US politics updates: Donald Trump confirms ‘potential’ trade deals, three countries named
Donald Trump confirms he has made potential trade deals with three countries — but they are not Australia.
The US has made trade deals with South Korea, Japan and India.
Donald Trump confirmed the “potential deals” when questioned about tariffs at the NewsNation town hall on Wednesday, US time.
But the US President said he was not in a hurry to announce the deals and that “it can wait two weeks”.
As Mr Trump celebrated 100 days in office this week, one of his top finance officials revealed the first trade deal between the US and another nation was “done, done, done, done”.
Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick made the comment on US network CNBC on Tuesday, US time.
“I have a deal, done, done done, done” said Mr Lutnick. “But I need to wait for their prime minister and their parliament to give approval”.
“I’m not going to tell you what country,” he added.
Mr Trump said on Tuesday afternoon that Australia has been “calling” but he’s yet to chat.
Mr Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” on April 2 saw 25 per cent tariffs slapped on South Korea, 24 per cent on Japan and 26 per cent on India, before announcing a 90-day pause on the higher-rate levies and lowering them to 10 per cent on April 9. Australia’s tariff was set at 10 per cent, the lowest amount.
Mr Trump said he was pausing the tariffs because 75 countries had asked to negotiate deals.
Tariffs on Chinese goods were not paused and are at 145 per cent.
US, Ukraine make huge breakthrough on war
The United States and Ukraine have signed a minerals deal after a two-month delay, in what Donald Trump’s administration called a new form of US commitment to Kyiv after the end of military aid.
Ukraine said it secured key interests after protracted negotiations, including full sovereignty over its own rare earths, which are vital for new technologies and largely untapped.
Mr Trump had initially demanded rights to Ukraine’s mineral wealth as compensation for the billions of dollars in US weapons sent under former president Joe Biden after Russia invaded just over three years ago.
After initial hesitation, Ukraine has accepted a minerals accord as a way to secure long-term investment by the United States, as Mr Trump tries to drastically scale back US security commitments around the world.
Announcing the signing of the deal in Washington, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said it showed “both sides’ commitment to lasting peace and prosperity in Ukraine.”
“This agreement signals clearly to Russia that the Trump administration is committed to a peace process centered on a free, sovereign and prosperous Ukraine over the long term,” Mr Bessent said.
“And to be clear, no state or person who financed or supplied the Russian war machine will be allowed to benefit from the reconstruction of Ukraine.”
The Treasury statement notably mentioned Russia’s “full-scale invasion” of Ukraine — diverging from the Trump administration’s usual formulation of a “conflict” for which Kyiv bears a large degree of responsibility.
In Kyiv, Prime Minister Denys Shmygal said on national television that the agreement was “good, equal and beneficial.”
In a post on Telegram, Mr Shmygal said that the two countries would establish a Reconstruction Investment Fund with each side having 50 per cent voting rights.
“Ukraine retains full control over its subsoil, infrastructure and natural resources,” he said.
Meeting a key concern for Kyiv, he said Ukraine would not be asked to pay back any “debt” for the billions of dollars in US weapons and other support since Russia invaded in February 2022.
“The fund’s profits will be reinvested exclusively in Ukraine,” he said.
Ukrainian Economy Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said on Facebook that the deal would finance mineral and oil and gas projects as well as “related infrastructure or processing.”
Mr Trump had originally sought $US500 billion in mineral wealth — around four times what the United States has contributed to Ukraine since the war.
Mr Trump has balked at offering security guarantees to Ukraine and has rejected its aspiration to join NATO.
But he said on Wednesday that a US presence on the ground would benefit Ukraine.
“The American presence will, I think, keep a lot of bad actors out of the country or certainly out of the area where we’re doing the digging,” Mr Trump said at a cabinet meeting.
Speaking later at a town hall with NewsNation, Mr Trump said he told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during a recent meeting at the Vatican that signing the deal would be a “very good thing” because “Russia is much bigger and much stronger.”
