Trump pushes ahead with tariffs as stock market plummets amid recession fears: Live updates

Over the past few months, Melania has been power-dressing to the max, styling menswear designs with feminine touches. It’s been a far cry from the wardrobe we saw in her first stint as FLOTUS when she wore a powder blue wrap coat dress to the 2016 inauguration, tucked skinny-leg khakis into knee-high boots at the Marine Corps Reserve Toys for Tots Campaign, and teamed hot pink pumps with a banana yellow cape for the NATO Leaders Summit in 2019.

“Our country is on the verge of a comeback, the likes of which the world has never witnessed, and perhaps will never witness again.”

In the eight years since he was first elected and then re-elected, Trump was impeached twice, determined to be the “central cause” of the January 6 Capitol attack, convicted of 34 crimes in New York and held civilly liable for sexual abuse. Not to mention that he also faced criminal charges at state and federal levels, was accused repeatedly of past sexual misconduct and promoted baseless claims about Covid-19 treatments as thousands of Americans died on his watch.

They call it Bullion Boulevard for good reason, for there are very few roads in the world where you can drive past £330bn worth of gold. The boulevard is of course next to Fort Knox in Kentucky, a base of the United States Army that also happens to double up as the home of America’s central bullion depository, holding well over half of the country’s gold reserves. So well protected is the facility that the expression “as safe as Fort Knox” has long been an epithet for security in the United States and beyond.

The only person who has come close to stealing the bullion was a certain Latvian called Auric Goldfinger in 1959, but then he was the figment of the imagination of one Ian Fleming, whose novel Goldfinger would be turned into the third James Bond film.

Little wonder then, that during the Second World War, Fort Knox was used to store the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, as well as a Gutenberg Bible, a copy of the Magna Carta, and the crown jewels of Hungary.

During the speech, Mace, a congresswoman from South Carolina, accused her former fiancé Patrick Bryant of rape and claimed that he and three other men, including Musgrave, recorded sex acts without her consent.

She displayed their names, hometowns and photos on a placard alongside the words ‘predators’ and ‘stay away from.’

Shortly before the speech, Musgrave said he got a text from an unknown person stating that he was about to be mentioned in the House by Mace.

Nate Vance is reported to have spent three years fighting in Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Now, in an interview with French outlet Le Figaro, he accused his cousin and President Donald Trump of ambushing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during the now infamous Oval Office blow-up.

The president answered a question about the recent spate of air accidents while returning to Washington, DC on Sunday evening just hours after a small aircraft went down near a retirement village in Manheim Township in Pennslyvania, resulting in five people on board being hospitalized.

Asked by one reporter whether his Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy had “legitimate concern” after his department had been “gutted” – including 400 Federal Aviation Administration workers being laid off last month – the president claimed the recent crashes have “nothing to do with the department.”

“It’s my favorite thing,” she said. “They email: ‘Caroline, ethical experts, yes…’ We write back ‘which experts?’ And then they send the names, and we Google them, and they’re like Democrat donors funded by George Soros.

“So you’re like, we copy and paste their Wikipedia like ‘these experts, a**hole?’ This is not a real story. These are not real stories.”

The impact goes well beyond job losses, writes Jamie Rowen.

Trump took to Truth Social on Monday to take credit for the arrest of a student at Columbia University.

“Following my previously signed Executive Orders, ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student on the campus of Columbia University,” said Trump. “This is the first arrest of many to come.”

“We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it,” he added. “Many are not students, they are paid agitators. We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again.”

“If you support terrorism, including the slaughtering of innocent men, women, and children, your presence is contrary to our national and foreign policy interests, and you are not welcome here. We expect every one of America’s Colleges and Universities to comply,” the president concluded.

New York Attorney General Letitia James responded on X, writing: “I am extremely concerned about the arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil, an advocate and legal permanent resident of Palestinian descent. My office is monitoring the situation, and we are in contact with his attorney.”