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US President Donald Trump will host top purchasers of the cryptocurrency that bears his name at a gala dinner on Thursday.

$TRUMP was launched shortly before his inauguration in January, initially rocketing in value before falling sharply shortly afterwards.

"It's fundamentally corrupt -- a way to buy access to the President," Democrat senator Chris Murphy wrote on X, one of a number of people to question the ethics of the event.

Some have also suggested the expected attendance of many foreign investors poses a threat to national security.

But the White House has batted away such allegations, saying Trump is only motivated by public service.

"This is something that doesn't have obvious utility. It's not being used for payments. It's not being used as a store of value," said Rob Hadick, General Partner of Dragonfly, a crypto venture fund.

The dinner - which is being held at Trump's golf course near the nation's capital - is advertised on the website gettrumpmemes.com as "the most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION in the World."

The top 220 purchasers of the meme coin, viewable on a leaderboard, received invitations to the "black-tie optional" event.

The top investor in the $TRUMP meme coin is billionaire crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun who was charged with fraud and market manipulation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission during the Biden Administration.

A Trump administration official told the BBC that the meme coin has nothing to do with the White House.

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly pushed back on concerns about potential conflicts.

"The President is working to secure GOOD deals for the American people, not for himself," Kelly said in a statement.

But one former financial regulator likened the meme coin to gambling.

"It's like selling membership cards for his personal fan club which are then traded," said Timothy Massad, Director of the Digital Asset Policy Project at Harvard.

"They have no value. But people speculate on the price and those purchases and that trading enriches him."

• Btw, here's the Leaderboard if anyone's interested.

US President Donald Trump confronted his South African counterpart, Cyril Ramaphosa, over widely discredited claims of a white genocide in South Africa, during an Oval Office meeting on Wednesday.

Mr Trump said that white farmers are "fleeing South Africa", playing footage to the room showing people chanting "kill the Boer, kill the farmer".

Responding, Mr Ramaphosa condemned the chants but pushed back against claims of white persecution.

The United States is becoming less popular globally in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, according to new data.

The 2025 Democracy Perception Index summarizes attitudes toward democracy, geopolitics and global power players, and canvassed more than 110,000 respondents across 100 countries.

A majority of people surveyed had an overall negative perception of the U.S., marking a steep decline from last year. America’s reputation took a particularly massive hit in EU countries — perhaps unsurprisingly, as U.S. President Donald Trump has called the bloc “horrible,” “pathetic” and “formed to screw the United States.”

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former NATO chief and founder of the Alliance of Democracies Foundation that coauthored the index, said he was “not surprised that perceptions of the United States have fallen so sharply.”

Meanwhile, China kept improving its global standing, overtaking the U.S. for the first time and recording mostly positive perceptions in all regions except Europe. Russia, the reputation of which tanked in the wake of President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, is still (slightly) more unpopular than the U.S. — though its image is also improving.

Donald Trump will inevitably claim Monday’s temporary truce in the US-China trade war as a victory, but financial markets seem to have read it for what it is – a capitulation.

Stocks were up and bond yields were higher after the US treasury secretary Scott Bessent’s early morning press conference in Geneva, where he has been holding talks with China.
As with the UK “trade deal” last week, the US is not reverting to the status quo before Trump arrived in the White House.

Instead, tariffs on Chinese goods will be cut from 145% to 30% – initially for a 90-day period. In return, China has cut its own tariffs on US imports to 10%, from the 125% it had imposed in retaliation against the White House.

That still marks a big shift in the terms of trade between the two countries since before Trump came to power, but falls far short of what was in effect a trade embargo.

Instead, the statement hailed “the importance of a sustainable, long-term and mutually beneficial economic and trade relationship”. The language was rather different to Trump’s Liberation Day speech, about the US being “looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far”.

In other words, the president has caved. He may have been swayed by market wobbles but it seems more plausible that dire warnings from retailers about empty shelves – backed up by data showing shipments into US ports collapsing – may have strengthened the hands of trade moderates in the administration.

Harvard University, the world-renowned institution emblematic of the elitism that Trump and his coterie hold in contempt, received an extortive demand from the administration that it surrender the core of its academic freedoms – and promptly told it to get lost.

Echoing pressures imposed on other elite colleges, notably Columbia University, the Trump team – representing the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services, and the General Services Administration – had demanded sweeping reforms in how Harvard is run, including the installation of viewpoint-diverse faculty members and the end of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes.

The backdrop to a demand for what would be unprecedented government interference in the affairs of the world’s richest university is the alleged rise of campus antisemitism, arising from an upsurge of pro-Palestinian demonstrations that have gripped Harvard and other colleges following Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel and Israel’s retaliatory military offensive in Gaza.

