, the states with the best reading and math scores have long been mostly blue. But that doesn’t explain the post-pandemic patterns. For example, New Jersey (a blue state) and Utah (a red state) both had high math scores in 2019, but New Jersey has fared much worse since then. 3. More inequality Pandemic learning loss has exacerbated class gaps and racial gaps. Lower-income students are even further behind upper-income students than they were five years ago, and Black students and Latino students are even further behind Asian and white students. “Children, especially poor children, are paying the price for the pandemic,” Kane said. Other research, by Rebecca Jack of the University of Nebraska and Emily Oster of Brown, points to two core reasons. First, schools with a large number of poor students and Black or Latino students were more likely to remain closed for long periods of time. Second, a day of missed school tends to have a larger effect on disadvantaged students than others. In the years before Covid, the U.S. education system had impressive success in reducing learning inequality, as I explained in a 2022 newsletter. But Covid erased much of that progress. “Educational inequality grew during the pandemic and remains larger now than in 2019,” Sean Reardon, a Stanford sociologist and co-author of the new report, said. 4. How to recover The authors of the report note that some school districts, including in poorer areas, have largely recovered from Covid learning loss. Among the standouts are Compton, Calif.; Ector County, Texas, which includes Odessa; Union City, N.J.; and Rapides Parish, La. The authors urge more study of these districts to understand what they’re doing right. Early evidence suggests that after-school tutoring and summer school, subsidized by federal aid, made a difference. Intensive efforts to reduce absenteeism can also help. One problem, the authors write, is that many schools have not been honest with parents about learning loss: “Since early in the recovery, the overwhelming majority of parents have been under the false impression that their children were unaffected.”

Dave Gomberg had been watching the wind, his concern mounting. A veteran fire weather specialist at the National Weather Service, he understood the high and low pressure systems that ginned up the infamous Santa Anas that blew periodically through Southern California. This wasn’t that. High in the upper atmosphere, powerful currents were forecast to align with the fast-moving air off the desert, threatening a rare supercharged windstorm — all this in a region that had seen less than a quarter-inch of rain over the last eight months. The National Weather Service held a conference call with Southern California fire and emergency management officials on Jan. 3, warning that a “truly historic event” was due in four days, with the possibility of fires that would spread with extraordinary speed. Even an amateur weather watcher was worried about the conditions: “Altadena, we have a problem,” he warned his followers. Yet neither days of lead time nor highly specific warnings from weather experts were enough to save Los Angeles from an inferno. The firestorms that would ravage the area would expose multiple weaknesses in the region’s ability to respond to an extreme weather event — even one whose timing was widely predicted — that was far more serious than the seasonal fire threats California had long endured. There was no all-hands news conference by public officials before the winds arrived, as happens in Florida before a major hurricane. There was no single local leader in the politically fragmented region taking to local television to warn residents of the extraordinary danger. County supervisors issued warnings, but mainly on their social media accounts. Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles, who runs the biggest of 88 cities in the county, was out of the country when the fires ignited. Gov. Gavin Newsom had driven down from Sacramento, not for the fires but for an unrelated news conference, and he was more than two hours away in the Palm Springs area when the first fire broke out. Los Angeles had spent decades preparing for a major earthquake disaster — the “Big One,” they call it — and the Big One was here. But it was a fire, and no one had a playbook for one this big. State and local leaders have called for a full review of the response, with Mayor Bass promising “a full accounting of what worked and, especially, what did not.” The New York Times examined the four critical days leading up to the disaster, reviewing internal documents, text messages, timelines and fire response guidelines, and interviewing dozens of emergency management, fire and government officials to map out the region’s preparations. The Times review found that California’s emergency management and fire systems mobilized for what seemed to be an extreme version of a familiar threat that comes when dry conditions and high winds create the risk of fire — a red flag day. Until recently, there were typically around a half-dozen red-flag days a year in Southern California. But this was not a typical red-flag warning. The National Weather Service was invoking a new category it has used as fire threats have become more extreme. And in Los Angeles, as in many other areas of the country, there was no stepped-up playbook to respond to one. The Los Angeles County Fire Department took the rare and costly step of ordering 900 firefighters to remain on overtime duty after the end of their shifts, even before any fire had erupted. The city’s fire department could have done the same, doubling the number of firefighters it had on duty to as many as 2,000. But it did not. Nor did the city department deploy engines in advance as aggressively as