Trump angrily denies Elon Musk will be part of sensitive Pentagon briefing on China: Live updates

The president’s first posts of the day find him picking up exactly where he left off last night: attacking the New York Times and Maggie Haberman (or “Maggot Hagerman”), threatening to send Tesla vandals to prison, perhaps in El Salvador, and rebuking judges for thwarting him.

Here’s Alex Woodward on Trump previously talking up the prospect of deporting American citizens to Central America.

Fox News host Harris Faulkner invented a bizarre situation in order to ask White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt if those who vandalize Teslas could receive the death penalty.

In Faulkner’s wild hypothetical, she brought up a possibility “that no one’s talking about.”

Ariana Baio has the story.

While Elon Musk is the face and public figure leading DOGE, its de-facto leader is actually the man who has been the tech mogul’s right-hand man for decades, according to a report.

Steve Davis, a 45-year-old engineer, has taken the lead in several of DOGE’s controversial cost-cutting moves, according to The New York Times.

Gustaf Kilander reports from Washington, D.C.

Here’s James Liddell on how the embattled tech boss responded to the NYT’s reporting on his attendance at a top Pentagon meeting.

Here’s Richard Hall’s take on yesterday’s surreal spectacle..

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has insisted that “all nuclear power plants belong to the people of Ukraine” after reports that Trump said an American takeover of the country’s nuclear power would offer the “best protection” for it.

In their first conversation since the American angrily rebuked Zelensky in the Oval Office, the U.S. president reportedly suggested Washington take ownership of his country’s energy infrastructure.

But Kyiv says the discussions referred only to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which is under Russian occupation.

Jane Dalton reports.

Both Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin have insisted recently that Ukraine’s forces in Kursk are surrounded by Moscow’s troops and are in imminent danger but U.S. intelligence reports are contradicting those claims.

A trio of U.S. and European officials familiar with intelligence details of the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine told Reuters that the situation on the ground does not reflect the comments made by Trump and Putin.

One of the U.S. officials also said that the White House was briefed on the actual situation in Ukraine, so it’s unclear why Trump is continuing to state otherwise.

Graig Graziosi reports.

During an event in Florida yesterday, Trump’s tough guy border czar Tom Homan called birthright citizenship a “magnet” for unauthorized immigration and claimed the Supreme Court still needs to decide the matter – something it has already done multiple times in decisions dating back to 1898.

Josh Marcus reports.

A federal judge has temporarily blocked Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from their “fishing expedition” in search of a “fraud epidemic” based on “little more than suspicion” inside the Social Security Administration.

A temporary restraining order from District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander prevents the world’s wealthiest man and his team of 10 at Social Security – which Musk has baselessly labeled a “Ponzi scheme” and accused of handing out tens of billions of dollars in retirement benefits to dead people – from “unfettered” access to personal information for millions of Americans.

U.S. DOGE Service employees at the nation’s retirement and disability agency currently have access to Social Security data or “personally identifiable information,” government lawyers said this month.

Their level of access “provides no avenues” to change beneficiary data or payments, but gives them the ability to “review records needed to detect fraud,” lawyers wrote in court filings March 12.

Alex Woodward reports.

President Donald Trump signed an order purporting to shut down the Department of Education yesterday, delivering a long-anticipated political win for conservatives who’ve long pushed for an end to public education in favor of private and religious schools.

Flanked by schoolchildren at desks, Trump signed the order during an East Room ceremony attended by multiple Republican governors and activists who celebrated the move, including Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who the president pointedly said he hopes is the last person to hold the position.

Trump claimed President Jimmy Carter’s decision to sign legislation creating the department had faced widespread opposition and insisted poor test scores among American schoolchildren proved critics “right.”

“Students in our public elementary and middle schools score worse in reading today than when the department opened, by a lot,” he said, adding that the department’s budget has nonetheless “exploded by 600 percent” to include “bureaucrats in buildings all over Washington.”

Among those reacting angrily to yesterday’s news was Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a former high school teacher, who joked: “It’s so obscene that he would put a mock classroom – we all know he's never been in one.”

Andrew Feinberg and Ariana Baio have this report.