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There are many lawsuits challenging allegedly illegal actions by the Trump administration — 132 of them as of March 21, according to the legal news site Just Security. That’s a lot to keep track of.

Two issues raised by some of these suits stand out, however, as Trump’s most blatant violations of the Constitution, and therefore as matters to pay particular attention to.

One is the question of whether Trump can simply cancel federal spending that is mandated by an act of Congress, an issue known as “impoundment.” As future Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote in a 1969 Justice Department memo, “it is in our view extremely difficult to formulate a constitutional theory to justify a refusal by the President to comply with a congressional directive to spend.”

The other issue is birthright citizenship. The Constitution is absolutely clear that anyone born in the United States and subject to its laws is a citizen, regardless of the immigration status of their parents. As one Reagan-appointed judge said of Trump’s attempt to strip citizenship from some Americans born in this country, “I’ve been on the bench for over four decades, I can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one is.”

So it is reasonable to worry that a majority of the justices will simply do whatever a Republican administration wants them to do.

This is why the birthright citizenship and impoundment cases are such important bellwethers. No competent lawyer, and certainly no reasonable judge, could conclude that Trump’s actions in either case are lawful. There is no serious debate about what the Constitution says about either issue. If the Court rules in favor of Trump in either case, it’s hard to imagine the justices offering any meaningful pushback to anything Trump wants to do.

Fortunately, there are early signs that this won’t happen. On the impoundment issue, the Supreme Court recently rejected the Trump administration’s request to block a lower court order compelling the administration to make approximately $2 billion in payments to foreign aid organizations.

The vote was 5-4, and the Court’s decision likely turned on a careless mistake by Trump’s lawyers. Still, even a small defeat for Trump indicates that most of the justices aren’t so eager to bail out the leader of the Republican Party that they will jump on the first opportunity to do so.

Similarly, three cases raising the birthright citizenship issue recently landed on the Court’s shadow docket — emergency motions and similar matters decided, often very rapidly, outside of the Court’s normal schedule. So far, the Court’s only issued brief orders indicating that the justices won’t even start to consider the case until April 4 at the earliest, more than three weeks after the Trump administration asked them to intervene.

That’s not a definitive sign that birthright citizenship is safe, but the fact that the Court decided to wait three weeks before looking at lower court orders that protected birthright citizenship suggests that most of the justices don’t take the Trump administration’s arguments very seriously. If they had, they likely would have heard the cases sooner — in the foreign aid case where four justices sided with Trump, for example, the plaintiffs were given just two days to respond to the Justice Department’s arguments.

Trump has claimed sweeping authority to cancel spending appropriated by Congress, including dismantling entire agencies like the US Agency for International Development (USAID). He also issued an executive order purporting to strip citizenship from many children born to undocumented mothers, or to parents who are temporarily present in the United States. Thus far, the courts have treated both of these actions with skepticism — as they should because they are clearly unconstitutional.

Rehnquist’s dismissive response to impoundment speaks for itself. There’s simply nothing in the Constitution that supports the argument that the president can impound funds that Congress commands him to spend. Indeed, the only language in the Constitution that seems to speak to this issue cuts against Trump. Among other things, the Constitution says that the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” So the president has a duty to faithfully execute any law providing for federal spending.

It’s worth noting, moreover, that at least two of the Court’s Republicans have previously expressed skepticism about impoundment. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a 2013 opinion that “even the President does not have unilateral authority to refuse to spend” funds appropriated by Congress. And Roberts wrote in a 1985 White House memo on impoundment that “no area seems more clearly the province of Congress than the power of the purse.” (Though it is worth noting that Roberts also suggested, in an attachment to that memo, that the president may have greater authority over spending relating to foreign policy.)

The case for birthright citizenship is even more straightforward. The Fourteenth Amendment provides that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” Someone is subject to US jurisdiction if the federal government can enforce its laws against that person. Undocumented immigrants and their children are obviously subject to US law, otherwise they could not be arrested or deported.

As the Supreme Court held in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), the “subject to the jurisdiction” exception to birthright citizenship is narrow and primarily applies to the children of “diplomatic representatives of a foreign state,” who have diplomatic immunity from US law, as well as children “born of alien enemies in hostile occupation.”

At least three courts have issued orders blocking Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship. In a brief asking the Supreme Court to narrow these orders, the Trump administration claims that the word “jurisdiction” actually means “allegiance.” So someone is not a citizen if they don’t owe “primary allegiance to the United States rather than to an ‘alien power.’”

But there are two reasons to doubt that even the Trump administration agrees with this argument. One is that Trump’s executive order only purports to strip citizenship from some children born to foreign nationals — a child of two lawful permanent residents, for example, remains a citizen. But if the Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t apply to anyone who owes “primary allegiance” to an “alien power,” that would mean that all children of foreign nationals should be stripped of their citizenship. The Constitution makes no distinctions based on whether a child’s parents are legally present in the United States, nor does it draw lines based on whether those parents are temporary or permanent residents.

The second reason is that, in its brief to the justices, the administration does not even ask the Court to fully reinstate Trump’s birthright citizenship order. Instead, it asks the Court to narrow the lower courts’ decisions so that they only apply to the plaintiffs in the specific lawsuits challenging that order. If Trump’s lawyers thought they had a winning argument, they almost certainly would have asked the justices to consider the merits of this case.

The question of whether lower court judges may issue what are known as “nationwide injunctions,” orders that suspend a federal policy in its entirety rather than permitting the plaintiffs in an individual case to ignore that policy, has lingered for quite some time. It’s these orders that are blocking Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship. Trump’s Justice Department pushed the Court to limit these nationwide injunctions during his first term, as did the Biden administration. But the Court has thus far allowed at least some of these broad orders to stand.