the region’s other federal, state and local fire agencies, a strategy that can be critical to containing wildfires, which in high winds can often be stopped only if they’re caught immediately. As it played out on the first day of the fires, perilous hurricane-force winds repeatedly grounded aerial firefighting equipment. Water systems failed in Pacific Palisades, one of the densest concentrations of wealth in the nation. Los Angeles city firefighters were caught short as brush fires fatally outran an inadequate early deployment. By the time the Altadena fire exploded on the other side of Los Angeles later in the day, the county fire department, responsible for that area, had already sent many of its firefighters to the Palisades to help the city, which had not deployed any extra engines there in advance. Later, many residents of the Palisades complained that they had never been told in advance which routes to plan to use for evacuations. In Altadena, an unincorporated area that lies in the county’s jurisdiction, even members of the town council said they had not understood the seriousness of the fire hazard. Officials in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties who oversee the alert systems had in fact heard a pitch from Weather Service officials ahead of the fires to consider issuing public text alerts of hurricane-level Category One winds. But the three agencies eventually decided against the idea at the time, saying it should wait until the wind had reached a certain sustained threshold. By that time, the fires were raging. “They did mention there would be red-flag warnings, but we get those all year round,” said Milissa Marona, a member of the town council in Altadena, where most of the 17 deaths that ultimately occurred happened in areas that did not receive evacuation orders until long after the flames were upon them. She said she had been in touch with Los Angeles County fire officials but didn’t fully appreciate the threat. “I wish we would’ve known the potential was there for a big fire.”Whatever reckoning comes as a result of the fires may wind up having broader implications for how communities from Hawaii to North Carolina think about wildfires. Fire experts say that the deadly mix of hurricane-level winds and bone-dry conditions increased the risk that firefighters would be overwhelmed, no matter the level of preparation, and that states like California may need to adopt an entirely new playbook for preparing for wildfires as climate change makes them exponentially worse. That includes the long-recognized need for better evacuation alerts and water systems, better management of brush and grasslands, and homes that are more fire-safe, as well as better technology to fight fires. It could mean a stronger, more unified response structure that brings multiple jurisdictions together during the planning stages in extreme fire weather. In the most extreme cases, cities in the West facing volatile fire conditions may be forced to consider the kind of advance staff deployments and public warnings that are already standard elsewhere in the country for hurricanes and tornadoes. Up until now, emergency planners have been reluctant to issue evacuation warnings ahead of a fire, even when risks are clear, because precise predictions of where a fire will ignite are impossible, and the potential for crying wolf could prompt the public to eventually ignore them. “I thought we were prepared,” said Los Angeles County’s fire chief, Anthony C. Marrone, a 39-year veteran of his department. “And we were prepared. As prepared as we could be. And it wasn’t even close to being enough.” Living With Wildfire To live in California is to live with wildfire. Preventive power outages. Smoke in one town blocking the sun in another. Admonitions to “harden your home.” Hundreds of thousands of Californians live in coastal and mountain areas of exceptionally high fire hazard, their lives a calculus of risk and stunning natural beauty. In these places, people come to learn how fire can start, and how quickly a stiff wind can explode it. And, once that happens, how nearly impossible it can be to put out. Two of the five largest municipal fire departments in the country serve Los Angeles and the flammable sprawl around it — one for the city of Los Angeles, and an even bigger one for the surrounding county — plus about two dozen smaller city departments, a combined force of at least 9,000 firefighters serving some 10 million people over an expanse larger than the combined states of Delaware and Rhode Island, not counting state and federal firefighters who are stationed in the area.The fires on Jan. 7 were not even the first this year to require a joint effort. Seventeen minutes into the New Year, a three-acre brush fire at virtually the same spot where the Palisades fire would erupt six days later nearly tripled in size before city and county firefighters, helicopters and brush crews contained it several hours later. Afterward, they counted themselves lucky. The wind had been light. Luck would not last. One warning came on the afternoon of Jan. 3, when the National Weather Service issued an official fire weather watch for Los Angeles and Ventura Counties. Four hundred miles to the north that day, the state’s Wildfire Forecast and Threat Intelligence Integration Center notified Mr. Newsom’s office. Striding into an informal briefing with the Capitol press corps on his 2025 agenda, the governor mentioned in passing that wildfire, which ordinarily threatens in the summer and fall, was already a concern. With the first workweek of a new year and a new presidential administration looming, though, the ominous forecasts were just one concern among many. In Sacramento, Mr. Newsom was struggling to balance a deadline for presenting