Trump’s 50% tariffs on India come into force as president puts pressure on country over Russian oil supplies
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. My name is Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.
We start with news that president Donald Trump’s doubling of tariffs on goods from India to as much as 50% took effect as scheduled on Wednesday, escalating tensions between the world’s two largest democracies and strategic partners.
A punitive 25% tariff imposed due to India’s purchases of Russian oil adds to Trump’s prior 25% tariff on many products from India. It takes total duties to as high as 50% for goods such as garments, gems and jewellery, footwear, sporting goods, furniture and chemicals – among the highest imposed by the US and on par with Brazil and China.
India and the US have held five rounds of discussions since April to reach a trade agreement, but differences over the opening up of India’s vast farm and dairy sectors, and its purchases of Russian oil led to a breakdown of talks.
The new tariffs threaten thousands of small exporters and jobs, including in prime minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat, Reuters reported.
An Indian commerce ministry official said on condition of anonymity that exporters hit by tariffs would receive financial assistance and be encouraged to diversify to markets such as China, Latin America and the Middle East.
In other developments:
Donald Trump held a televised, three-hour cabinet meeting, in which various secretaries seemed to compete to praise him in more effusive terms, and he took questions from reporters from partisan outlets.
Trump told reporters that “I think, maybe in my own mind, I have somebody that I like” to take the place of the Federal Reserve governor he is trying to force out, Lisa Cook, who is fighting to keep her place.
Two reporters for pro-Trump outlets offered testimony about crime in Washington DC to support the president’s claims.
Texas’s redrawn congressional maps have drawn a lawsuit from the NAACP, accusing the state of committing a racial gerrymander with its maps that strip Black voters of their political power.
A whistleblower complaint alleges that Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) copied and uploaded the sensitive Social Security data of hundreds of millions of Americans to a vulnerable cloud server, potentially violating federal privacy laws. One of the Doge staffers accused in the complaint is Edward Coristine, whose recent assault in Washington DC provided the pretext for Trump’s federal takeover.
In a deeply partisan press release, Sean Duffy, the former Republican congressman and Fox host serving as Donald Trump’s transportation secretary, announced the cancellation of $175m in funding for four projects related to what he called “California’s High-Speed Rail boondoggle”.
The Trump administration retaliated against some Federal Emergency Management Agency staffers who signed a letter of dissent about the agency’s leadership, the Washington Post reports.
A local television outlet in Washington DC recorded video of “a full busload of National Guard members … picking up trash in Lafayette Park, just outside the White House”.
Cracker Barrel announced that it is scrapping its new logo, and returning to its old one, hours after Donald Trump joined the conservative backlash to the change.
Key events
Maanvi Singh
Catalina “Xochitl” Santiago had already made it past the security line at the El Paso airport when two border patrol agents called her in for questioning and whisked her away to an immigration detention center.
Nearly a month after her arrest, she and her family still aren’t clear why she is detained. Santiago is a beneficiary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program – which has allowed her to legally live and work in the US.
“They have no legal basis for why they detained her or why they’re holding her or why they’re trying to deport her,” said her spouse, Desiree Miller. And immigration officials have yet to provide her or her family any clear answers, she added.
Since her arrest on 3 August, Santiago’s case has alarmed immigration advocates across the US, as it illustrates the increasing vulnerability of hundreds of thousands of young people who arrived in the US as children and were granted temporary protections from deportation through the Obama-era Daca program.
Although there have been no regulatory changes to the program, the administration has tried to strip 525,000 Daca recipients, also known as Dreamers, of benefits. In July, Tricia McLaughlin, a Department of Homeland Security assistant press secretary, claimed, falsely, that “Daca does not confer any form of legal status in this country” and urged recipients to self-deport.
A reminder that my colleague, Jakub Krupa, is covering the latest news out of Denmark, following local media uncovering a network of “at least three” people working on “influence operations” in Greenland to drive a wedge between Denmark and the territory, in a bid to pave the way for it to get closer to the US.
Denmark has summoned theacting US diplomat. This all comes as Donald Trump has expressed unrelenting interest for the US to acquire Greenland, despite Denmark’s insistence that the island is not for sale.
The president posted up a storm on Truth Social overnight.
“Republicans: BAN MAIL-IN VOTING!!!” Trump wrote just hours ago, renewing his most recent calls to undermine mail-in ballots – a voting method that he and the first lady have used in the past. It’s worth noting that almost a third of voters used mail-in ballots in the 2024 election, according to a report from the US Election Assistance Commission.
In an earlier post, the president said that the House speaker, Mike Johnson, and the Senate majority leader, John Thune, were working with him on a “comprehensive crime bill” with the promise that he’ll eventually reveal more details about the legislation.
Trump has said that he’s also speaking with both leaders about potentially billions of dollars in congressionally guaranteed funds to help with his “beautification” project in DC.
The president doesn’t have any events on his public schedule from which we can expect to hear from him today.
He’s due to have lunch with JD Vance at 12:30pm ET, and special envoy Steve Witkoff said, in an appearance on Fox News, that the president would also chair a meeting on Gaza at the White House on Wednesday.
The US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said on Wednesday that “everything is on the table” in trade talks with China and that he will be meeting again with his Chinese counterpart at the end of October or beginning of November.
“It’s a very complicated relationship,” he said in an interview on Fox Business’ Mornings With Maria program.
“We are moving very deliberately on this. Both sides have approached it with great respect.”
Journalists in Lebanon have demanded an apology from a senior US envoy after he told them to “act civilized” and not be “animalistic”.
As reporters shouted questions after the US delegation’s meeting with the Lebanese president, Joseph Aoun, on Tuesday, Tom Barrack, the US ambassador to Turkey and special envoy to Syria, stepped up to the podium in the packed room and said: “We’re going to have a different set of rules … please be quiet for a moment.