While there are strong arguments against these nationwide injunctions, the Court has resisted efforts to limit them for years. It would be quite aberrant for the justices to suddenly decide to strip lower courts of their power to issue these nationwide orders in the birthright citizenship cases, where Trump’s arguments on the merits are frivolous.

In any event, the only outward sign the justices have given regarding their views on birthright citizenship suggests that Trump is going to lose. When the Justice Department asks the justices to stay a lower court’s decision, one of the justices typically asks the other party in the case to respond to that request by a short deadline — sometimes as little as a few days, and rarely more than a week. In this case, however, the Court gave the plaintiffs arguing in favor of birthright citizenship three full weeks to respond.

So long as the Court does nothing, the lower court orders blocking Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship remain in effect. And the justices are unlikely to do anything until they read the plaintiffs’ response. So, by stringing this case out for an additional three weeks, the justices ensured that Trump’s executive order wouldn’t go into effect any time soon.

All of which suggests that the Supreme Court appears unlikely to back Trump on his two most clear-cut violations of the Constitution. That does not mean that this Court will act as a meaningful check on many of Trump’s other illegal actions. But it does suggest that at least some members of the Court’s Republican majority will occasionally say “no” to the leader of their political party.

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It’s been another long week in Canadian politics — and it looks as if it’s going to end with a snap-election call.

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Prime Minister Mark Carney is expected to call an election on Sunday, and April 28 is the likeliest date, our sources tell us.

I spent 48 hours traveling with Mr. Carney to Paris, London and Iqaluit, from Sunday to Tuesday, as part of a small group of journalists who accompanied him on his first overseas trip as prime minister (news organizations cover travel costs).

Today I’ll share some observations on how Mr. Carney’s approach to President Trump’s threats is taking clearer shape and is, subtly but discernibly, different from that of his predecessor. Dealing with Mr. Trump will be one of the most important issues — if not the most important — on the ballot, and Mr. Carney’s emerging strategy tells us a lot about what he would do if elected.

Ian Austen will be back next week with our Canada Letter as we dive into the election period in earnest.

[Read: ‘Most European Non-European Country’: Canada Turns to Allies as Trump Threatens]

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Mr. Carney has placed respect at the heart of how he talks about President Trump — suggesting he will not engage if Mr. Trump carries on calling him “governor” like he did with Justin Trudeau.

Upon accepting his party’s leadership on March 9, Mr. Carney said he wouldn’t remove Canada’s retaliatory tariffs unless the United States showed his country respect.

On his flash Europe tour this week, he honed that message.

In London, at a news conference at the Canada High Commission, he told us of the U.S. leadership, “They’re disrespectful, they’re not helpful and they need to stop before — they will have to stop before — we sit down and have a conversation about our broader partnership.”

No rush

It also seems Mr. Carney is in no hurry to have these conversations with Mr. Trump, and believes that Canada’s approach should be slow, careful and measured, rather than a rush into pleading for easing the tariffs or seeking a deal under duress.

It’s telling that — at the time of this writing on Friday evening — he’s not yet held a call with Mr. Trump since being sworn in as prime minister last week.

In our Iqaluit stop, I asked Mr. Carney if he was changing his strategy toward Mr. Trump. Here’s what he said: “I’m less interested in reacting to every initiative put on the table. We want to have that broader conversation. It won’t happen overnight. There’s no magic one meeting that is going to unlock things.”

He added, “The big issues around trade are going to need to be taken more comprehensively, and they will be taken, from a Canadian perspective, from a position of strength.”

Dollar for dollar

Mr. Carney also mentioned, for the first time, that the dollar-for-dollar retaliatory approach to the U.S. tariffs “has limits,” indicating that while he would stick with the measures put in place by Mr. Trudeau, he may be less willing to escalate.

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New friends

Mr. Carney’s whirlwind tour was an effort to highlight that he’s comfortable on the global stage, and is known and liked by foreign leaders. But he also took steps this week that suggest he puts teaming up with non-U.S. powers at the heart of his U.S. policy.

First came the announcement, made in Iqaluit on Tuesday, that he had finalized the selection of Australia as a partner to develop an over-the-surface radar for the Arctic. The ABC, the Australian national broadcaster, reported that the United States was also in talks for a similar deal with Canberra, but that they stalled under Mr. Trump, allowing Mr. Carney to complete Canada’s agreement first.

And on Friday we reported exclusively that Canada was a top non-European Union partner for the bloc’s new military industrial initiative that’s taking shape, one that would allow Canada to gain preferential access to European defense contracts. The motive behind this effort is U.S. allies’ desire to pull away from their reliance on American military equipment.

Mr. Carney discussed this in detail with the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, on the phone on Sunday, and with President Emmanuel Macron of France in person on Monday.

[Read: Menaced by Trump, Canada Prepares to Join E.U. Military Industry Buildup]

[Read: Canada Bolsters Arctic Defenses as Trump Sets His Sights North]

Canada confident

Mr. Carney has also indicated he wants to stop talk of Mr. Trump’s “51st state” threats, although he takes them seriously. In London he called the possibility of a U.S. annexation of Canada “unthinkable.”

Instead, he wants to drive home the idea that he believes Canada should be confident in this moment rather than seek external validation.

Some key quotes on that theme include:

“We don’t need another country to validate our sovereign sovereignty. We are sovereign. We don’t need praise from another country. We are proud.” (London, March 17).

“We can stand up for ourselves. Canada is strong.” (London, March 17).

“We can give ourselves more than anything that President Trump or any other trade partner can take away.” (Iqaluit, March 18).