Critics, however, see a more nefarious White House agenda – namely, gutting universities of what it sees as a liberal-left bias, while using antisemitism as a cudgel in an authoritarian power grab.

Having seen Columbia cave in to similar demands and threatening $9bn in federal funding, the White House may have thought it was on to a winner with Harvard.

“Investment is not an entitlement,” the administration’s 11 April letter read, accusing Harvard of having “failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment”.

The administration’s demands made “clear that the intention is not to work with us to address antisemitism in a cooperative and constructive manner”, Garber wrote.

“Although some of the demands outlined by the government are aimed at combating antisemitism, the majority represent direct governmental regulation of the ‘intellectual conditions’ at Harvard.

“No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”

The university’s lawyers, William Burck and Robert Hur, both of whom have conservative credentials, starkly set out the broader constitutional stakes, writing that the government’s demands were “in contravention of the first amendment” and concluding that “Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration”.

Elon Musk was roundly mocked on social media after attempting to spin his defeat in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race into a win for voters' rights.

That was already the law in Wisconsin, and Question 1 just protected it in the state's Constitution. However, Musk had long focused on the state's Supreme Court race and talked little about Question 1. He often posted on social media about the dangers or electing a liberal judge and poured $25 million into the state to support the conservative candidate.
However, Musk's pick lost to the liberal candidate.

That led to Musk's post on X downplaying the loss - and the round of mocking that followed.

The DOGE leader had also traveled to Wisconsin two days before the race to personally hand voters $1 million checks after giving a speech in which he wore a cheesehead hat.

“The long con of the left is corruption of the judiciary,” the Tesla billionaire posted on X on Tuesday night.

Wednesday’s win by Democratic candidate Susan Crawford, over Brad Schimel, cemented a liberal majority for the next three years. In her acceptance speech, Crawford made reference to Musk and his campaign.

“I never could have imagined that I would be taking on the richest man in the world for justice in Wisconsin... and we won,” she said.

Crawford’s win keeps the court under a 4-3 liberal majority in the face of crucial litigation surrounding abortion access, voting rights and redistricting.

A US federal judge has questioned why the Trump administration failed to obey his order halting the deportations of alleged Venezuelan gang members.
White House officials argued in a court filing that they did not defy the ruling. The argued in part that because Boasberg's order was made orally rather than in written form, it was not enforceable - and that the planes had already left the US by the time it was issued.

During a hearing on Monday, Boasberg said he clearly ordered the government to turn the planes around. "You're saying that you felt you could disregard it because it wasn't in a written order?" he asked Department of Justice lawyers.

After lawyers told the judge that planes with deportees already had taken off, he reportedly gave a verbal order for the flights to turn back "immediately", although that directive was not included in a written ruling published shortly thereafter. Nonetheless, a timeline of events reported by US media suggests the Trump administration had the opportunity to stop at least some of the deportations.

Under the US system of checks and balances, government agencies are expected to comply with a federal judge's ruling.

El Salvador has agreed to accept the deportees from the US. The country's president, Nayib Bukele, appeared to mock the judge's ruling. "Oopsie… Too late," he posted on social media, along with a picture of a headline announcing the ruling and a 'crying with laughter' emoji. His team also published footage of some of the detainees inside one of its mega-jails.
According to the White House, El Salvador's government received $6m (£4.62m) to take the detainees, which Leavitt said "is pennies on the dollar" compared to the cost of holding inmates in US prisons.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which brought the lawsuit leading to the judge's order, questioned Trump's use of the Alien Enemies Act, a sweeping wartime authority that allows fast-track deportations. "I think we're in very dangerous territory here in the United States with the invocation of this law," said the ACLU's Lee Gelernt.
The Alien Enemies Act only allowed deportations when the US was in a declared war with that foreign government, or was being invaded, Mr Gelernt said. "A gang is not invading," he told BBC News. Making matters worse was the fact "the administration is saying nobody can review what they're doing", Mr Gelernt added.

Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate student at Columbia University and green-card holder, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers over the weekend in what is likely one of the first high-profile detentions of a student who participated in the protests against the Israel-Hamas war.

The arrest follows through on one of President Trump's executive actions, which directed the government to use all of its tools to punish those who have engaged in "antisemitic harassment and violence." The executive action cites the federal law that authorizes deporting a foreign national who "endorses or espouses terrorist activity."

In a social media post on Monday, Trump said the arrest was the first of many to come. He vowed that his administration "will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again."

People dance and wave large Israeli flags during a rally against campus antisemitism at George Washington University in May 2024 in Washington, D.C.

Michael Thaddeus, a mathematics professor at Columbia University, said the move seeking to strip Khalil's green card and deport him violates the broader trust from foreign students who come to study in the U.S.