Asked whether the minerals deal is going to “inhibit” Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Mr Trump said “well, it could.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday threatened giving up on mediation unless the two sides come forward with “concrete proposals.”
— AFP
‘Monsters’: Trump reacts to Joe Rogan’s deportations warning
Donald Trump has reacted to Joe Rogan’s warning about the presdient’s aggressive approach to deporting migrants from the US.
The controversial podcaster and Trump supporter told listeners on his podcast last month that “rounding up gang members and shipping them to El Salvador with no due process” was “dangerous”.
“We gotta be careful that we don’t become monsters while we’re fighting monsters,” Rogan warned.
Speaking to ABC News on his 100th day in office, Mr Trump said he agreed with Rogan’s comments “a hundred per cent”.
“We want to be careful. We are careful,” he said, before labelling many who have entered the US “criminals”.
“We’re doing something that has to be done. We have a country that’s very sick. (Former US President) Joe Biden – and it’s not him, because I don’t even think he knew what the hell was happening. But the people around him are vicious people.
“And what they’ve done to the country is unbelievable. They’ve allowed 21 million people to pour into our country. Many of these people are criminals.”
Mr Trump added claimed Venezuelan “criminals” were “living happily in the United States of America”.
“I was elected to get ‘em out, and we’re getting ‘em out.”
The Trump administration has butted heads with federal judges, rights groups and Democrats who say he has trampled or ignored constitutional rights in rushing to deport migrants, sometimes without the right to a hearing.
In a post on social media on Saturday, Mr Trump claimed undocumented migrants in the US were “wreaking havoc like we have never seen before”.
He also dismissed due judicial process around deportations, saying: “It is not possible to have trials for millions and millions of people.”
“We know who the Criminals are, and we must get them out of the U.S.A. – and FAST.”
China suggests Covid originated in the US
China, which Mr Trump has consistently blamed for the Covid pandemic, has suggested the virus originated in the US.
China released a white paper on origins tracing overnight with Xinhua, China’s official state news agency, citing the White House’s official website which blames the origin of the virus on China as one of the reasons for the paper’s release.
The White House launched a new Covid-19 web page this month, which government health websites such as Covid.gov and Covidtests.gov now redirect to. The Web page, featuring a picture of Mr Trump and the words “LAB LEAK: The true origins of Covid-19”, claims coronavirus came from a lab leak in China.
China’s white paper calls for an in-depth investigation of the origins of the virus to be done in the US.
“As pointed out in the white paper, the US government, instead of facing squarely its failure in response to Covid-19 and reflecting on its shortcomings, has tried to shift the blame and divert people’s attention by shamelessly politicizing SARS-CoV-2 origins tracing,” Xinhua reported.
“It has severely undermined joint international efforts in the fight against the pandemic and become a weak link in global public health governance.
“Substantial evidence suggested the Covid-19 might have emerged in the United States earlier than its officially-claimed timeline, and earlier than the outbreak in China.”
Elon Musk returns to the White House
Billionaire Elon Musk was back at the White House for a cabinet meeting after it was publicly revealed he was no longer working there in-person for his official role with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
“Instead of meeting with him in person, I’m talking to him on the phone, but it’s the same net effect,” White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles told New York Post in an extensive interview to mark Mr Trump’s 100th day in office on Tuesday, local time.
Mr Musk, who defined much of Mr Trump’s initial weeks back in power, “hasn’t been here physically, but it really doesn’t matter much,” Ms Wiles added.
The Tesla CEO has been a staunch critic of remote work. In 2023, he called working from home “morally wrong” and in 2022, he told his Tesla employees to return to the office or “pretend to work somewhere else”.
This year, for months, Mr Musk would brief Mr Trump personally in the Oval Office, attend cabinet meetings and frequently travel with the president on Air Force One — often with his young son X joining him.
Just one day after the remote work revelation, Mr Musk was pictured at a cabinet meeting at the White House on Wednesday, local time.
