Morning Brief: Trump’s Tariffs, Le Pen Barred & Social Security Fraud?

Trump’s tariffs go into effect at midnight as foreign leaders and state governors scramble to negotiate last-minute deals. Populist leader Marine Le Pen is banned from running for office in France after being found guilty of embezzlement. And, Elon Musk says he’s uncovered millions of non-citizens on the social security rolls, including thousands who allegedly voted.

It’s Tuesday, April 1st, and this is the news you need to know to start your day. If you’d rather listen to your news, today’s edition of the Morning Wire podcast can be heard below:

Trump Tariffs Take Hold

(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Topline: Just hours from Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day,” consumers, corporations, and international trading partners are preparing for a slew of new tariffs that could reshape the global economy.

For weeks now, the president has floated various ideas on tariffs, sometimes saying he’d match the rates set by other countries, then floating the idea of a universal 20 percent rate, before saying that he could be “much more generous” with our trading partners. We’re still not entirely sure what the details of Trump’s “Liberation Day” policy will be – that ambiguity is almost certainly intentional.

The Art of the Deal: By waiting until the last minute, Trump has left the door open for negotiating. On Friday, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum met with Trump officials to discuss her plans to improve border security, clearly hoping to ease looming tariffs on her country. The president has fielded calls from the prime ministers of Canada and Great Britain — both men reportedly made their last-minute pitches seeking to dodge tariffs. In the last 72 hours, lawmakers in both parties have also been calling the White House to lobby for exemptions for particular industries in their states, and a flood of business leaders have made their case to the president, some vowing to bring manufacturing stateside and pour money into investments and jobs in exchange for lower tariffs.

While that shifting picture might benefit Trump from a negotiating standpoint, it has spooked markets. Wall Street saw its second worst day of the year on Friday and continued to see-saw Monday:

• The DOW Jones was up 1% at market close after a tumultuous day of trading
• The NASDAQ was down 0.14%
• The S&P 500 was up by 0.55%
• Japan’s NIKKEI 225 index was down by more than 4%
• Various European stock exchanges have been trending down for days

Amid the market swings and concerns over potential price increases from these tariffs, there’s no doubt that more voters have soured on President Trump’s handling of the economy — the issue he’s typically been the most popular on. Numerous polls show his approval rating on the economy lower now than at any point in his first or second term. The Associated Press, for example, had him at 40%. If Liberation Day results in considerable price increases, there’s a real risk those numbers could fall even further.

French Opposition Leader Banned

(Photo by Tom Nicholson/Getty Images)

Topline: Marine Le Pen, the populist frontrunner for France’s 2027 presidential race, has been convicted of embezzlement and banned from seeking office for five years.

Marine Le Pen is the leader of the National Rally, a right-wing political party in France. She has generally been characterized by the leaders of France’s establishment parties as an extremist but has proved to be very popular. She came in first place in the first round of the last French presidential election, and polling continues to show that more than 1 in 3 French voters back her and her party, more than any of the other prospective candidates. National Rally also holds a plurality of seats in France’s national assembly, 126/577, although they have been consistently kept out of government by coalitions of other parties.

Le Pen was found guilty of misappropriating several million euros in European Union funds. Her party was entitled to a certain amount of EU funding to pay staff to work for general European political operations, but the court determined she used that money to the benefit of her party rather than restricting it to EU-related expenses.

However: Ellen Fantini, managing editor of The European Conservative, told Morning Wire that virtually every major party in Europe uses these funds similarly. She says the way the conviction is being carried out makes it very clear that this is about sidelining Le Pen as a candidate.

“Under French law, of course, she can appeal the conviction, like in the United States,” Fantini said. “But the prohibition on running for office is in execution as of basically today, even though she has the right to appeal. So it’s obvious that that’s the real thing they wanted.”

Critics of the case against Le Pen have condemned it as a blatant weaponization of the justice system against a political opponent and compared the legal battle to the various efforts to convict Donald Trump on state and federal charges in the lead-up to the 2024 election. Leaders of right-wing parties across Europe have spoken up in support of Le Pen:

• On Monday, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban posted, “Je suis Marine!” [I am Marine].
• Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, leader of the right-wing populist League party, called the ruling a “declaration of war by Brussels.”
• “I am shocked by the incredibly tough verdict against Marine Le Pen,” Geert Wilders of the Netherlands’ right-wing Party for Freedom, said. “I support and believe in her 100% and I trust she will win the appeal and become President of France.”

Le Pen has already indicated that she will appeal the case, although her chances of overturning the ban before the 2027 election deadline are slim.

“This evening, millions of French people are indignant, indignant to an unimaginable extent seeing that France, the country of human rights, judges have implemented practices that were thought to be the reserve of authoritarian regimes,” Le Pen said in an interview on Monday.

Non-Citizen Social Security

(Photo by Douglas Sacha via Getty Images)

Topline: Elon Musk and venture capitalist Antonio Gracias have alleged widespread fraud in the Social Security system.

Senior figures within the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project claimed to have uncovered millions of non-citizens who were collecting Social Security benefits and potentially voting in American elections. Musk and Gracias said on Sunday that 2.1 million non-citizens received Social Security Numbers last year alone, and 4.8 million received SSNs over the last four years. That alone isn’t necessarily evidence of fraud – non-citizens in the country under certain rules are eligible for Social Security Numbers – but the number of non-citizens receiving them surged under the Biden administration.

“The defaults in the system from Social Security to all of the benefit programs have been set to max inclusion, max pay for these people, and minimum collection,” Gracias said on Sunday. “We found 1.3 million of them already on Medicaid as an example.”

Social Security is currently deep in the red – the trust fund that handles retirement benefits, for instance, is expected to run out of money in 2033.

Musk claimed that the surge in illegal immigration and increased access to government benefits during the Biden years were intentional government policy. “They weren’t asleep at the switch. It was a massive, large-scale program to import as many illegals as possible, ultimately to change the entire voting map of the United States and disenfranchise the American people and make it a permanent deep blue one party state.”

Gracias says that some of these non-citizens who received Social Security numbers showed up to vote. “We actually just took a sample and looked at voter registration records and we found people here registered to vote,” Gracias said. “We found some by sampling that actually did vote, and we have referred them to prosecution.”