"They come because of their trust and belief that they could speak out freely while they're here and not be imprisoned or harassed because [of] their political speech or activism or advocacy," Thaddeus said.

First, they told Khalil, who's of Palestinian descent, that his student visa had been canceled. But he's not on a visa; he's a legal permanent resident. His wife went to get his green card from their apartment, but officers said his lawful permanent residency had been revoked.

During Trump's first term, he took steps towards limiting visas for foreign nationals and revoking people's immigration status, including denaturalization, or cancelling someone's status as a naturalized U.S. citizen.

The court currently has a 6-3 conservative supermajority, but both Barrett and Roberts have at times broken ranks and voted with the court's liberal wing in rulings that have infuriated the MAGA base.

The high court handed the U.S. president a significant setback when it ruled Wednesday that the Trump administration must abide by a lower court order to unfreeze $2 billion in foreign aid.

The aid was blocked after Trump signed an executive action his first day in office ordering the funding freeze while his administration scoured U.S. spending for what Trump and his allies characterize as "waste, fraud and abuse."

A lower court judge subsequently ordered the administration to unblock the aid in response to a lawsuit filed by nonprofit organizations in connection to the Trump administration's freezing of foreign assistance through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the State Department.

In a 5-4 ruling on Wednesday, Barrett and Roberts joined Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson and left in place the ruling by U.S. District Judge Amir Ali.

Mike Cernovich, a longtime conservative activist and Trump supporter, amplified a video of Barrett and Trump interacting during his address to a joint session of Congress.

"She is evil, chosen solely because she checked identity politics boxes," Cernovich wrote. "Another DEI hire. It always ends badly."

Mike Davis, a former law clerk for Gorsuch and the former chief nominations counsel for Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, didn't name Barrett directly but echoed Cernovich's criticisms of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, which Trump has dismantled across the federal government.

He wrote on X: "President Trump will pick even more bold and fearless judges in his second term. Extreme vetting. No DEI. No missteps."

Donald Trump just imposed a 25 percent tariff on virtually all goods produced by America’s two largest trading partners — Canada and Mexico. He simultaneously established a 20 percent across-the-board tariff on Chinese goods.

As a result, America’s average tariff level is now higher than at any time since the 1940s.

Meanwhile, China and Canada immediately retaliated against Trump’s duties, with the former imposing a 15 percent tariff on American agricultural products and the latter putting a 25 percent tariff on $30 billion of US goods. Mexico has vowed to mount retaliatory tariffs of its own.

This trade war could have far-reaching consequences. Trump’s tariffs have already triggered a stock market sell-off and cooling of manufacturing activity. And economists have estimated that the trade policy will cost the typical US household more than $1,200 a year, as the prices of myriad goods rise.

All this raises the question: Why has the US president chosen to upend trade relations on the North American continent? The stakes of this question are high, since it could determine how long Trump’s massive tariffs remain in effect. Unfortunately, the president himself does not seem to know the answer.

In recent weeks, Trump has provided five different — and contradictory — justifications for his tariffs on Mexico and Canada...

...more in the article.

As the title states, Trump's address to Congress - in pictures.

Democratic lawmakers are discussing a litany of options to protest at President Trump's speech to Congress on Tuesday, including through outright disruption, a half dozen House Democrats told Axios.

Why it matters: Some of these tactics go beyond their leaders' recommendation that members bring guests hurt by Trump and DOGE. This sets up a potential clash between party traditionalists and its more combative anti-Trump wing.

• "The part that we all agree on is that this is not business as usual and we would like to find a way — productively — to express our outrage," one House Democrat told Axios.

• There is widespread disagreement among Democrats, both inside and outside of Congress, over what would be the most appropriate and effective form of demonstration.

A wide array of props — including noisemakers — has also been floated:

• Signs with anti-Trump or anti-DOGE messages — just as Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) held up a sign during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech last year that said "war criminal."
• Eggs or empty egg cartons to highlight how inflation is driving up the price of eggs.
• Pocket constitutions to make the case that Trump has been violating the Constitution by shutting down congressionally authorized agencies.
• Hand clappers, red cards and various other props have also been discussed, multiple sources said.

What they're saying: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) wrote in a letter to House Democrats that he and other leaders plan to attend the speech to "make clear to the nation that there is a strong opposition party ready, willing and able to serve as a check and balance."

• Jeffries also said leadership understands if some members skip the speech — as several have said they plan to do — but urged a "strong, determined and dignified Democratic presence in the chamber."

• House Democratic caucus chair Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) told Axios leadership is telling members to "keep the focus on the health and safety and the economic wellbeing of our constituents."