HITTING “PAUSE”: Donald Trump blinked in the face of world economic turmoil and placed a 90-day pause on his draconian “reciprocal” import tariffs. The stock markets that lost trillions of dollars in value over the previous four trading days immediately rebounded, but the uncertainty extends out to the middle of summer.

  The European Union in response delayed their retaliatory tariffs for 90 days as well.

  A prime mover in Trump’s decision may have been that investors were beginning to dump US government bonds, long considered one of the world’s safest havens for money. He was also under fire from corporate executives who said the tariff chaos made it impossible to make plans.

  Trump said people were getting “a little bit yippy.”

  Following Trump’s announcement, the S&P 500 rose 9.5 percent and the Dow Jones was up nearly 3,000 points, almost 8 percent, the third largest gains since the end of WWII.

  Interestingly, a couple of hours before his tariff reversal, Trump posted on his Truth Social that “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT,” a public invitation to insider trading.

  The tariff pause leaves a 10 percent universal tariff on imported goods and does not include China. Trump posted on his Truth Social that he’s ratcheting up the pressure on China; “Based on the lack of respect that China has shown to the World’s Markets, I am hereby raising the Tariff charged to China by the United States of America to 125%, effective immediately.”

  Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stepped before the cameras to cast the chaos as Trump’s clever plan. “This was his strategy all along and you might even say that he goaded China into a bad position, they have shown themselves to the world to be the bad actors.”

  Spinning off the title of Trump’s bestseller, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt described it as “the art of the deal.”

  If it was strategy, Trump forgot to tell Jamieson Greer, the US trade representative, who was defending tariffs before a House committee when his phone delivered him news of the pause. 

  Despite his aides and appointees initially saying the tariffs were not a negotiating ploy, Trump cut their legs off saying the are a good jump off place for negotiations and, “You have to have flexibility.”

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE:

— Vengeance is his. President Trump yesterday issued orders for the investigation of two members of his first term administration who have opposed him as well as placing sanctions on yet another large law firm has brought legal actions.

  Trump ordered the investigation of Christopher Krebs, a cybersecurity official at the time who said fraud did not turn the 2020 election against the then President. Trump also ordered the Justice Department and Homeland Security to investigate Miles Taylor, former chief of staff for Homeland Security, who in 2018 published an anonymous critical opinion in The NY Times describing himself as part of the resistance within the administration.

  The executive order about Krebs said his “misconduct involved the censorship of disfavored speech implicating the 2020 election and COVID-19 pandemic.” Trump’s order on Taylor accused him of stoking “dissension by manufacturing sensationalist reports on the existence of a supposed ‘resistance’ within the Federal Government that ‘vowed’ to undermine and render ineffective a sitting President.”

  Yet another Trump order commanded punishment for the law firm Susman Godfrey, which represented Dominion Voting Systems in their successful slander suit against Fox News. It says, “Susman spearheads efforts to weaponize the American legal system and degrade the quality of American elections,” and that the law firm engages “in dangerous efforts to undermine the effectiveness of the United States military through the injection of political and radical ideology, and it supports efforts to discriminate on the basis of race.” 

— Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union revived the lawsuit to stop the Trump administration from using the 1798 Enemy Aliens Act to send Venezuelan migrants to prison in El Salvador. The suit was filed two days after the Supreme Court said challenges to the use of the Alien Enemies Act had to be filed where the migrants had been held in the US rather than in Washington, where the orders were issued.

— White House Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said she  will not engage with reporters who list their pronouns in their email signatures. She said, “Any reporter who chooses to put their preferred pronouns in their bio clearly does not care about biological reality or truth and therefore cannot be trusted to write an honest story.” 

THE SPIN RACK:  The number of people killed in the Dominican Republic nightclub collapse is up to 184. Among the dead at the Jet Set nightclub was Fray Luis Rosario, who owned restaurants in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Providence, Rhode Island. — Russian-American ballerina Ksenia Karelina was released from Kremlin custody in a prisoner swap in exchange for German-Russian Arthur Petrov at a swap in Abu Dhabi. Karelina had been sentenced to 12 years in a penal colony for treason. The US resident on visiting her birth country was found to have donated $51.80 to a Ukraine charity.

BELOW THE FOLD:  Mattel Toys  is releasing a “Ken” doll in the likeness of basketball great LeBron James. The Ken doll is an inch taller than the usual 12 inches, which doesn’t measure up to the real LeBron who is 6ft-9. And Ken can’t hit a three pointer.

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