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Trans Canada

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• As Canadians shun travel to the United States, Myrtle Beach, S.C., a popular snowbird destination, looks a little different this year.

• The police in Hamilton, Ontario, are investigating after more than 80 cars were vandalized at a Tesla dealership. The carmaker, owned by Elon Musk, has been the target of similar incidents in the United States.

• The Canadian authorities said the Delta Air Lines plane that crashed in Toronto last month was descending at a high speed before it landed.

• The research of Dr. Shoo Lee, one of Canada’s most renowned neonatologists, was used to convict a British nurse of murder. But Dr. Lee says his work should have never been cited in the case.

• Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, has emerged as one of the country’s staunchest defenders against Mr. Trump. That has earned him the moniker “Captain Canada.”

• Mélanie Joly, Canada’s foreign minister, said China had executed four Canadian citizens in the country over drug-related offenses.

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Matina Stevis-Gridneff is the Canada bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the country. More about Matina Stevis-Gridneff

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We’re eager to have your thoughts about this newsletter and events in Canada in general. Please send them to nytcanada@nytimes.com.

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As he did with NATO members in Europe, President Trump is undermining trust with key allies on the other side of the globe. His administration’s decisions are straining relationships with the Asian countries that the U.S. would rely on in the event of conflict with China or North Korea.

Beijing was an early target of Trump’s latest tariff war, but the White House appears to be applying its aggressive stance on trade to the rest of the region as well. Washington has imposed tariffs on aluminum and steel from Australia, threatened them on cars from Japan and hinted that South Korea could be next target of U.S. tariffs.

As with Europe, the Trump administration is sending conflicting signals to America’s long-standing allies in Asia, with whom the U.S. has deep-rooted security agreements that date back to the 1950s.

In recent years, the Biden administration bolstered these ties with the goal of containing China, launching a pair of strategic security pacts — one among the U.S., Japan and South Korea and the other, known as AUKUS, with the U.K. and Australia.

These alliances are are vital to the “First Island Chain” strategy, a war plan whose name refers to a line of islands that stretches from Japan, through Taiwan, to the Philippines — a natural barrier that could be used to circumscribe China’s naval and air operations if war were to break out.

Biden even moved past decades of deliberate U.S. ambiguity concerning Taiwan, openly declaring that America would defend the island against an attack by China.

Seth Jones, president of the defense and security department of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says a trade war that punishes U.S. partners in the region threatens to weaken ties with Asian allies, possibly forcing them to reassess the reliability of U.S. security commitments.

“Tariffs against the Australians, or current or future tariffs — particularly increases against the Japanese and South Koreans — would certainly not be helpful in contributing to a close partnership with those countries,” he says.

Worries that tariffs could trigger an Indo-Pacific trade war

There’s concern that the ongoing tit-for-tat tariff dispute seen in North America and Europe could also land in Asia.

“I think there is a fear that … this is only going to escalate,” says Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center.

During his first term, Trump’s Indo-Pacific strategy was a difficult read for the region. In one of his first acts as president, he withdrew the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership pact, a trade agreement with 12 Pacific Rim nations negotiated by the Obama administration (although Hillary Clinton, Trump’s rival in the 2016 election, also opposed the deal).

Trump followed that up with a round of brinkmanship with Kim Jong Un before a complete reversal and profession of love for the North Korean leader. Then came the China trade war, version 1.0.

In the current Trump term, “we are in uncharted territory,” says John Nilsson-Wright, head of the Japan and Koreas Program at the Center for Geopolitics at the University of Cambridge. “There is a profound sense of anxiety and I think a sense of urgency [in] countries like Japan, Australia, European states which have a stake in the Indo-Pacific, particularly the U.K.”

Tong Zhao, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, thinks Trump’s focus on trade and toughness on China indicates that “he cares about economic benefits” the U.S. could reap.

“He doesn’t have strong issues with China’s authoritarian system,” he says. “He doesn’t really have issues with China’s regional aggression as long as those regional aggressions do not immediately threaten American interests.”

In a campaign interview last year, Trump also suggested that Taiwan’s dominance in microchip manufacturing meant it had the money to pay the U.S. for defending the island.

Trump’s new term comes amid regional political uncertainty

The maneuvering is happening as political uncertainty roils not just the U.S., but also the Pacific region. South Korea is in the middle of a major constitutional crisis over the ouster of Yoon Suk Yeol as president after he tried to declare martial law.

Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, Shinzo Abe — with whom Trump had enjoyed an apparently genuine friendship — was a strong advocate of building up Japan’s military to meet the threat posed by China. He resigned in 2020 and was later assassinated. Shigeru Ishiba is Japan’s third premier since Abe.

Australia could also get a new prime minister after elections in May.

Trump’s approach to the Indo-Pacific reflects his personal view of how the U.S. fits into the larger global context, according to Kanishkh Kanodia, a fellow in the U.S. and Americas program at Chatham House, a London-based think tank.

“I think President Trump sees [alliances] as secondary to him. He prefers one-on-one/bilateral relationships,” Kanodia says. In short, he “[views] allies and alliances generally as liabilities which have historically disadvantaged the U.S.”

During his first term, Trump strongly suggested that he might pull a significant number of U.S. troops from South Korea, a military presence seen as a key deterrent against North Korean aggression. In an interview with Time magazine in April last year, he reiterated demands from his first term that Seoul “step up and pay” to maintain U.S. troops on its soil.

Not long ago, such a stance by a U.S. president would have been unthinkable, Nilsson-Wright says. Today, though, “we have to realistically consider whether Trump might see that as a bargaining card that he would deploy,” he says.

