Trump lauded with chants of ‘four more years’ by Steve Bannon, Black supporters; Elon Musk makes bizarre CPAC appearance: Live updates

Elon Musk on Thursday echoed false Kremlin claims that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is a “dictator” and vowed to change X’s Community Notes feature, after accusing “governments and legacy media” of gaming the crowd-sourced fact-checking feature amid the Trump administration’s ongoing public spat with the Ukrainian leader.

Josh Marcus has the details.

President Donald Trump is speaking at a dinner for the Republican Governors Association in Washington, D.C.

“I want to get you home to the hockey game,” Trump said at the beginning of his remarks. The U.S. and Canadian national teams are playing this evening.

The RGA is responsible for recruiting candidates, raising funds, and coordinating strategies to help Republicans win gubernatorial races.

Trump opened by praising Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, the association’s chairman, who has had a complicated relationship with the president. Trump was highly critical of Kemp for certifying his narrow loss in Georgia during the 2020 election, which Trump falsely claimed was rigged.

They reconciled before the 2024 election, and Kemp endorsed Trump. “He was fantastic,” Trump said of Kemp. “We won Georgia by a lot.”

The president also gave a shoutout to RNC chairman Michael Whatley who was in attendance and touted his election integrity efforts in the 2024 election.

Talking about tariffs, Trump says he has been called by many big companies that want to “beat” the tariffs. The president has said that companies that make their products in the U.S. will obviously pay no import taxes.

The president said he believes that in the midterms, the GOP will increase its margins “by a lot” and that it will be a “big surprise.”

SpaceX founder and Trump megadonor turned “special government employee” Elon Musk waved a chainsaw around and continued to accuse the Biden administration of abandoning American astronauts during a madcap surprise appearance on stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference Thursday.

Andrew Feinberg watched and filed this report from the conference in National Harbor.

The Washington Post reports that President Donald Trump is preparing to dissolve the leadership of the 250-year-old U.S. Postal Service and absorb the independent mail agency into the Commerce Department.

Trump is expected to issue an executive order as soon as this week to fire the members of the Postal Service’s governing board and place the agency under the control of the Commerce Department and Secretary Howard Lutnick, according to six people familiar with the plans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisals.

The board is planning to fight Trump’s order, three of those people told The Washington Post. In an emergency meeting Thursday, the board retained outside counsel and gave instructions to sue the White House if the president removed members of the board or attempted to alter the agency’s independent status. Trump’s order to place the Commerce Department in charge of the Postal Service likely violates federal law, according to postal experts.

Elon Musk has claimed that his acolytes at the Department of Government Efficiency, reportedly a collection of youthful tech-bros, work 120-hour weeks in Trump’s quest to rid the U.S. government of wasteful federal spending and unnecessary staffers.

To operate such mammoth shifts, the DOGE disciples survive on a nutritious diet of takeout pizza, Red Bull and Doritos, according to The Times. What sleep they do manage to get is done in temperature-regulating sleep pods, that are powered by AI.

The pods have reportedly been installed on the fifth floor of the Office of Personnel Management, where the team is located – barely a five-minute walk from the White House.

Mike Bedigan has the story.

The Trump administration has stopped U.S. scientists from participating in critical U.N. climate change assessments, according to two sources familiar with the situation who spoke to Reuters. This decision is part of a broader withdrawal from efforts to mitigate climate change and from multilateral cooperation.

The stop-work order affects staff members of the U.S. Global Change Research Program and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration engaged with a key working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

One source stated that the U.S. will not attend a major IPCC plenary meeting in Hangzhou, China, next week. The meeting is set to plan the seventh global climate assessment.

The White House declined to comment when approached by Reuters, and the State Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Eric Garcia reports from National Harbor:

Now, after Trump pardoned them, they received rockstar treatment throughout the conference.

A federal judge ruled that the Trump administration must temporarily restore foreign aid programs worldwide. The administration had continued to withhold funds in violation of a court order. However, the judge chose not to hold them in contempt of court.

Judge Amir H. Ali rejected a request from nonprofit groups working with the U.S. Agency for International Development to declare Trump administration officials in contempt of his previous order.

Earlier this week, the administration argued in court filings that it was keeping thousands of USAID and State Department contracts and grants canceled or suspended despite a temporary restraining order that payments be restored, arguing that it was complying, but they were each one by one.

Ali wrote on Thursday he “was not inviting defendants to continue the suspension while they reviewed contracts and legal authorities to come up with a new, post-hoc rationalization for the en masse suspension.”

Two nonprofit groups, among several plaintiffs suing over the aid freeze, asked Ali on Wednesday to find administration officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in contempt for “brazen defiance” of his earlier order.

Ali concluded that contempt was “not warranted on the current record” because the administration had acknowledged the need for “prompt compliance” in its court filings.

Here’s Rhian Lubin with the background to the case:

New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced she will not remove Eric Adams from office on Thursday, despite the New York City mayor facing deep concerns over his leadership priorities, but will impose new guardrails on his administration.

The governor said she will introduce legislation that seeks to increase oversight over Adams’s administration and prevent the mayor from firing the head of the Department of Investigation without the approval of the state inspector general.