President Donald Trump said Sunday that Americans could feel “some pain” from the emerging trade war triggered by his tariffs against Canada, Mexico and China, and claimed that Canada would “cease to exist” without its trade surplus with the United States.
The trade penalties that Trump signed Saturday at his Florida resort caused a mix of panic, anger and uncertainty, and threatened to rupture a decades-old partnership on trade in North America while further straining relations with China.
“Canadians are perplexed,” said the country’s U.S. ambassador, Kirsten Hillman. “We view ourselves as your neighbor, your closest friend, your ally.”
By following through on a campaign pledge, Trump may also have simultaneously broken his promise to voters in last year’s election that his administration could quickly reduce inflation. That means the same frustration he is facing from other nations might also spread domestically to consumers and businesses.
Less than two weeks into his term, President Donald Trump is waging war against his own government, creating a deep sense of fear in the federal workforce — and recipients of federal aid — as he tests the limits of his power to alter the scope, function and nonpartisan nature of government without Congress.
Primarily using two little-known agencies — the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management — Trump has tried to choke off funding for a wide array of domestic and foreign assistance programs, made it easier to fire tens of thousands of federal workers, and launched a campaign to pressure more to resign from their posts.
Two federal judges have blocked the domestic spending freeze, and, in the face of public outcry, Trump rescinded an OMB memo implementing it this week — but the underlying executive order remains in place, with the federal workers responsible for enacting it left to choose between mandates from the courts and from the president.
In conversations with NBC News, nearly two dozen federal workers described a climate of fear, confusion, skepticism and anger at federal agencies over the past two weeks. A number of civil servants described a sense that they were being actively tracked and monitored in a way that was foreign prior to Trump’s return to power.
At a time when Americans’ trust in government has been eroding for decades — the vast majority say they do not trust that Washington will do the right thing always or most of the time in Gallup polling — Trump is putting into action long-standing Republican views on how to shrink and restructure the federal footprint. But critics say that taking an ideological sledgehammer to the government will make it less effective, less efficient and less protected from partisan influence.
Nearly 60 employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development were placed on administrative leave after Trump issued an order freezing funding for global aid programs, and his aides are in active discussions about unilaterally folding the agency into the State Department — a move that critics say cannot be done without Congress enacting a law. The agency’s website went dark Saturday.
“The organizing idea behind what they’re doing is that Trump wants to be king,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said. “He doesn’t want to be accountable to the law, and the American people are getting hurt.”
Van Hollen added that Trump’s actions could make it harder for the president to collect enough votes to avoid a government shutdown six weeks from now.
“It also begs the question about whether we can proceed in any good faith” on a spending measure,” he said. “I mean, we go through these negotiations to get a compromise, but the president cherry picks what he likes and discards the rest.”
Trump allies in Congress, like freshman Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., say the president is simply fulfilling his campaign-trail promises.
“The American people overwhelmingly voted for President Trump in part because of his promise to root out government waste and bring common sense back to the White House,” Banks said in a statement to NBC News. “With a $36 trillion national debt, I welcome his administration working to ensure every tax dollar is spent responsibly on the agenda he promised.”
It all amounts to a high-stakes bet that the public will reward Trump and Republicans for a slash-and-burn approach to re-forming the federal government, even if it takes money out of the pockets of voters or state and local government functions they rely on. The person who faces the least risk is Trump, who is not constitutionally eligible to run for re-election, the president’s allies say.
“Thus far the approach has been phenomenal,” one Republican operative said.
But the operative said they harbored “some concern” about the Friday dismissal of the top six FBI officials — suggesting that may be more problematic for Trump and his administration on the outside than within government.
“When it comes to backlash, [Trump] really shouldn’t care,” this person said. “He’s not running again and slimming down the size of the federal workforce is a part of his mandate, it will ultimately be up to [Vice President] JD [Vance] [and] current incumbents to defend the actions of this administration if there is backlash in the future.”
In some cases, Trump is not waiting for attrition. In addition to dismissing FBI leaders, he fired as many as two dozen Justice Department prosecutors who worked on “Capitol siege” cases — those involving defendants from the Jan. 6 attack on Congress. Trump pardoned most of the people convicted of Jan. 6-related crimes and commuted the sentences of others.
