Judge permits Trump administration to deport Columbia student 

A Pennsylvania man was charged with making threats to assault and murder Trump and other administration officials, including tech billionaire Elon Musk, according to court documents filed this week.

An FBI agent said in a criminal complaint that Shawn Monper, 32, of Butler — the town where a gunman attempted to assassinate Trump in July — made a series of threatening statements against Trump in recent months on YouTube, using the account name "Mr Satan" and saying that he was going to "assassinate him myself," and "we just need to start killing people, Trump, Elon, all the heads of agencies Trump appointed, and anyone who stands in the way."

Monper also wrote that he would "open fire" if he came across an armed ICE agent, according to the complaint, which added that Monper had obtained a firearms permit through the Pennsylvania State Police shortly after Trump’s inauguration and wrote in a Feb. 26 post on YouTube that he had “bought several guns and been stocking up on ammo since Trump got in office."

Monper faces four counts of influencing, impeding or retaliating against a federal official and a federal law enforcement officer.

A public defender listed for Monper did not immediately respond to a request for comment tonight.

Trump said tonight that countries can either pay U.S. tariffs or "choose not to deal with us."

"They can choose not to deal with us, or they can choose to pay it, and that's where we are," Trump told reporters on Air Force One.

A reported had asked about Trump’s negotiations with other countries after his decision Wednesday to scale back most of the tariffs that had taken effect hours earlier.

"If they think it's too high, they don't have to do business with us," Trump said tonight, adding that he didn't anticipate any U.S. trading partners would arrive at such a decision.

The Trump administration has directed staff at the State Department to report any instances of “anti-religious” bias, according to a copy of an internal notice obtained by NBC News.

The announcement was titled “Implementing the President’s E.O. on Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias in the Department of State,” and provides an anonymous form dedicated for employees and contractors to report instances of “anti-religious bias during the last presidential administration” by April 18. 

People who complete the form can also submit recommendations to the Secretary of State to “remedy any anti-religious bias at the Department.”

A task force, established by Trump’s executive order, will meet on or around April 22 to discuss the initial findings, and an interagency report is due on June 6.

The notice also states, “Although the E.O. focuses on anti-Christian bias, targeting anyone for their religious beliefs is discriminatory,” and is contrary to the Constitution and other federal laws. 

President Donald Trump had his annual physical on Friday, a check-up that may give the public its first details in years about the health of a man who, in January, became the oldest in U.S. history to be sworn in as president.

“I have never felt better, but nevertheless, these things must be done!” Trump, 78, posted on his social media site ahead of the examination, which was conducted at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

How long the exam took wasn't immediately clear as Trump did not speak to reporters before or after it. All told, however, he spent more than five hours at the center before heading to Air Force One and flying to Florida for the weekend.

Despite long questioning predecessor Joe Biden's physical and mental capacity, Trump has routinely kept basic facts about his own health shrouded in secrecy — shying away from traditional presidential transparency on medical issues. If history is any indication, his latest physical is likely to produce a flattering report that's scarce on details.

A group of demonstrators at Georgetown University took to the streets on Friday to denounce the Trump administration and its actions on immigration and students’ visas.

In the D.C. area and across the U.S., students say the administration is targeting those who participated in demonstrations against the war in Gaza.

“Stop these abductions, stop these visa revocations, stop all the targeting, of not just pro-Palestinian students – we’re seeing all migrants, all citizens, honestly,” said a student who didn’t want to share their name

Read the full story from NBC4 Washington here

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cut a federal grant for a planned restoration project for New Jersey’s iconic Lucy the Elephant, according to the historic landmark’s executive director.

Built in 1882, “Lucy” is a six-story elephant-shaped building located on 9200 Atlantic Avenue in Margate City, New Jersey. Originally created to promote real estate sales and attract tourists to the area, it is currently the oldest surviving roadside tourist attraction in America, houses a museum and was voted the nation’s number one roadside attraction in a USA Today online poll.

In August of last year, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey presented a $500,000 federal grant that would go toward a planned $750,000 restoration project focused on repairing Lucy’s interior, upgrading its air conditioning system and improving its fire suppression and burglar alarm systems.