Mr Musk’s stint as an unpaid special government employee concludes at the end of May. He will then advise the effort informally.
Trump ridiculed over embarrassing post
Concerning new data has revealed the US economy went backwards in the first three months of 2025 as unease about tariffs began to bite, fuelling recession fears.
Mr Trump, however, has claimed the slump has “nothing to do with tariffs” and instead reflected “Biden’s stock market” and was an “overhang” from the last president. Joe Biden’s spokesman clapped back saying the US was heading towards a “Trumpcession”.
But an awkward social media post by Mr Trump from last year has resurfaced where he claimed credit for the economy going gangbusters under Mr Biden. Now he is in office, he insists the negative economic numbers are actually his predecessor’s fault.
MORE: $115bn wiped: Trump’s rich listers hefty fall
On Wednesday, US time, the nation’s Commerce Department stated that US gross domestic product (GDP) had fallen by 0.3 per cent between January and March.
That compared to growth of 2.4 per cent in the last three months of 2024. The most recent fall in US GDP was in 2022, during Mr Biden’s presidency, when the economy fell by 1 per cent.
Two consecutive quarters of economic contraction is generally considered a recession.
MORE: Aussies to get $5k back amid US tariffs
The downturn in growth is due to a huge uptick in imports in the early months of 2025. These have surged by more than 40 per cent as companies stock piled goods from overseas ahead of tariffs being imposed.
Imports count against GDP figures so this upsurge dragged the overall figure down.
In contrast, consumer spending and business investment remained in positive territory.
Although consumer spending growth does appear to be slowing. And that’s concerning some economists.
“There’s a lot of reasons to expect the underlying trends in the US economy to soften,” economist at S & P Global Market Intelligence Ben Herzon told the New York Times.
White House blames Biden, cold weather
On Wednesday morning, Mr Trump and the White House scrambled to paint a far rosier picture and shift blame away for the president’s policies.
“This is Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s. I didn’t take over until January 20th,” said Mr Trump on social media. The Commerce Department figures cover more than two months of Mr Trump’s presidency.
“Tariffs will soon start kicking in, and companies are starting to move into the USA in record numbers.
“Our country will boom, but we have to get rid of the Biden ‘overhang’
“This will take a while, has NOTHING TO DO WITH TARIFFS, only that he left us with bad numbers, but when the boom begins, it will be like no other.
“BE PATIENT!!!” he urged.
The White House blamed the GDP figures on imports as well as cold weather and the Los Angeles wildfires.
Awkward Trump social media post from 2024
Mr Trump may well be insisting the current downturn is due to it being “Biden’s stock market,” but an inconvenient social media post from January 2024 has resurfaced where Mr Trump, who then wasn't in power, took the credit for a healthy – and growing – economy.
“This is the Trump stock market,” he wrote on January 29 of that year.
“Investors are projecting that I will win and that will drive the market up”.
‘Plummeting toward a Trumpcession’
Mr Biden’s spokesman Andrew Bates rubbished Mr Trump’s claims.
“When Joe Biden handed Donald Trump the best-performing economy in the world, experts praised the US for leaving every other wealthy nation ‘in the dust,’” he said in a statement.
“Now we’re plummeting toward a Trumpcession.”
White House: ‘It will reverse’
“What happened with the numbers today is that we had a fairly extraordinary surge of imports, driven by the rest of the world trying to get their products in here before the tariffs,” Trump economic adviser Peter Navarro said.
“Next time, that won’t be the case at all, and it will reverse,” he says.
The White House also claimed that “core GDP” grew by 3.0 per cent. Core GDP isn’t a standard measure but may focus on consumer spending and investment rather than imports.
It also said domestic investment “soared” by 22 per cent.
The major US indices all fell upon opening but mostly recovered by the close.
The Nasdaq was down 0.086 per cent, the S & P 500 was up by 0.15 per cent and the Dow Jones was in the green by 0.35 per cent.
Australia may also take a hit as the ASX is poised drop after the concerning figures were released in the US.
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