his state budget proposal with an invitation to Washington, D.C., for the memorial service for the late President Jimmy Carter. There was a news conference on Jan. 7 near Palm Springs in the Coachella Valley, where the outgoing president, Joe Biden, would proclaim two new national monuments. Los Angeles leaders had their own competing demands as they prepared to meet the weather warnings. Mayor Bass and the five supervisors who lead Los Angeles County were working on a new initiative to get homeless veterans into housing. On Saturday, Jan. 4, Mayor Bass was heading to the inauguration of the new president of Ghana, a quick trip made at the request of the White House. She was in the air as the weather warnings started to increase in urgency. As the weekend before the fires unfolded, the forecasts loomed larger. Fire weather doesn’t always mean fire, but the Los Angeles County fire chief, Mr. Marrone, had a bad feeling. Just a month before, a terrifying wildfire had roared through Malibu, not far from Pacific Palisades at the base of the Santa Monica Mountains. The Franklin fire had destroyed 20 buildings before firefighters stopped it, a relatively small footprint, but the skies had been calmer. In 2018, the Santa Anas had kicked up a fire in the same place, the Woolsey fire, that had leveled 151 square miles and killed three people. “That’s the dickens,” the chief said. “The wind.” It is far from clear that any measure of planning could have stopped an inferno driven by hurricane-force winds. But experts say they expect a close assessment of whether more vigorous public warnings, better evacuation planning and deployment of more firefighting resources before the fires started might have lessened damage and saved lives.

President Donald Trump has made good on his campaign promise to impose tariffs on imports from the United States’ three largest supplier countries—Canada, China, and Mexico. Trump signed orders on Saturday evening, imposing 25% tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada (though Canadian energy faces a lower tariff of 10%) and 10% tariffs on goods from China. Trump signed an Executive Order titled: “Imposing Duties to Address the Flow of Illicit Drugs Across Our Northern Border.” Trump discussed the tariffs in a series of posts on his social media platform, Truth Social. One update announced the official orders of the tariffs, stating that the decision was made to “protect” Americans “because of the major threat of illegal aliens and deadly drugs killing our Citizens, including fentanyl.” In a second post, Trump included a video of himself on the campaign trail, where he promised the tariffs he is now imposing. Though tariffs have been used as useful tools by politicians, consumers and economists are concerned about whether, just weeks into Trump’s term, his tariffs could raise prices of goods and services. Many voters described grocery prices and general affordability issues as high on their voting priorities, but there is the possibility of these tariffs raising prices of groceries, gas, energy, and automotive sectors. With a heightened focus on tariffs and discussions about the potential benefits and risks, here’s what you need to know about the government-imposed taxes and why Trump is in favor of them. What are tariffs? Simply put, ​​import tariffs, the kind of tariffs Trump is levying, are taxes placed on goods imported from other countries. There are also export tariffs, which are taxes on goods brought out of a country, though these are much more rare. There are several different types of tariffs, and the kind that Trump is imposing is known as an “ad valorem tariff”—meaning the tax on imported goods is calculated as a percentage of the product’s value. Who pays for tariffs? Typically, tariffs are paid by domestic importers, and paid to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. However, economists often say that portions of the cost of tariffs ends up paid by consumers. In response to tariffs, sellers may hike up prices of the goods that they are importing for consumers. “Generally, it will make it more costly to import goods,” says Felix Tintelnot, associate professor of economics at Duke University. “With the one caveat: it is conceivable that the foreign exporter could reduce its price in order to maintain competitiveness and not lose out.” For example, since avocados are mostly imported from Mexico, with Trump’s new tariffs potentially making it more expensive to import avocados, grocery stores could raise the prices of avocados to make up for the added tax, Tintelnot explains. Why is Trump in favor of tariffs? Trump has said that he planned to impose tariffs on imported goods to boost American manufacturing and end, what he says, are unfair trade practices. “You see these empty, old, beautiful steel mills and factories that are empty and falling down,” Trump declared in October 2024 on the campaign trail. “We’re going to bring the companies back. We’re going to lower taxes for companies that are going to make their products in the USA. And we’re going to protect those companies with strong tariffs.” “A bilateral trade deficit is a terrible metric to focus on, because it's completely natural that bilateral trade deficits exist,” Tintelnot says. “It's like if you put a tariff on your local gym because you're paying them more than they're buying from you.” Trump has also stated that the tariffs are intended to stop the flow of undocumented immigrants and illegal drugs into the United States. “China makes the fentanyl, gives it to Mexico, puts it through Canada, puts it through different places, mostly Mexico, but also a lot through Canada,” Trump claimed while speaking from the Oval Office on Friday. “And so all three haven't treated us very well.”