South Korea tried to lock in its defense payments

Concern in Seoul over renewed arm-twisting from Washington led it to “Trump-proof” the level of funding it’s expected to provide for U.S. military bases in the country by locking in a new joint agreement in the final year of the Biden administration.

Trump’s past implications that the U.S. might close bases in South Korea and withdraw at least some of its forces could have the unintended consequence of pushing Seoul to pursue its nuclear weapons to counter North Korea’s strategic arsenal, according to Shihoko Goto, director of the Indo-Pacific program at the Wilson Center.

Nuclear nonproliferation has long been a cornerstone of America’s foreign policy, but in the first Trump term “there had been public interest in South Korea for the country to acquire nuclear weapons … in response to some of the anxieties that Seoul has had about U.S. security guarantees,” she says.

Although India — an open nuclear power — is not part of the First Island Chain strategy, it nevertheless plays a critical part in ensuring security and stability in the region, Goto says. The U.S. and India have no security treaty, but Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi have had warm relations.

In Japan, she says, “there is really no public appetite to … become a nuclear power.” Nonetheless, Japan now says it is committed to doubling its defense spending by 2027. That’s seen as a major step toward rearmament, reversing the demilitarization imposed by the allies at the end of World War II. “Behind this change of posture has been from a single source: China,” according to Tomohiko Taniguchi, a senior adviser at Fujitsu Futures Studies Center.

Indo-Pacific partners want stability

There are roughly 28,000 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea. In addition, the Biden administration had sought to bring the 55,000 troops currently deployed to Japan under a joint command in the country, rather than the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command thousands of miles away in Hawaii. The change would mean U.S. troops could meet the threat from China more rapidly and effectively.

In an effort to quash media reports that new Pentagon cuts might nix any such move, Japan’s Defense Minister Gen. Nakatani said Friday that there is no change in the plan.

Like Japan, in Australia there doesn’t appear to be any serious public debate about going nuclear. However, a 2022 survey conducted by the Sydney-based Lowy Institute found that 36% of Australians were strongly or somewhat in favor of the country acquiring nuclear weapons, up from only 16% in 2010.

During his first term, Trump praised then-Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte for his “wonderful job” in prosecuting a deadly anti-drug war — an extrajudicial crackdown that led to Duterte’s recent arrest on International Criminal Court charges of crimes against humanity.

Speaking shortly after Trump’s reelection, Philippine Defense Minister Gilberto Teodoro said he didn’t expect any demands from Washington to pay more for defense. Meanwhile, more than three decades after the U.S. abandoned Subic Bay in the Philippines, the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps will again have a presence at the strategic outpost in the form of prepositioned military equipment.

Ultimately, America’s Indo-Pacific partners are hoping the new Trump White House will prove a more constant ally in what Taniguchi, a former Abe adviser, describes as “perhaps the most precarious neighborhood … on the globe.”

They “want stability in trade relations,” Goto says. “They also want stability when it comes to security relations with the United States.”

NPR’s Anthony Kuhn contributed to this report from Beijing.

Don’t cry for him, America, but when it comes to his vision for the Kennedy Center, President Donald J. Trump appears to be dreaming impossible dreams.

The president, who is also now the board chair for the Kennedy Center, convened a meeting of said board on Monday. In a recording of the meeting shared with The Washington Post, Trump and members said they’d like to see “Camelot,” “Cats,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Hello, Dolly!” and “The Phantom of the Opera” featured at the Kennedy Center. Speaking with reporters, Trump said, “We’re going to get some very good shows.”  

Most Kennedy Center audiences were never the sort of conservative theatergoers clamoring for a season of ‘Cats,’ ‘Phantom’ and ‘Fiddler on the Roof.’

There are a number of practical problems with this wish list, the first of which is that none of those musicals are touring in North America (although a tour of “Phantom” does launch in November). And if the Kennedy Center were to try to mount its own nonunion productions, it would run into a brick wall of standing labor contracts. 

“We’re gonna fix that,” the president said upon learning that the Kennedy Center would have had to pay the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees in order to have board member Lee Greenwood sing at the meeting. “They wanted $30,000 to move a piano,” Trump claimed. 

And yet, none of these obstacles prevent the president of the United States from assuming “Cats” will be onstage at the Kennedy Center next year, as if he has the power to summon Mr. Mistoffelees and Rum Tum Tugger through sheer will. 

Since Feb. 7, when Trump announced plans to appoint himself America’s arts impresario in chief, he has fired roughly two dozen board members appointed by President Joe Biden, had the remaining trustees elect a new president of the board and dismissed Kennedy Center leader Deborah Rutter, who had helmed the institution for 11 years. 

Life at the center has been a tumultuous free fall ever since, with a series of cancellations and missed deadlines. The second week of March, when the Kennedy Center typically announces programming for the next season, has come and gone. Across Washington, venues like The Anthem and Shakespeare Theatre Company are fielding calls from artists and organizations looking for somewhere else to perform. Most notably, the producers and creators of the musical theater juggernaut “Hamilton” announced they were canceling a two-month run, which most likely have generated more money than any other show in the 2025-26 Kennedy Center season.

“I never liked ‘Hamilton’ very much,” the president said, undeterred. 

Yet alleged financial mismanagement at the Kennedy Center has been top of mind for Trump and his surrogates, including Ric Grenell, the former ambassador whom the president appointed to replace Rutter on at least an interim basis, who accused the center of having low cash reserves.

As a nonprofit organization, the Kennedy Center is required to submit public tax returns, and the most recently available filings indicate it is not in financial distress, with a total budget of $268 million and a surplus of $6 million. About 16% percent of the budget comes from a congressional appropriation specifically earmarked for physical upkeep, because the center was dedicated in 1971 as a national memorial to slain President John F. Kennedy Jr. 