But Lucy’s executive director Rich Helfant announced today that the grant was rescinded by DOGE. Read the full story from NBC Philadelphia here.

President Donald Trump’s planned tariffs on pharmaceuticals imported into the U.S. could have wide-ranging consequences for drugmakers and American patients, some experts told CNBC. 

The duties could disrupt the complex pharmaceutical supply chain, drive up the prices of drugs in the U.S. and exacerbate shortages of critical medicines, some health policy experts said. Drugmakers often rely on a global network of manufacturing sites for different steps of the production process. 

“We are already in a state where prescription drugs are unaffordable to many,” Mariana Socal, a health policy professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told CNBC. 

Read the full story from CNBC here

A lawyer for the Justice Department said repeatedly "I don't know" when asked today by a judge where the man the administration mistakenly deported to El Savador is.

"This is extremely troubling," Judge Paula Xinis said, as the DOJ attorney also said he had no information about what efforts the government had made to date to get Garcia back.

She ordered the government to give her daily updates to her questions, including over the weekend. The attorney for the Justice Department, Drew Ensign, said he anticipated having some answers for her by Tuesday.

A Louisiana immigration judge ruled Friday that the U.S. can deport Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil based on the federal government’s argument that he poses a national security risk.

AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey, File

Immigration Judge Jamee Comans made the determination at the end of a nearly two-hour hearing. Khalil can appeal the ruling.

Khalil, who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations at the school, was detained by federal immigration agents on March 8 in New York and transferred to an immigration detention center in Jena, Louisiana.

Khalil’s lawyers have challenged the legality of his detention, saying the Trump administration is trying to crack down on free speech.

Shawn Monper, 32, of Butler, Pennsylvania, is accused of making threatening comments on YouTube over several weeks targeting the Republican president, Elon Musk and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, the department said on Friday.

Investigators say Monper got a firearms permit shortly after Trump’s January inauguration and then commented online that he had bought “several guns and been stocking up on ammo since Trump got in office.”

An attorney for Monper didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment on Friday.

Attorney General Pam Bondi thanked law enforcement for arresting “this individual before he could carry out his threats against President Trump’s life and the lives of other innocent Americans.”

Tit-for-tat U.S. and Chinese tariffs on each other’s goods are rising so fast it makes the head spin. Here’s how the situation has spiraled since last week:

February and March: The new Trump administration imposes a combined 20% tariff on goods imported from China over its role in the international flow of precursor ingredients for fentanyl.

April 2: Citing the U.S. trade deficit with China, Trump announces an additional 34% tariff on Chinese goods.

April 4: China announces its own 34% tariff on U.S. goods.

President Donald Trump announced deals Friday with five law firms that will allow them to avoid the prospect of a punishing executive order and require them to together provide hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of free legal services for causes his administration supports.

The resolutions reflect the Republican president's continued success in bending prominent law firms to his will as they seek to cut deals with his administration to avoid being targeted by White House sanctions.

The latest firms to reach agreements with the White House are Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft; Kirkland & Ellis; Allen Overy Shearman Sterling US; Simpson Thacher & Bartlett; and Latham & Watkins.

The spate of executive orders directed at the legal community and top law firms over the last two months has been part of a broader effort by Trump to reshape civil society and to extract concessions from entities whose work he opposes. The orders have threatened to upend the day-to-day business of the firms by stripping their lawyers' security clearances, barring their employees from access to federal buildings and terminating federal contracts held by the firms or their clients.

A federal judge refused on Friday to block immigration agents from conducting enforcement operations at houses of worship in a lawsuit filed by religious groups over a new policy adopted by the Trump administration.

U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich in Washington, D.C., handed down the ruling in a lawsuit filed by more than two dozen Christian and Jewish groups representing millions of Americans.

She found that there have been few such enforcement actions and the faiths had not shown they had suffered legal harm.

Lawyers for the Trump administration on Friday said they’re unable to provide information on the location and status of a Maryland man who was mistakenly deported last month to a notorious prison in El Salvador.

The attorneys said they haven’t had enough time to review the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on Thursday that directed the administration to return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the U.S.