In the deadliest U.S. major commercial aviation incident in 16 years, there were no survivors in a collision between a commercial aircraft and an Army helicopter by Ronald Reagan National Airport near Washington D.C. on Wednesday, Jan. 29. There were 64 people on board the jet, and three military personnel on the helicopter. Recovery operations are underway at the Potomac River, over which the crash occurred. This is President Trump’s first major incident to lead the country through in his second term at the White House. What did Trump say in the immediate aftermath of the passenger jet and Army helicopter crash? Late Wednesday night, Trump’s Press Secretary posted a statement from the President on X (formerly Twitter), in which he thanked first responders and said he had been “fully briefed on the terrible accident.” He said he was “monitoring the situation and will provide more details as they arise.” Trump posted the same statement on his own social media platform, Truth Social, on Thursday morning. Trump posted another remark about the incident just after midnight on Thursday, seemingly suspicious of the incident, and saying the situation “looks like it should have been prevented.” “The airplane was on a perfect and routine line of approach to the airport. The helicopter was going straight at the airplane for an extended period of time,” he wrote on Truth Social. “It is a CLEAR NIGHT, the lights on the plane were blazing, why didn’t the helicopter go up or down, or turn. Why didn’t the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane.” What did Trump say in his press briefing the day after the crash? At around 11:30 a.m. on Thursday morning President Trump delivered remarks about the crash to press in the White House briefing room. He was joined by Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. After beginning with a moment of silence for the victims, Trump spoke about the timeline of the crash and confirmed, once more, that there were no survivors. Trump emphasized putting aside differences and grieving this “tragedy” as a nation, also stating he would contact the countries of origin of the non-Americans on board, including the Russian figure skaters. “On behalf of the First Lady, myself, and 340 million Americans, our hearts are shattered alongside yours, and our prayers are with you now and in the days to come, we'll be working very, very diligently in the days to come,” he said. “In moments like this, the differences between Americans fade to nothing compared to the bonds of affection and loyalty that unite us all, both as Americans and even as nations, we are one family, and today we are all heartbroken.” Soon after, Trump went on to call out former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s air traffic policies. He then started to focus on “diversity” within the Federal Aviation Administration. Last week, on his second day in office, Trump signed an Executive Order to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs (DEI) in the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), proclaiming that DEI “penalizes hard-working Americans who want to serve in the FAA but are unable to do so, as they lack a requisite disability or skin color.” When asked by a reporter if he had any evidence to show that DEI policies were to blame for the crash, Trump said “it just could have been.” When asked if he was getting ahead of the investigation, he said he did not think so. “Because I have common sense,” Trump said when asked how he could already come to the conclusion that diversity had something to do with the crash. “We want brilliant people doing this. This is a major chess game at the highest level when you have 60 planes coming in during a short period of time and they're all coming in different directions.” The FAA has yet to publicly identify any of the controllers responsible for monitoring flights around the airport. Furthermore, air traffic controllers must undergo extensive training and mental fitness tests.According to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, these tests are to determine that air traffic controllers don’t have any “personality or mental disorder that clearly demonstrates a potential hazard to safety in the air traffic control system.” Trump continued to flesh out his suspicions about how this tragedy occurred, again emphasizing the visibility during the clear night, and the potential maneuvers the pilots could have made to prevent the crash. “We don't know that necessarily it’s even the controller's fault, but one thing we do know: there was a lot of vision, and people should have been able to see that,” Trump said. “At what point do you stop at what point you say ‘wow that plane's getting a little bit close,’ so this is a tragedy that should not have happened.” What has Trump said since? Later on Thursday, Trump spoke to reporters in the Oval Office, where he was asked if he had spoken to any of the victims’ families, to which he denied to comment. He was then asked if he plans to go and visit the site of the crash. “I have a plan to visit—not the site,” he said. “You tell me, what’s the site? The water? You want me to go swimming?” Trump went on to say that he will be meeting with some of the families impacted by the crash. The President was also asked whether he believed his remarks on diversity earlier in the day would affect the investigation of the crash, to which he responded “no.” “I think they’ll do an investigation, it will probably come out the way I said it,” Trump said. Trump has gone on to speak about the crash via various posts on Truth Social. On Friday, he posted a video of Denver International Airport CEO Phil Washington during his March 2023 confirmation hearings in the Senate, getting questioned by Republican Senator Ted Budd. He had been nominated by former President Joe Biden to lead the FAA after the role remained empty since mid-2022, and if confirmed, would have been the first Black person to serve as FAA Administrator. Though Washington, a 24-year veteran, held multiple transit-related positions, he was grilled for his lack of aviation experience. Washington eventually withdrew his nomination for leading the FAA after continued opposition from Republicans.