“The moment that this starts becoming chaotic, like animalistic, we’re gone,” he said.
“Act civilised, act kind, act tolerant, because this is the problem with what’s happening in the region,” added Barrack, who has recently been leading talks with Lebanese officials.
The Lebanese presidency in a statement on X expressed regret at “remarks made inadvertently from its podium by one of its guests”, affirming its appreciation for the journalists and media representatives.
The information minister, Paul Morcos, in a statement also expressed regret at the remarks “by a member of the foreign delegation towards media representatives at the presidential palace”.
The photojournalists’ syndicate called Barrack’s comments “a direct insult” that set “a serious and totally unacceptable precedent”.
Anna Betts
A federal judge on Tuesday dismissed an unprecedented lawsuit filed by the Trump administration earlier in the summer against all 15 judges serving on Maryland’s federal district court – a case that opposed pausing some deportations from the state.
In a 37-page ruling, US district judge Thomas Cullen of Virginia’s western district – who was nominated and confirmed to his position during Donald Trump’s first presidency – wrote that “any fair reading of the legal authorities cited by defendants leads to the ineluctable conclusion that this court has no alternative but to dismiss”.
“To hold otherwise,” Cullen added, “would run counter to overwhelming precedent, depart from longstanding constitutional tradition, and offend the rule of law.”
The Trump administration had challenged an order issued by Maryland’s chief district judge that temporarily barred the government from deporting undocumented immigrants for two business days if they filed challenges to their detention. Trump’s justice department argued that the order exceeded the court’s authority and violated federal law.
But Cullen, who was nominated to the bench by Trump in 2020 and was assigned the case because all Maryland district judges were named as defendants, wrote that the judges were “absolutely immune” from lawsuits over their judicial actions. And Cullen said that instead of suing, the administration should have challenged the order though other legal channels, such as appealing against the order.
George Chidi
Texas’s redrawn congressional maps have drawn a lawsuit from the NAACP, which accuses the state of committing a racial gerrymander with its maps that strip Black voters of their political power.
The lawsuit, joined by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, names Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, and secretary of state, Jane Nelson, as defendants.
It asks a federal judge for a preliminary injunction preventing the use of the redrawn maps, arguing that the redistricting violates the US constitution by improperly reducing the power of voters of color. It also argues that the maps violate section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
“We now see just how far extremist leaders are willing to go to push African Americans back toward a time when we were denied full personhood and equal rights,” the president of the Texas NAACP, Gary Bledsoe, said in a statement.
“We call on Texans of every background to recognize the dangers of this moment. Our democracy depends on ensuring that every person is counted fully, valued equally and represented fairly. We are prepared to fight this injustice at every level. Our future depends on it.”
Texas Republicans passed a redrawn map on Saturday, with the expected result of an increase in Republican representation by five seats in the next Congress. Democratic state legislators are a minority in both chambers of the Texas legislature, leaving them with few options to block it.
A group of state house representatives spent nearly a month away from the state to deny Republicans a quorum. That maneuver ended last week, after California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and the state legislature began a process to counter the Republican gerrymander with a Democratic gerrymander of their own.
Anna Betts
Donald Trump said on Tuesday that his administration “wants nothing less than $500m from Harvard” as a condition for restoring billions of dollars in federal funding to the Ivy League university.
“Don’t negotiate with them, they’ve been very bad,” Trump told his education secretary, Linda McMahon, in a cabinet meeting.
Trump’s comments came amid reports that his administration and Harvard are moving toward a potential settlement that could bring an end to their months-long battle over the government’s allegations that Harvard has not done enough to crack down on antisemitism tied to pro-Palestinian protests.
In April, Harvard became the first – and so far only – university to sue the Trump administration over the funding cuts. It sued again the following month over the government’s efforts to block the school from enrolling international students.
Harvard has argued that the administration unlawfully slashed $2.6bn in research funding from the university in retaliation for the school’s refusal to comply with a series of demands laid out in an 11 April letter from a federal antisemitism taskforce. Those demands related to campus protests, academic policies and admissions practices.
A US district judge heard arguments from both Harvard and the Department of Justice last month.
Trump administration pulls another $175m from California’s high-speed rail
The Trump administration is cancelling another $175m in funding for California’s high-speed rail, marking another setback for the state’s much-delayed project.
The US transportation department said on Tuesday it was withdrawing $175m for grade separation, over-crossing and design work and to build a high-speed rail station in Madera. The move follows the cancellation earlier this summer of $4bn in federal grants for the state’s ambitious but long-overdue plans.
California in July sued to challenge the withdrawal of funding, calling the decision illegal.
The funding cuts are another hurdle for the 16-year effort to link Los Angeles and San Francisco by a three-hour train ride, a project that would deliver the fastest passenger rail service in the United States.
The rail system, whose first $10bn bond issue was approved by California voters in 2008, has built more than 50 major railway structures, including bridges, overpasses, under-crossings and viaducts, and completed 70 miles (113km) of guideway.
The project has also faced numerous delays and spiraling costs, with no section of the railway currently operational and a completion date still years away.
The San Francisco-to-Los Angeles route was initially supposed to be finished by 2020 at a cost of $33bn; the projected cost has since risen from $89bn to $128bn, with the start of service along a portion of the line in the Central valley only expected by 2033. On Monday, state lawmakers suggested the project would require a $1bn-per-year investment to continue in light of the federal funding cuts.
Fed governor’s lawsuit could be filed today, CNBC reports
US Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook’s lawsuit against Donald Trump could be filed as soon as today, CNBC reported on Wednesday citing sources.
More to follow on this as we get it.