A federal judge in Maryland directed the Trump administration to “take all available steps to facilitate the return” of Abrego Garcia following Thursday’s high court order.

Read the full story here.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt says Trump is undergoing his “routine and long scheduled physical” and promised a “readout from the White House physician.”

As Leavitt spoke to reporters during a briefing on Friday, Trump was at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

Trump’s medical records carry the same privacy protections as all citizens, so how much information he authorizes the White House to release once his physical is completed remains to be seen.

Through the years, Trump has long been reticent to release even basic information about his health.

Defending its "reciprocal tariffs," the White House this week said President Donald Trump believes the U.S. has the workforce and the resources to build iPhones in the U.S. Apple CEO Tim Cook nor anybody else at the tech company has come out to back that claim, but analysts who follow Apple say the idea of an American-made iPhone is impossible at worst and highly expensive at best. 

As it's largely a theoretical exercise, there's a broad range of guesses as to how much an all-American iPhone might cost.

Bank of America Securities analyst Wamsi Mohan said in a Thursday note that the iPhone 16 Pro, which is currently priced at $1,199, could increase 25% based on labor costs alone. That would make it a roughly $1,500 device.

Read the full story from CNBC here.

Consumer sentiment grew even worse than expected in April as the expected inflation level hit its highest since 1981, a closely watched University of Michigan survey showed Friday.

The survey’s mid-month reading on consumer sentiment fell to 50.8, down from 57.0 in March and below the Dow Jones consensus estimate for 54.6. The move represented a 10.9% monthly change and was 34.2% lower than a year ago. It was lowest reading since June 2022 and the second lowest in the survey’s history going back to 1952.

As sentiment moved lower, inflation worries surged.

Read the full story here.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump appeared to back a plan to make daylight saving time permanent in the U.S., writing, "The House and Senate should push hard for more Daylight at the end of a day."

"Very popular and, most importantly, no more changing of the clocks, a big inconvenience and, for our government, A VERY COSTLY EVENT!!!" Trump added.

Along similar lines, as recently as December Trump advocated for permanently eliminating daylight saving time.

At the time, the then-president-elect wrote in a Truth Social post that, "the Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time, which has a small but strong constituency, but shouldn’t! Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation."

As recently as 2022, a bipartisan group of senators backed a bill that passed the Senate and sought to make daylight saving time permanent, eliminating the need for Americans to change their clocks twice a year.

Between 1992 and 2004, the National Weather Service’s NEXRAD radar system prevented over 330 fatalities and 7,800 injuries from tornadoes, according to NOAA. How would that change if the public weather forecast is commercialized?

Jim Watson - Pool / Getty Images

The commander of the U.S. Space Force base in Greenland that Vice President JD Vance visited last month has been fired from her job for writing an email distancing herself from Vance's comments criticizing Denmark.

“I do not presume to understand current politics, but what I do know is the concerns of the U.S. administration discussed by Vice President Vance on Friday are not reflective of Pituffik Space Base,” Col. Susannah Meyers wrote in the email three days after Vance’s visit. “I commit that for as long as I am lucky enough to lead this base, all of our flags will fly proudly — together.”

Meyers is no longer leading the base because of that email, two defense officials said.

“Actions to undermine the chain of command or to subvert President Trump’s agenda will not be tolerated at the Department of Defense," Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said.

Getty Images

Democrats are at a crossroads. And different potential party leaders are already scoping out different potential paths back to power in a few years.

After the party lost November’s presidential election, its image has slipped to historic lows, and it lacks significant power in Washington to push back against Trump’s efforts to bend the federal government to his will — even as Democratic voters warm to the idea of an all-out fight against Trump.

It’s against that backdrop that key Democratic leaders are making early, yet important, moves about how to position themselves as the party looks toward a wide-open 2028 presidential race. Some seek to resist Trump at all opportunities, others concede victories to Republicans on cultural issues, and still more hope to split the difference — working with Trump when necessary and criticizing him when they disagree.

Read the full NBC News story here.

Ryan Nobles reports on Ksenia Karelina, a Russian-American ballerina who was freed in a Russia prisoner swap returning to the U.S.

