Former Sen. Ben Sasse says he has been diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer

(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney are scheduled to meet at the White House on Tuesday amid the trade war between the neighboring nations.

In July, Trump issued a 35% tariff on most goods and raw materials from Canada.

Canada originally issued retaliatory tariffs. However, in August, Carney announced exemptions for goods covered under the United States-Mexico-Canada trade pact.

During their last meeting in May, Carney pushed back against Trump’s controversial proposal to make Canada the 51st state.

“As you know from real estate, there are some places that are not for sale. And Canada is not for sale, it will never be for sale,” Carney told Trump. 

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(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump issued vetoes for the first bills of his second term, including a bipartisan bill intended to provide funding for a water infrastructure project in Colorado, a measure that passed the House and Senate unanimously.

The Finish the Arkansas Valley Conduit Act was set to provide clean water to rural parts of Colorado.

“Enough is enough. My administration is committed to preventing American taxpayers from funding expensive and unreliable policies,” Trump wrote in a veto letter sent to Congress. “Ending the massive cost of taxpayer handouts and restoring fiscal sanity is vital to economic growth and the fiscal health of the nation.”

Trump also vetoed the Miccosukee Reserved Area Amendment Act, a bipartisan bill that aimed in part to optimize water flow into part of Everglades National Park designated for the Miccosukee Native American tribe and to incorporate the Osceola Camp into the Miccosukee Reserved Area to improve the governing structure of the tribe.

“[D]espite seeking funding and special treatment from the Federal Government, the Miccosukee Tribe has actively sought to obstruct reasonable immigration policies that the American people decisively voted for when I was elected,” Trump wrote in his veto. “My Administration is committed to preventing American taxpayers from funding projects for special interests, especially those that are unaligned with my Administration’s policy of removing violent criminal illegal aliens from the country.”

The Miccosukee tribe was part of the opposition to the construction of the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” migrant detention facility in the Everglades.

Trump’s veto of the bipartisan bill supporting the Colorado project comes at a time when he has fractious relations with some of the state’s political leaders.

The bill was co-sponsored by House Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who defied the Trump administration by signing onto the Epstein discharge petition that forced a vote on a measure to compel the DOJ to release the files. The pipeline would provide water to residents of Boebert’s district.

“This isn’t over,” Boebert said on social media on Tuesday, responding to the White House’s veto announcement.

Democrats also are responding to the bill’s veto, with Colorado’s Democratic Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper lambasting Trump on social media, with both accusing him of playing partisan politics.

“Trump just vetoed my Arkansas Valley Conduit bill — passed unanimously to deliver clean, affordable water to Southeast Colorado,” Bennet said. “This isn’t governing. It’s a revenge tour.”

“Donald Trump is playing partisan games and punishing Colorado by making rural communities suffer without clean drinking water,” Hickenlooper said, adding that Congress should overturn Trump’s veto.

Since the bill cleared both chambers unanimously, Congress could overturn Trump’s veto. Doing so would require passing the measure by a two-thirds vote in both chambers. Trump vetoed ten bills total during his first administration, only one of which — the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 — was overridden by Congress.

Trump’s veto also comes two weeks after he attacked Colorado Gov. Jared Polis for refusing to release former Mesa County, Colorado, clerk Tina Peters from prison following her receiving a presidential pardon.

Peters was convicted on state charges for a scheme to tamper with voting systems driven by false claims about the 2020 election. Trump’s pardon power does not extend to state crimes.

“The poorly run state of Colorado with a governor whose incompetent and frankly, with a governor that won’t allow our wonderful Tina to come out of a jail, in a high intensity jail because she caught people cheating on an election and they said she was cheating,” Trump said on Dec. 15.

He added, “She wasn’t cheating. She went over, she looked at one of the election scams going on. And because she did that, they put her in jail for nine years.”

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(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump last week announced a “complete blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers going into and out of Venezuela,” ratcheting up the pressure on Nicolás Maduro’s regime as 15,000 U.S. troops and 11 warships stand ready in nearby waters — and leaving questions over the scope of the apparent escalation.

