Trump live updates: US-China trade war intensifies as Beijing retaliates with fresh tariff hike

The president will be returning to the Maryland military medical institution that treated him for Covid-19 during the pandemic today before jetting off for another well-earned weekend at Mar-a-Lago of golfing in the sunshine.

Here’s Madeline Sherratt on his announcement of the check-up earlier this week.

Chinese trolls have released another insulting video depicting overweight Americans working blue collar manufacturing jobs and devouring burgers, a clip likely to be seen by the very online Donald Trump.

The Senate moved late last night to confirm Trump’s choice for chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, retired Lieutenant General Dan Caine.

The 60 to 25 vote came after Democrats, led by Elizabeth Warren, blocked a quick passage of Caine’s nomination in protest at the president’s sudden firing of the previous top military commander, General CQ Brown Jr, on February 21.

Warren and her fellow Democratic senators argued that Brown’s removal was unjustified.

But Caine nevertheless proved to have bipartisan support and his low-key confirmation hearing revealed no major objections to him becoming the U.S. military’s top uniformed official.

The Senate Armed Services Committee, which conducted that hearing, voted 23 to four to pass his nomination on to the upper chamber of Congress.

Here’s Katie Hawkinson’s profile of Caine.

Speaking with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr and other members of his cabinet on Thursday, the president suggested that vaccines may be causing higher autism levels across the U.S., despite that theory having been long debunked by science.

“You stop taking something, you stop eating something, or maybe it’s a shot but something’s causing it,” Trump mused.

Here’s Julia Musto to unpack the issue.

The president said during yesterday’s cabinet meeting that the release of dancer Ksenia Karelina from a Russian jail was brought about by a petition from a very unlikely ally.

The president has made no secret of his affinity for Russian president Vladimir Putin’s leadership style and he got to experience it first-hand Thursday in a cabinet meeting that has been described as “Kremlin-esque.”

Here’s a sample of the toadying on display courtesy of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins:

Richard Hall has this account.

With the president facing accusations from Democrats of enabling “insider trading” with this week’s tariff shenanigans, attention is being drawn to this exchange between Trump, financial investor Charles Schwab and NASCAR team owner Roger Penske at the White House on Wednesday, in which the former jokes about the two men making hundreds of millions of dollars from the chaos.

Here’s more from Mary Papenfuss.

The administration is reportedly canceling the Social Security numbers of immigrants who came to the U.S. legally and adding their identities to a closely guarded database tracking deaths.

The move, treating the individuals as if they had literally died in the eyes of the government, is the latest in the administration’s larger campaign to revoke the status of hundreds of thousands of immigrants who got temporary authorization to remain in the U.S. under the Biden administration.

In recent weeks, the administration has pulled the status of hundreds of thousands of migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who were granted temporary legal status, while stripping protections from potentially around one million people who entered the U.S. legally using a Border Patrol app while they awaited asylum claims.

The Social Security effort, reportedly initiated at the request of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, has a goal of making sure the “financial lives” of the targeted immigrants are “terminated,” Social Security Administration acting commission Leland Dudek said in an email.

If you’re wondering how the markets liked that return rally from Beijing, take a look at this shot of the German Dax taken from the Frankfurt Stock Exchange just now.

Beijing has increased its tariffs on American imports to 125 percent, raising the stakes in a trade war that threatens to up-end global supply chains.

The hike, hitting back against Donald Trump’s decision to hike duties on Chinese goods to a whopping 145 percent, will come into effect on Saturday.

Reacting to the news, the U.S. dollar index fell 1.2 percent to 99.50, marking its lowest level since April 2022.

As quoted by state broadcaster CCTV, Chinese President Xi Jinping said: “There are no winners in a trade war, and going against the world will only lead to self-isolation.”

He added: “For over 70 years, China’s development has relied on self-reliance and hard work – never on handouts from others, and it is not afraid of any unjust suppression.”

China’s mission to the World Trade Organisation said it had filed an additional complaint to the trade body over U.S. tariffs.