Staffers have admitted that some needed maintenance has been deferred, and regular visitors know that massive columns on the weather-beaten Potomac River side are under scaffolding for repairs. Still, the center hardly seems in need of the make-it-great-again overhaul the president claims. “It’s in tremendous disrepair, as is a lot of our country,” Trump said. His redecorating plans include “the seats, the décor, everything” and will be funded by Congress. 

But in a series of recent interviews, a board member appointed during Trump’s first term has shared his own glitzed-up vision for the Kennedy Center. Among other things, New York real estate magnate Paolo Zampolli has proposed fashion shows, a Cipriani restaurant and a ramp so he can travel by boat from Georgetown instead of taking an Uber. 

“I see the center like La Scala of Milano,” he told Politico. “So luxurious. So prestigious.”

The center hardly seems in need of the make-it-great-again overhaul the president claims.

But Zampolli’s vision of the Kennedy Center as a hangout for Washington’s 1% sets up an odd dichotomy for the proposed audience. The average red-hat-wearing tourist who might buy tickets for “Cats” has never dreamed of eating overpriced spaghetti at Cipriani. The reality is that most Kennedy Center audiences are in the middle of these two demographics: They are federal workers who enjoy classical music, NGO lobbyists with undergraduate theater degrees and labor leaders with affinities for modern dance. And they are exactly the people now weighing whether to boycott Kennedy Center performances, because they are laid off, they are protesting Trump’s takeover or both.

More important, most Kennedy Center audiences were never the sort of conservative theatergoers clamoring for a season of “Cats,” “Phantom” and “Fiddler on the Roof.” 

“Those are G-rated, general audience, high school-approved shows,” Lulu Picart told me. A Broadway performer and theater artist, Picart appeared at the Kennedy Center in the 2023 touring production of the musical “1776,” which featured a cast of female, trans and nonbinary performers as America’s Founding Fathers. 

Picart and her cast members were appalled to wake up one February morning and discover all record of the groundbreaking performance had been scrubbed from the Kennedy Center’s website. (Ironically, the Trump administration has made artistic endeavors celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence a priority over at the National Endowment for the Arts.) 

The president, in an Evita-like photo-op on Monday, stood in the Kennedy Center’s Opera House presidential box, arms outstretched as if there were hundreds of fans below him instead of a handful of handpicked board members. 

“It won’t be easy, you’ll think it strange,” the eponymous character Evita sang in the opening of her anthem for a new Argentina. She’s absolutely right. The changes Trump is proposing won’t be easy. And as anyone who knows show business could tell the president, it’s also very, very strange.

Rebecca Ritzel

Rebecca Ritzel is a Washington-based culture critic who contributes to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Globe and Mail and other outlets.

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Kyiv, Ukraine – While urging Kyiv to give away its nuclear power plants to Washington, United States President Donald Trump may have forgotten one of the scariest words to ever come out of Ukraine.

Chernobyl, a synonym of the world’s worst nuclear disaster.

The 1986 explosion at the nuclear power plant in then-Soviet Ukraine was hundreds of times mightier than the two atomic bombs Washington dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

The Chernobyl blast rocketed red-hot, highly irradiated graphite and dust, making parts of the cordoned-off “exclusion zone” around the shutdown plant unfit for human habitation for tens of thousands of years.

If it was not for thousands of servicemen and emergency workers who prevented a much bigger bang of Reactor Four, where uranium fuel rods melted into a giant “elephant foot”, most of Eastern Europe would have been similarly uninhabitable.

“For three months, I couldn’t get up, I could barely eat,” one of the workers, 69-year-old Volodymyr Robovyk, told Al Jazeera earlier this month, describing the health consequences he suffered.

What have the US and Ukraine said?

During a phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday, Trump said the best way for Kyiv to protect its four nuclear power plants is to give them away to the US.

“American ownership of those plants could be the best protection for that infrastructure,” Trump said.

Trump added that Washington could be “very helpful in running those plants with its electricity and utility expertise”.

Zelenskyy soon clarified that he and Trump “only talked about one power plant that is under Russian occupation”.

He meant the Zaporizhzhia plant in southeastern Ukraine, Europe’s largest nuclear facility that once generated a fifth of Ukraine’s electricity.

Russia occupied it in 2022, and all of its six reactors have been put into “cold shutdown” that stops energy generation and curbs the risk of an explosion.

However, Kyiv is not going to turn the Zaporizhzhia plant over to Washington.

“If they want to take it from the Russians, invest in it, modernise it, that’s another matter,” Zelenskyy told a news conference on Thursday while on a state visit to Norway. “We’re not talking about the change of ownership.”

What do Ukrainians fear?

Many Ukrainians wonder whether there is any danger of a Russian provocation, such as an explosion if and when Ukraine tries to take over the plant after Trump’s suggestion.

“Of course, there is such danger,” Ihor Romanenko, who served as deputy head of Ukraine’s general staff of armed forces, told Al Jazeera.

He compared the possibility to the June 2023 blast that destroyed the Nova Kakhovka dam, which once provided a crucial water supply to the Zaporizhzhia plant.

Kyiv accused Moscow of blowing up the dam, calling it a “war crime” and “ecocide”.

Romanenko said Trump is abusing Ukraine’s dire military and financial straits to take over the plant – and that Kyiv may sue Washington to get them back in the future.

“Our memory works fine,” he said. “We remember everything that belongs to Ukraine and will fight for what is ours.”

However, a former Zaporizhzhia plant staffer dissuaded his concerns about the possibility of a Russian provocation.