The dominoes fell really fast. On Monday, Jan. 20, shortly after his inauguration, President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order that called for a 90-day pause on new foreign-aid programs for efficiency and "consistency with U.S. foreign policy." The order got less attention than some of the others he signed that day but may have much more far-reaching effects. By the evening of Friday, Jan. 24, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had issued a directive that went even further, effectively freezing operations at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the U.S. government's lead provider of nonmilitary foreign aid. No new projects were to be started, no contracts were to be extended, and work was to be stopped on most existing programs. By Monday, Jan. 27, at least 56 of USAID's top brass were sent home on paid administrative leave for 90 days, reportedly cut off from their email, and, in case the message was not clear, the photos from the walls of their office were removed. Chaos and confusion began to spread through the ranks of USAID, both in Washington, D.C, where there are about 15,000 employees and abroad, where there are thousands more. It also spread among the many nongovernmental organizations and religious groups that receive funds from it, and the small businesses the agency contracts to provide services. Some of them had to guess whether their programs had to be paused under the terms of their agreement with the State Department and others received suspension notices and memos from a variety of different channels. TIME spoke to several current and former senior officials at USAID and others who head up organizations it supports about the impact of the move on their activity. Almost all requested that TIME not use their names because they didn't want to jeopardize their future funding or employment. On Tuesday morning one of those aid organizations, which runs dozens of child nutrition clinics in several extremely impoverished countries, had an emergency meeting to try to decide whether to close them. "Those kids have to be fed every three to four hours with therapeutic feeding products in order to reverse the effects of malnutrition, prevent long-term harm, and basically keep them alive," says an official at the NGO. "We had to make a decision: Do we close those centers? Or do we keep them open at the risk of being in violation of our suspension notice or stop-work order?" Later that day, after the NGO opted to keep the clinic open by repurposing some non-USAID funding, Secretary Rubio released a clarification that "life-saving humanitarian assistance" could proceed. The organization believes, but is not sure, the clinics fall under that heading. Charitable groups around the world told TIME they were making similar agonizing choices. One had to decide whether to abide by a stop-work order or deliver lunches to schoolchildren in impoverished communities, as it has for years. It decided to obey the order, wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of perishable food. Another is figuring out whether to close health clinics for pregnant mothers in Haiti, leaving them with scant alternatives for a place to give birth. Yet another was forced to pause a program that helped migrants fleeing Venezuela stay in South American countries (rather than continuing north to the U.S. border), through work training, housing, and support of the host community. The U.S. plays an outsize role in responding to international crises, providing 40% of the world's humanitarian assistance. Most people in the humanitarian sector acknowledge that Washington has the right to review how the more than $40 billion it spends doing so every year is used. "The government has the prerogative to conduct a review of spending and programs against their priorities," says an executive of a major aid organization. "But the ways in which they're going about it, in my mind, would undermine the likelihood of them actually having an aid sector to work with as they go forward."