As the fallout of the U.S. tariffs continued, the U.S. dollar also continued to tumble today and hit its lowest rate against the Swiss franc in a decade.

The Swiss Franc stood at $1.22 against the dollar, undermining the status of the U.S. currency as a safe haven asset in times of economic volatility. The Euro also strengthened against the dollar, reaching $1.14 of its value, the lowest performance of the U.S. currency in half-a-decade.

Trump is undergoing his annual physical on Friday, potentially giving the public its first details in years about the health of a man who in January became the oldest in U.S. history to be sworn in as president.

Despite long questioning predecessor Joe Biden’s physical and mental capacity, Trump has routinely kept basic facts about his own health shrouded in secrecy — shying away from traditional presidential transparency on medical issues.

If history is any indication, his latest physical is likely to produce a flattering report that’s scarce on details. It will be conducted at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and will be the first public information on Trump’s health since an assassination attempt against him in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July.

Rather than release medical records at that time, Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson — a staunch supporter who served as his White House physician and once joked in the White House briefing room that Trump could live to be 200 if he had a healthier diet — wrote a memo describing a gunshot wound to Trump’s right ear.

China’s Ministry of Commerce today blasted Trump’s 145% tariffs on Chinese goods as a “numbers game with no real economic significance.” The U.S’s tactics of weaponizing tariffs have become “a joke,” it said in a statement.

“If the U.S. keeps playing the numbers game of tariffs, China will ignore it,” the ministry added, but vowed once again to “fight to the end” if the U.S. “insists on substantially harming China’s interests.”

China raised its tariff on U.S. imports today to 125% from its previous rate of 84%, signaling that this is likely to be its last increase for the moment as tit-for-tat tariffs reach levels that make trade between the world’s two biggest economies unfeasible.

“Given that, at the current tariff level, U.S. exports to China are no longer commercially viable, China will not respond to any further tariff hikes by the U.S. on Chinese goods,” the ministry said.

The week looks set to end much as it began, with global markets convulsing as Trump’s tariffs raise fears of recession.

Asia-Pacific markets were mixed, with U.S. ally Japan’s Nikkei 225 losing the most at 2.96%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index and China’s CSI 300 both ended the day higher before China's tariff increase announcement.

In Europe, major markets were all lower, led by Germany’s Dax, which was down almost 1.7% in morning trading.

The dollar fell to its lowest in 10 years against the Swiss franc and its lowest in six months against the yen, Reuters reported, as the euro reached its highest level against the U.S. currency since February 2022 and gold hit another record high.

U.S. stock futures were all down between 0.6% and 0.7% as of 5 a.m. ET, after China announced it would raise its tariff on U.S. goods to 125%. The three major U.S. averages all closed lower yesterday, reversing some of their gains from a historic rally Wednesday after Trump announced a 90-day pause on higher targeted tariffs on all countries except China.

Trump pulled back Wednesday on a series of harsh tariffs targeting friends and foes alike in an audacious bid to remake the global economic order.

Trump’s early afternoon announcement followed a harrowing week in which Republican lawmakers and confidants privately warned him that the tariffs could wreck the economy. His own aides had quietly raised alarms about the financial markets before he suspended a tariff regime that he had unveiled with a flourish just one week earlier in a Rose Garden ceremony.

The stock market rose immediately after the about-face, ending days of losses that have forced older Americans who’ve been sinking their savings into 401(k)s to rethink their retirement plans.

Read the full NBC News story here.

China announced countermeasures on Friday, raising tariffs on U.S. goods from 84% to 125% starting Saturday.

The U.S. and China have escalated trade war by raising tariffs even as U.S. President Donald Trump hit a pause on tariffs for other countries.

Trump’s universal tariffs on China total 145%. When Trump announced Wednesday that China faced 125% tariffs, he did not include a 20% tariff on China tied to its role in fentanyl production.

“The U.S. alternately raising abnormally high tariffs on China has become a numbers game, which has no practical economic significance, and will become a joke in the history of the world economy,” a Commerce Ministry spokesman said in a statement announcing the countermeasure. “However, if the US insists on continuing to substantially infringe on China’s interests, China will resolutely counter and fight to the end.”