“I don’t think that in this situation [the Russians] will resort to deliberately damaging the station’s parts, because the station is a subject of negotiations and haggling,” a former engineer who fled the plant in 2023, but still maintains ties with former colleagues, told Al Jazeera.

“The better its condition is the higher is the price they will get when they’re swapping it for something – if they’re swapping it,” the engineer said on condition of anonymity.

What’s the mood at the Zaporizhzhia plant?

The engineer said former colleagues who agreed to collaborate with Rosatom, the Kremlin-controlled nuclear monopoly that manages the plant, were worried about Trump’s proposal.

But after realising that Washington did not announce the use of its military force to retake the plant, the collaborators feel elated.

“There are these mood swings,” the engineer said.

Rosatom has long pledged to relocate them to Russia or to the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant Russia is building in southeastern Turkiye in case Ukraine retakes the Zaporizhzhia plant.

And there is always a risk of negligence on the part of Russian servicemen guarding the plant.

In 2023, Al Jazeera published an exclusive report about the ethnic Chechen guards in Enerhodar, the plant’s company town.

They ignored safety measures, installing fences and machineguns inside the plant and seeing it as a “big concrete construction one can hide behind”, a former plant staffer said.

If their negligence results in damage to one of the reactors or spent fuel storage facilities, an explosion similar to a “dirty” atomic bomb could occur – and spew a radioactive cloud over Ukraine and parts of Eastern Europe, another staffer told Al Jazeera.

What’s the role of Ukraine’s nuclear plants?

Before 2022, Ukraine’s four nuclear power plants generated almost half of the nation’s electricity.

Their role was especially crucial after Kyiv lost access to coal mines in the southeastern Donbas region.

Since 2022, Moscow has been shelling Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, and Putin tentatively agreed to stop hitting it only earlier this week.

Shortly after Trump’s idea was announced, US Secretary for Energy Chris Wright told Fox News that his agency has “immense technical expertise” to run them.

“I don’t think that requires boots on the ground,” he said.

Wright has a background in engineering and natural gas. He may not be the best expert on how to operate Soviet-era reactors.

They run on Rosatom-manufactured uranium rods, but in 2005, Kyiv chose to replace them with fuel from Westinghouse, a Pittsburg-based nuclear energy giant.

Seven years later, Westinghouse fuel damaged protective envelopes in two reactors of the South Ukrainian power station.

Rosatom experts were called in to remove the rods, prompting Putin to announce that they “solved complex technical problems”.

Westinghouse redesigned the rods, and no further incidents were reported.

What are the wider concerns about the plants?

International observers are also concerned about Ukraine’s ageing reactors.

Bankwatch, a Prague-based environmentalist group, called them “zombie reactors” and urged Kyiv to shut them down.

However, Petro Kotin, head of Energoatom, Ukraine’s nuclear energy monopoly, told Al Jazeera in 2021 that Bankwatch “manipulated facts” and that his agency succeeded in extending the reactors’ lifespan.

There are also widespread concerns about alleged corruption at Energoatom amid non-transparent deals and the procurement of cheap spare parts.

“They get crazy kickbacks. This is a team of marauders,” Olga Kosharna, a nuclear safety expert, told Al Jazeera in 2021.

What if there is “an equipment failure if you bought the wrong spare part?” she said.

CNN  — 

The southern Ukrainian port city of Odesa was engulfed in flames late Thursday after being struck by a large-scale Russian drone attack, hours after US President Donald Trump expressed optimism about ending the war and as peace talks are set to resume on Monday.

Trump – who recently held separate phone calls with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky on implementing a partial ceasefire – projected optimism about reaching an end to the war on Thursday, saying “we’re doing pretty well in that regard.”

Delegations from Russia and the US are expected to resume talks on ending the war on Monday in Saudi Arabia, both countries’ officials said, following an earlier round of talks in February.

Zelensky said a team from Ukraine will also attend, with parallel meetings likely to take place, and urged Putin to “stop making unnecessary demands that only prolong the war.”

“I believe we’ll get it done. We’ll see what happens,” Trump said on Thursday, referring to the talks.

Hours after Trump spoke, Russia launched a “massive” drone attack on Odesa, hitting civilian targets and injuring at least three people, including a minor, local officials said.

A high-rise residential building and a shopping center were among the targets, local governor Oleh Kiper said.

Videos shared on social media show what appears to be civilian infrastructure on fire and huge plumes of smoke rising over the city. CNN has not been able to immediately verify the videos.

Czech President Peter Pavel was in the port city on an official visit at the time of the attack, Ukrainian official Dmytro Kuleba said.

Meanwhile, Russian assaults wounded at least five others near the southern city of Zaporizhzhia on Thursday, local governor Ivan Fedorov said.

Nearly 200 drones also hit the Kirovohrad region in central Ukraine overnight into Thursday, wounding 10 people, including four children, and damaging homes, a church, and key infrastructure, Zelensky said.

“Russian strikes on Ukraine do not stop, despite their propaganda claims. Every day and every night, nearly a hundred or more drones are launched, along with ongoing missile attacks. With each such launch, the Russians expose to the world their true attitude towards peace,” Zelensky said Thursday on X.

Ukraine and Russia have exchanged aerial assaults in the days since the Kremlin agreed to temporarily halt attacks on energy infrastructure targets, but stopped short of signing off on a broader ceasefire sought by the US.

Overnight into Thursday, Ukraine struck a military airfield deep inside Russian territory, sparking a huge explosion and destroying nearby houses, Russian and Ukrainian officials said.

Ukraine’s military confirmed it was behind the attack on Engels airbase – more than 465 miles from the Ukrainian border – saying it targeted the airbase because it is used by Russia’s air force “to launch missile strikes on the territory of Ukraine and terrorist attacks against the civilian population.”

