Probable cause to hold Trump admin in contempt, judge says
A federal district judge says there is probable cause to hold the Trump administration in criminal contempt of court over deportations.
President Donald Trump is floating an idea to dramatically reshape how the country does it finances by using the revenue raised through his tariff policies as a replacement for the federal income tax.
“There’s a real chance,” Trump said in an interview broadcast April 15 on Fox Noticias. “There is a chance that the money from tariffs could be so great that it would replace (the income tax). You know, in the old days, about 1870 to 1913, the tariffs were the only form of money. And that’s when our nation was relatively the richest. We were the richest.”
Ratified in 1913, the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution established Congress’s right to impose a federal income tax. On Capitol Hill, details are still under wraps as Republican lawmakers this year try to pass a major tax and spending bill that is seen as the primary vehicle for Trump’s second-term agenda.
The president has imposed sweeping tariffs on dozens of countries around the world and claimed during the interview that the tariffs were bringing in “two billion and three billion dollars a day.”
The administration has currently imposed a 90-day pause on new reciprocal tariffs, while raising rates on Chinese goods to as high as 245% when counting the tariffs imposed during Trump’s first term and the Biden administration.
Money and a plane ticket
During the same interview with Fox’s Rachel Campos-Duffy, Trump said he wants to give money and a plane ticket to undocumented immigrants who “self-deport.”
“We’re going to have a self-deportation program,” the president said. “We’re going to give them a stipend. We’re going to give them some money and a plane ticket, and then we’re going to work with them.”
If the immigrants are “good,” the administration would work to get them back as legal immigrants, he said.
“Because you have some great people that came in,” said Trump. “But we have very bad ones.”
The Biden autopen
Trump also shared his thoughts on an allegation he’s made previously about former President Joe Biden and his use of the autopen – a machine used to automatically add a signature to documents.
Trump has claimed some of the preemptive pardons issued in the final hours of his presidency are “void, vacant, and of no further force or effect” because Biden had used an autopen instead of signing them by hand.
“In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on March 17.
Asked by Campos-Duffy if he believed former First lady Jill Biden was using the “autopen,” Trump disagreed with the suggestion.
“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “They had a lot of bad people. They had a lot of radical left lunatics in there. And I think he was perfect. He was perfect for them because he didn’t have a clue.”
Campos-Duffy is married to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. Both were previously cast members of the MTV reality television show “The Real World.”
Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy is a White House correspondent for USA TODAY. You can follow her on X @SwapnaVenugopal