Long before Michael Jackson, the Rolling Stones and Rihanna, there was Freddie Colston. Colston was just a 20-year-old student from tiny Fairbanks, La., when he traveled to Los Angeles in January 1967. He had grown up in a home without indoor plumbing, but now he was staying in lavish accommodations with about 180 other members of the Grambling College marching band. Soon they would high-step onto the field at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum to perform in the halftime show of the very first Super Bowl. “When we heard that crowd, it was like a spirit got into us, and we were walking on a cloud,” said Colston, 77, who played the cymbals. “Our step was higher, and the beat was faster.” In the decades before the National Football League recruited stars to perform at the Super Bowl halftime show — the rapper Kendrick Lamar will headline on Feb. 9 at this year’s game in New Orleans — it frequently relied on dynamic marching bands from Grambling and other historically Black colleges and universities. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT With nicknames like “Human Jukebox” (Southern University) and “Sonic Boom of the South” (Jackson State University), the musical groups are known for their creative formations and flamboyant showmanship. And the tradition has endured even as the Super Bowl has morphed into a corporate playground of advertisements, parties and spectacle. At least 13 Super Bowl halftime shows have included H.B.C.U. marching bands, including Usher’s collaboration last year with Jackson State University, and they are often part of pregame festivities. (When Beyoncé performed at halftime of a Christmas Day regular-season game on Netflix, she incorporated Texas Southern University.)Lamar has not said if he will feature an H.B.C.U. band in his nearly 15-minute performance while the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles are recuperating. But there will be a presence at the Caesars Superdome when Southern University, from Baton Rouge, La., plays before Jon Batiste sings the national anthem. Each H.B.C.U. marching band has its own style and look, with vibrant uniforms that often match the school colors. But no matter the school, spectators have come to expect a rollicking show with high-stepping choreography, dancers often at the front, and trumpeters and drummers swaying in rhythm while blowing or pounding their instruments. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “That particular style of performance has always had broad appeal, and marching bands and other musical groups have always been cultural ambassadors for Black colleges,” said Steven Lewis, the curator of music and performing arts for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington. Grambling’s band of all-Black students was invited to Los Angeles at the height of the civil rights movement, and to a city still reeling from the flames and mayhem of the Watts riots two years earlier. Some Black leaders implored university administrators to reject the invitation. “There was a feeling early on that it was an empty gesture,” Lewis said of the invitation to Grambling, which is now known as Grambling State University. “But that criticism has been going on for quite a long time, and it’s something the league still has to work on.” After the San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick repeatedly knelt during the national anthem in 2016 to protest racial injustice, and a rancorous debate about patriotism and civil rights ensued, some Black stars were hesitant to perform at the Super Bowl. In 2019, the N.F.L. began a partnership with Roc Nation, Jay-Z’s entertainment and sports company, that led to recent performances by the Weeknd, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and other prominent Black artists. Marching bands carry outsize influence and pride at H.B.C.U.s, many of which were founded shortly after the Civil War and incorporated military marching in their curriculums. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The bands are student-recruitment tools, garnering attention at the Rose Parade and presidential inaugurations, including Mississippi Valley State University’s performance at President Trump’s last month. Some groups compete against one another at events such as the Battle of the Bands, giving energetic flair to contemporary songs. They also caught the attention of football executives looking to infuse entertainment in a new event. When the champions of the National Football League and the American Football League met for the first time, the Super Bowl was not yet called the Super Bowl.“You looked at those bands, and it was the fact that they were more than just a marching band,” said Jim Steeg, the N.F.L.’s former vice president of special events, who oversaw the Super Bowl for more than two decades beginning in the mid-1970s. “They were just performing different than everybody else.” After Grambling’s longtime president, Ralph Waldo Emerson Jones, decided that its band would play in the first Super Bowl halftime show, the musicians practiced through the university’s holiday break. In the 1960s, Colston said, 5 a.m. practices were not uncommon. “They said, ‘We don’t turn down no performances,’” Colston said. “‘We’re going to go anywhere.’” One day, Colston said, Jones gave a wad of cash to a drummer with instructions to dole out $2 to each band member for a spending allowance in Los Angeles. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT When the musicians flowed onto the football field at halftime, Grambling joined the marching band from the University of Arizona, a mostly white school, to depict a map of the United States. The bands played “This Is My Country” for the finale as a sea of balloons ascended. “We had to conduct ourselves in a professional way because this was a group of colored kids in a white society,” Colston said. “We were representing our schools, our churches, the towns we came from.” H.B.C.U. bands were included in the following three Super Bowl halftimes. After the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, the director of the Florida A&M band created a set themed around American pride for Super Bowl III in Miami the following year. George Quillet, a clarinetist for Florida A&M, said many of his bandmates initially disagreed with the concept for the performance but later changed their minds. “We really got invigorated because our leaders guided us through the process of what we had to do,” said Quillet, now 76. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The show included them marching into a formation shaped like a flying eagle. After marching into letters resembling “U.S.A.,” the students stood still as a speaker blared portions of President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address and King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. This Super Bowl is the 11th to be held in New Orleans: Southern University took on a Mardi Gras theme at halftime of the city’s first Super Bowl, in 1970, and Grambling performed a tribute to Duke Ellington in 1975. Three years later, Southern played a 12-minute pregame routine.Kenny Ricard, a Southern clarinetist who is now 67, said that before taking the field in 1978, the band’s members recited the chant they uttered ahead of every performance: “Pick up your feet, drive and blow, start thinking about the show.” In those decades, marching bands were eager and dependable entertainment options for the N.F.L., which was concerned with the logistics of creating a show that could entertain both an in-person and television audience. The starry gates swung open in 1993, when Michael Jackson stood motionless onstage for nearly a minute of raucous applause before singing a medley of his beloved hits with the pageantry of pyrotechnics. Steeg said the N.F.L. needed to bolster the halftime show to keep fans engaged and away from counterprogramming on other networks. As A-listers took center stage — the past two Super Bowls in New Orleans were headlined by U2 and Beyoncé — H.B.C.U. bands began taking a more complementary role. In 2007, Florida A&M supported Prince’s performance, supplying background music from below an elevated platform.Shelby Chipman, who was then on the band’s staff and is now its director, said Prince’s agent had called the band, asking it to play. His team sent musical information so the band could match the notes he would sing but otherwise gave it creative liberty for its dance routines and formations. Prince’s team visited Florida A&M a few weeks before the Super Bowl to see a rehearsal. The band practiced with Prince only once, less than 24 hours before the game. “Normally with these kinds of performances, they give us the green light,” Chipman said. Colston, who has worked in customer service for the N.F.L.’s Washington Commanders, still attends homecomings at Grambling State and relives memories of the first Super Bowl. He hopes that the celebrities who now dominate the stage know their history. “We opened the door for them,” he said.

Torrential rains unleashed flooding and high winds and generated warnings of landslides to Hawaii and Maui, the two largest Hawaiian islands, on Friday, all part of a storm system that has been sweeping through the chain of islands this week. On the island of Hawaii, known as the Big Island because it’s the largest in the archipelago, rain drenched the North Kona district from Keauhou to Kailua-Kona, the second largest community on the island and a center of tourism and commerce with a population of about 20,000 people. Up to three inches of rain was expected to fall along the island’s west side by the end of the day, the National Weather Service said. Flash flood warnings went into effect as streams rose rapidly, forecasters said. Thunderstorms and high winds reached the Big Island on Friday but were expected to weaken before Saturday. The storm had migrated southeast over several days along the chain of islands, from Kauai to Oahu and then reaching Maui, the second largest island, on Thursday, when heavy rainfall led to floods that inundated communities. Maureen Ballard, a Weather Service meteorologist in Honolulu, said that the storm system had been weakening, bringing fewer thunderstorms, as it moved south and down the chain. “We are expecting conditions to be improving as the day goes on,” she said. “What we are seeing in the islands is not exactly going to be reaching the mainland” across the Pacific. On Maui, the eastern region saw peak rainfall rates of two to three inches per hour, including along the slopes of Haleakala, a volcano. The Weather Service issued warnings of flash flooding for the entire island and of landslides for its steep terrain areas. The heaviest period of rain was forecast to come in waves, with wind gusts of more than 60 miles per hour felt through 6 a.m. local time on Friday, the Maui Emergency Management Agency administrator, Amos Lonokailua-Hewett, said on social media. The largest volume of rain generally doused the western side of Maui, where up to 10.32 inches had fallen in the 24-hour period ending at 7 a.m. local time, Ms. Ballard said.Wind gusts of up to 35 m.p.h. swept through lower elevations, where most people live, but the summit of Haleakala, a volcano that is in a national park, recorded readings of winds whipping up to 120 m.p.h., Ms. Ballard said.Sue LaChapelle, a resident of Kihei in South Maui, said in a telephone interview that residents had been posting videos of flooding and road damage on a community page that she oversees on Facebook. She said that residents were dealing with closed and washed-out roads as well as a water main break. “This is not uncommon,” Ms. LaChapelle said. “This is usually what happens in heavy rain. This area is known to flood. It came down so hard so it can’t drain anywhere.” One social media post showed a vehicle swirling in deep floodwaters in the dark. Chris Stankis, a Maui County Fire Department spokesman, said firefighters had escorted the occupants to safety after they had misjudged how deep the water was and tried to drive through it. The County of Maui said in a statement on Friday that there were no reports of fatalities, injuries or missing people, but the storm had caused “significant damage” resulting in road closures, water main breaks, and power outages. Power outages were also reported across Oahu, emergency management officials there said.Ms. Ballard, the meteorologist, said that separate storm systems, which were hundreds of miles to the north of Hawaii, were expected to merge and evolve in several days, potentially affecting the mainland United States.