Zelensky on Wednesday accused Putin of already breaking his pledge, saying that Russia attacked Ukraine with 150 drones, including strikes on energy facilities.

Zelensky has said he is “ready” to pause attacks on Russia’s energy and civilian infrastructure, saying his team will prepare a list of civilian targets to be included in a future deal.

Ukraine “unconditionally agrees” to a ceasefire, but is “waiting for the aggressor to agree,” Zelensky said Thursday while speaking at a press conference in Norway.

Putin announced the halt on energy infrastructure attacks on Tuesday after a lengthy call with Trump. “Vladimir Putin responded positively to this initiative and immediately gave the Russian military the corresponding order,” a Kremlin readout said.

As part of its demands for a broader ceasefire, the Kremlin laid out several tough conditions that Putin had previously insisted on – such as a halt to all foreign military aid and intelligence to Kyiv, and a halt to any Ukrainian mobilization or rearming during that period.

Zelensky spoke to European leaders on Thursday as they reaffirmed their support for Ukraine, calling on other Western leaders to match words of support for Kyiv with deeds, as Trump escalates his courting of Russia.

“The stronger they are on the battlefield, the stronger they are behind the negotiation table,” the European Union’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas said of the Ukrainians, according to Reuters.

The meetings in Saudi Arabia’s capital Riyadh on Monday are designed for US and Russian officials to hammer out more specific language on the deal reached by Trump and Putin, as well as other areas of negotiation toward a full ceasefire. The talks won’t involve Cabinet-level US officials, the State Department said Wednesday.

This story has been updated with additional information.

CNN’s Mariya Knight, Kit Maher, Olivia Kemp, Alayna Treene, Christian Edwards, Clare Sebastian, Svitlana Vlasova and Anna Chernova contributed to this report.

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The president and his allies in Congress are targeting the financial, digital and legal machinery that powers the Democratic Party and much of the progressive political world.

Published March 19, 2025Updated March 20, 2025

Executive actions intended to cripple top Democratic law firms. Investigations of Democratic fund-raising and organizing platforms. Ominous suggestions that nonprofits aligned with Democrats or critical of President Trump should have their tax exemptions revoked.

Mr. Trump and his allies are aggressively attacking the players and machinery that power the left, taking a series of highly partisan official actions that, if successful, will threaten to hobble Democrats’ ability to compete in elections for years to come.

So far, the attacks have been diffuse and sometimes indiscriminate or inaccurate. But inside the administration, there are moves to coordinate and expand the assault.

A small group of White House officials has been working to identify targets and vulnerabilities inside the Democratic ecosystem, taking stock of previous efforts to investigate them, according to two people familiar with the group’s work who requested anonymity to describe it.

Scott Walter, president of the conservative watchdog group Capital Research Center, which monitors liberal money in politics, recently briefed senior White House officials on a range of donors, nonprofit groups and fund-raising techniques. The White House group is said to be exploring what more can be done within the law.

It is not unusual for partisans in Congress or their outside allies to push for investigations into political groups on the other side of the aisle.

But using the levers of government to target the opposition has long been considered an abuse of power, sometimes leading to prosecution. Mr. Trump himself was impeached in 2019 for pressuring the Ukrainian government to investigate the Bidens.

Mr. Trump’s continued willingness to defy that norm — including in a grievance-filled speech at the Justice Department on Friday, during which he name-checked a litany of critics and called them “horrible people,” “thugs” or “scum” — has Democrats sounding the alarm.

“The breadth is breathtaking,” said Cole Leiter, executive director of Americans Against Government Censorship, a coalition of progressive groups and labor unions created last year to defend against an anticipated Republican assault. Taken together, Mr. Leiter said, the efforts amounted to an attempt “to cut the legs out from their opposition.”

It may “sound conspiratorial,” Mr. Leiter added, “but the reality is it’s a sober description of what they’re trying to do.”

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Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, did not directly address the accusation that the administration’s actions were aimed at crippling the left. “The Democrats don’t need President Trump to dismantle the Democratic Party,” he said in a statement. “They are self-destructing with their radical policies.”

Undermining the left would amount to follow-through on Mr. Trump’s campaign promises to seek “retribution” against his perceived enemies.

The sentiment has been echoed and expanded upon by some of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers.

The billionaire Elon Musk, the top Trump donor leading the administration’s cost-cutting initiative, has appeared to encourage investigations of institutions that form the financial backbone of the left. They include ActBlue, the donation platform that helps fund virtually the entire Democratic Party and that congressional Republicans are already probing, and Arabella Advisors, a consulting firm that manages difficult-to-trace “dark money” groups that collectively have spent billions of dollars helping Democrats and their causes.

“Something stinks about ActBlue,” Mr. Musk wrote March 7 in one of several social media posts about the platform. A day later, he claimed without evidence that ActBlue was funded by Democratic megadonors including Herb Sandler, who died in 2019.

(Megan Hughes, an ActBlue spokeswoman, denied that the group was funded by the people Mr. Musk named, living or dead. “The only funders that ActBlue has are small-dollar donors that work sacrificially to fund worthy campaigns and causes,” she said in a statement.)

At the recent White House briefing, according to a person familiar with it, Mr. Walter presented research about ActBlue and major Democratic donors, leaving behind materials including copies of a book he published last year about Arabella.

Congressional officials say the Trump administration has signaled that it intends to throw its weight behind investigations of ActBlue in the House. And Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has suggested that ActBlue might have criminal exposure. He has also demanded documents from and threatened to subpoena another key company providing digital infrastructure for the left, Bonterra, which runs a crucial Democratic voter database system and supplies much of the party’s organizing software.

