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President Donald Trump on Monday continued what he has dubbed his flood-the-zone strategy, issuing a pair of executive orders that target trading practices, threatening Hamas and installing an ally atop two government ethics offices, even as federal courts continued to block some of his efforts and Democrats castigated his moves to shutter agencies as illegal.
Trump signed separate executive orders imposing 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum, ending the federal government's "procurement and forced use of paper straws" and eliminating a training program for government leaders known as the Federal Executive Institute. He issued a warning to Hamas, saying that if the militant group does not release all Israeli hostages from Gaza by "Saturday at 12 o'clock," then "all bets are off and let hell break out."
And the president named longtime supporter Doug Collins - a former Georgia congressman already serving as secretary of veterans affairs - to run two government ethics offices after abruptly firing the offices' leaders in recent days.
"I got elected on making government better, more efficient and smaller. And that's what we're doing," said Trump, who also pardoned former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat who was convicted of public corruption and served eight years in prison before Trump commuted his sentence in 2020. Blagojevich appeared on Trump's television show, "Celebrity Apprentice," more than a decade ago.
The president also signed a memo appointing dozens of senior officials across the government, including seven ambassadors.
The series of moves, announced in the Oval Office on Monday afternoon and coming as Trump enters his fourth week in the White House, reflect the new administration's dizzying pace as the president and his allies seek to remake the federal government.
Conservatives have generally hailed the actions - "Democrats rage as DOGE cuts waste in Govt," read a Fox News chyron as Trump spoke in the Oval Office - and a CBS News poll released Sunday found that 53 percent of Americans approve of the president's performance.
"I have high approval ratings because I'm, you know, I'm using common sense," Trump told reporters.
The moves also came amid mounting lawsuits and court rulings against the new administration.
Minutes before Trump spoke to reporters, a federal judge in Massachusetts partially blocked the implementation of a new policy set to strip billions of dollars in biomedical funding from universities and research organizations. The National Institutes of Health on Friday night said it would cap federal payments to cover the cost of research infrastructure, upending a decades-old process hammered out between the federal government and the private organizations that help oversee the nation's research.
Elon Musk, Trump's billionaire ally and the leader of the U.S. DOGE Service, had argued that the new NIH policy would cut administrative waste - but university leaders, scientists and even some Republicans had warned that it would devastate academia and harm efforts to research cancer, Alzheimer's disease and other conditions. The federal judge's temporary halt on the policy applies only to the 22 states that sued the administration; GOP-led states did not join the suit.
In a statement earlier Monday, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said the "arbitrary cuts" would be "devastating, stopping vital biomedical research and leading to the loss of jobs" in her state.
Refugee advocacy groups on Monday also sued Trump over his executive order suspending the U.S. refugee admissions program - the first legal challenge against the resettlement freeze, which took effect last month and suspended the refugee admissions program completely.
Some of Trump's announcements threaten to escalate regional and international tensions.
The steel and aluminum tariffs are likely to further strain relations between the United States and its North American neighbors, which are among the largest suppliers of steel imports. The president just last week paused plans to impose a separate set of import taxes on goods from Canada and Mexico, which he linked to concerns over immigration and drug trafficking.
And Trump's warning to Hamas comes on the eve of his meeting with King Abdullah II, the leader of Jordan, a small Arab monarchy that is a longtime ally of the United States.
The Jordanian king is set to sit down on Tuesday with the U.S. president in a closely watched visit after Trump proposed removing all Palestinians from Gaza and sending them to nearby countries including Jordan and Egypt. Trump last week also said that the United States would "take over" Gaza and turn it into the "Riviera" of the Middle East. The comments have sparked anger in Jordan and other countries across the Middle East.
Speaking to reporters Monday, Trump suggested he could withhold aid from Jordan and Egypt if they don't agree to take Palestinians from Gaza.
"Yeah, maybe, sure why not," he said.
Democratic lawmakers on Monday rallied outside the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in Washington and the Social Security Administration in Baltimore, protesting how Musk and his DOGE agents have accessed government systems and sought to shutter agencies.
"Elon Musk wants to shut down the CFPB, but we're here to say we're going to shut down Elon Musk's illegal operation," Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) said, vowing that protesters would hold the administration accountable.
In his remarks, Trump also teased forthcoming actions such as tariffs on automobiles. He did not address an anticipated executive order that would target crime and homeless encampments in Washington, D.C.
The president also dwelled on a longtime priority: reversing the Biden administration's effort to shift to paper straws, which was favored by environmental groups but which Trump has long criticized as flimsy and unworkable.
"We're going back to plastic straws," Trump said, adding that he didn't "think that plastics are going to affect a shark very much as they're eating, as they're munching their way through the ocean."