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has enormous power to investigate crime. Leading the agency requires judgment, restraint, and, above all, fidelity to the rule of law over loyalty to any individual. On this, Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee for FBI director, falls short. While some senators may disagree about whether Patel has sufficient experience to manage the Bureau’s 38,000 employees, his lack of independence is disqualifying. During his confirmation hearing on January 30, Patel refused to acknowledge that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. That answer, combined with his history of kowtowing to Trump, made it clear that Patel is unlikely to stand up to the executive branch if abuses of power occur. I know from my work as a former national security prosecutor and law professor that the FBI has a stained history. J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s director for almost half a century, used warrantless wiretaps to intercept communications of people he deemed to be “subversive,” including Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Bureau’s COINTEL program infiltrated student groups, civil rights organizations, and the anti-war movement, all in the name of domestic security. The FBI identified targets based on First Amendment-protected activity and used underhanded propaganda campaigns to discredit them. When a senate committee revealed these aggressive tactics in the 1970s, the FBI responded by creating its Domestic Investigations Operations Guide, known internally as the “DIOG,” a policy manual that provides stringent safeguards for opening cases and using invasive investigative techniques. Strict adherence to those requirements prevents the FBI from abusing its power. But the DIOG is policy—not law. A new director could erase it with one press of the delete key. One would hope that career FBI agents would balk at opening cases without a factual predicate or at using invasive investigative techniques as fishing expeditions. But if the boss changes the FBI’s policy, then they would be expected to comply with his orders. During questioning from senators, Patel refused to say whether he would resign if Trump directed him to engage in conduct that was unethical or unconstitutional, simply parroting the stock answer used repeatedly by Pam Bondi at her confirmation hearing for attorney general: “I will follow the law.” After Trump’s first term, Patel’s public displays of loyalty to his former boss have been hard to miss. According to a 2022 Breitbart report about the classified documents found at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, Patel claimed to have been present when Trump declassified “whole sets of documents,” but “the White House counsel failed to generate the paperwork to change the classification markings.” Trump was later indicted for unlawfully retaining national defense documents, but the charges were dismissed after Trump was elected in November. Patel also produced the “Justice for All” musical recording, in which Trump recited the pledge of allegiance backed by the voices of the “J6 Prison Choir”: charged Jan. 6 defendants held in custody, singing the national anthem over a jailhouse phone line. And, perhaps most astonishingly, Patel authored a children’s book called The Plot Against the King, in which “King Donald” is falsely accused of cheating to win an election by working with Russia. The hero who saves the day? A wizard named “Kash.” Fierce loyalty to the president would be worrisome in any administration in light of the FBI’s law enforcement mission. But it is especially troubling when the president has vowed retribution against his political enemies, as Trump has. Many of Trump’s targets appear in another book authored by Patel called Government Gangsters, an attack on the so-called “deep state.” The book lists the names of government officials he calls “a cabal of unelected tyrants,” including former Attorney General William Barr and former FBI directors James Comey and Christopher Wray. While Patel has denied that the names constitute an enemies list, Patel has indicated that he plans to target not just former government officials, but also journalists. In a 2023 podcast interview, Patel said that in a second Trump administration, “We will go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media.” It seems unlikely that Trump’s rivals would be convicted of baseless criminal charges in light of due process protections, such as the right to a grand jury and judicial review, representation by counsel, and a requirement that guilt be found by a unanimous jury beyond a reasonable doubt. But even undergoing an investigation can be costly and emotionally draining, and it can irreparably tarnish the reputation of a public figure. The decision to subject anyone to the criminal justice process should be made by responsible professionals making objective decisions based on fact and law. Based on his track record, Kash Patel cannot be trusted to make those decisions.