Some of the president’s allies have welcomed the moves as payback for Democratic congressional investigations of Mr. Trump and Republican political networks.

“Democrats ran breathless investigations of Republican dark money for years, and I hope that this is a concerted effort to go after the left’s dark money,” said Mike Davis, a former Republican congressional aide who founded a group using what he calls brass-knuckle tactics to assail Mr. Trump’s critics.

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For now, Republicans are making wild claims about illegal activity at ActBlue with little to no evidence. But congressional Republicans believe the Trump administration will be far more cooperative in providing financial records to fuel their investigations than the Biden administration was.

“This is not a partisan issue,” said Jonathan Wilcox, deputy chief of staff for Representative Darrell Issa of California, “and we’re optimistic this Treasury Department will demonstrate a completely different commitment to public transparency and government oversight.”

Last week, several Republican lawmakers urged Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to investigate ActBlue or to help them do so. Mr. Issa sought information on claims that ActBlue had assisted groups accused of supporting terrorism. Representatives James Comer of Kentucky, Nick Langworthy of New York and Bryan Steil of Wisconsin requested reports about suspicious activity related to ActBlue.

The Treasury Department did not respond when asked if it was cooperating with the Republican congressmen.

But the terrorism accusation — even without evidence — is notable. A bill that passed the House over objections from most Democrats and many in the nonprofit world would have allowed the Treasury secretary to strip a charitable group of its tax-exempt status if it was deemed a “terrorist-supporting” organization.

The F.B.I. declined to say if it was acting on a request last week by Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona for an investigation of whether ActBlue had allowed Democrats “to skirt the integrity of federal campaign finance laws,” including by processing donations that originated in hostile foreign countries. But Kash Patel, the new F.B.I. director, a Trump loyalist, has reportedly expressed willingness to work aggressively to comply with Republican congressional oversight, and a close Trump ally predicted Monday at an event with Donald Trump Jr. that the F.B.I. would take action “soon” on ActBlue.

The group has denied Republican claims of wrongdoing. Ms. Hughes said ActBlue was “meeting this moment with the same resilience and determination that have fueled our work for decades.”

But Democrats worry that ActBlue may offer a harbinger of what’s in store for other important Democratic institutions.

Mr. Musk last week highlighted a Fox News segment that accused the billionaire-backed groups managed by Arabella Advisors of falsely portraying themselves as a grass-roots resistance to Mr. Trump.

In an appearance on Mr. Cruz’s podcast that was filmed inside the White House, Mr. Musk claimed that Arabella’s groups and ActBlue were part of a “left-wing N.G.O. cabal” that was organizing and funding protests of his electric automaker Tesla. He called the protests, which have included vandalism of Tesla dealerships and charging stations, “terrorist activity,” and Mr. Cruz suggested it should be prosecuted.

Arabella said in a statement that it simply provided “operational and administrative support to philanthropists and organizations” and that it did not “have donors, make grants or engage in political activity.” The firm added that it “has no connection to violent protests or vandalism against Musk or his businesses. Any suggestion to the contrary is false.”

While some Republican students of left-wing political financing have been puzzled by Mr. Musk’s claims, they are hoping to harness his interest to generate more sustained investigations by the Trump White House and Congress.

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Mr. Trump himself appeared to call into question the charitable tax-exempt status of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, a Democratic-aligned watchdog group that has long been among the more aggressive litigants against him and is currently suing to force the release of records related to Mr. Musk’s cost-cutting.

“CREW is a charitable organization, and that’s a political thing,” Mr. Trump said on Friday at the Justice Department, singling out Norm Eisen, a former board member, as a “vicious and violent” person who has “been after me for nine years.” (Mr. Eisen’s new group, State Democracy Defenders Fund, has also fought some of the new administration’s actions in court.)

Jordan Libowitz, a CREW spokesman, declined to comment on Mr. Trump’s mention of the group.

Personal grievance also figured heavily into directives Mr. Trump recently issued restricting access to government information and contracts for lawyers at firms associated with his critics.

The targeted firms include Perkins Coie, which was paid about $5 million by the Democratic National Committee and other party committees during the 2024 elections. It had earned Mr. Trump’s ire by facilitating funding for since-discredited research on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and the D.N.C. into his team’s dealings with Russia.

Covington & Burling, which received nearly $8.6 million from the D.N.C. and former Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign in the 2024 campaign cycle, was targeted by a presidential memorandum stripping security clearances from lawyers who represented Jack Smith, the former special counsel who pursued two separate indictments of the president in 2023.

The D.N.C. declined to comment on Mr. Trump’s moves against the law firms and its vendors, including ActBlue.

A third law firm, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, was the subject of an executive order Friday restricting its business activities because one of its lawyers, Mark F. Pomerantz, had tried to build a criminal case against Mr. Trump several years ago when Mr. Pomerantz worked at the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

Perkins Coie has lost “significant revenue” as a result of the order, lawyers for the firm said in a lawsuit that prompted a judge to halt parts of the order.

On Friday, Mr. Trump singled out Mr. Pomerantz and Marc Elias, a former Perkins Coie lawyer who had been the firm’s point person on the Russia research. Calling them “radicals” and “really bad people,” Mr. Trump confusingly claimed that the lawyers had “tried to turn America into a corrupt Communist and third world country.”

On MSNBC afterward, Mr. Elias said, “I’d be an idiot not to be worried.”

But he vowed to continue battling Mr. Trump. “The question is not whether we are worried,” he said, adding, “The question is what do we do.”

Kenneth P. Vogel is based in Washington and investigates the intersection of money, politics and influence. More about Kenneth P. Vogel

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