A naval blockade is considered an act of war under international law. But Trump’s reference to “sanctioned” tankers indicated U.S. operations would continue as a law enforcement crackdown by the U.S. Coast Guard, which seized an oil tanker off the Venezuelan coast last week and another over the weekend.

A Coast Guard interdiction is not a military operation; it is a court-authorized enforcement of U.S. sanctions.

According to retired Marine Corps Col. Steve Ganyard, a former State Department official and an ABC News contributor, the president’s orders, announced on his social media platform, amount to a legal quarantine — and not a blockade — because the post references only legally sanctioned tankers.

But Trump also referred to the Venezuelan regime as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), which could implicate any oil tanker that enters Venezuelan waters.

It wasn’t clear how the administration could designate the government as terrorists — or whether Trump was making reference to Cartel de los Soles, which the administration designated as a terror organization and has said is headed by Maduro.

What impact could a quarantine or blockade have?

Trump’s post last week “leaves more questions than answers,” said Clayton Seigle, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “What exactly are we going to do? How are we going to do it?”

“None of that is really detailed,” he said.

Whether the escalated pressure will target sanctioned vessels — or all vessels — remains an open question, but both approaches would impact Maduro, Seigle said.

“If you cut off all oil exports, and the associated revenues — and that’s a big if –then I think in a matter of weeks, the regime in Caracas would face extreme pressure,” he said.

If the U.S. continues to target only sanctioned tankers, “then I think that it could be a more prolonged runway for the regime to try to work something out, find a compromise, or even plan a deliberate exit.”

The U.S. says it has killed more than 100 people in the 25 strikes it says it has carried out on alleged drug smuggling boats since September.

Experts have pointed to President John F. Kennedy’s quarantine of Cuba in 1962 as an analogue to Trump’s approach — with unknown possibilities inviting risk.

“What if a ship doesn’t stop? This was the debate in the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Seigle said. “It’s all fun and games if they pull over and let [themselves] get boarded.”

“What if they don’t? Are you opening fire? Are you sinking ships?”

The announced blockade, though, “looks like it’s a relatively low-risk military operation” designed “to prevent” such a “quagmire,” Seigle said.

“Because if it goes smoothly and they’re able to cut off a lot of Maduro’s oil revenue, then they have a reasonable chance of getting the political outcome that they want, which is Maduro fleeing.”

Yet Trump on Wednesday wouldn’t offer a comment when asked if he sought regime change in Venezuela. Instead, he repeated a claim he said was a premise for blocking tankers.

“You remember, they took all of our energy rights,” he said of Venezuela. “They took all of our oil from not that long ago, and we want it back. But they took it. They illegally took it.”

Trump did not specify which period of nationalizations undertaken by the Venezuelan governments aggrieved the U.S. in his view.

An international arbitration court in 2013 ordered Caracas to pay $8.7 billion to U.S. firm ConocoPhillips, penalizing Venezuela for expropriation of crude assets in 2007 which it found to be unlawful.

Operating in the shadows
The U.S. has sanctioned hundreds of oil tankers around the world which it says are part of an illicit network often called the “shadow fleet.”

27 of those designated tankers are operating in Venezuelan waters, according to Seigle.

Venezuela, Russia, and Iran “share that sanctioned fleet,” he added, and Venezuela’s slice is the smallest of the three.

A full quarter of China’s oil imports are produced by those sanctioned countries, Seigle said, leaving the country with “an outsized concern.”

“This is going to raise eyebrows and maybe raise concerns in Beijing among strategic planners that are responsible for making sure that they have enough oil,” he said.

Sanctioned tankers represent less than a fifth of the oil exported from Venezuela, according to Seigle.

“But I think it can have outsized effects in a number of important areas, including whether and for how long Maduro can hold out in a leadership position in Caracas, and also with regard to Venezuela’s biggest oil customer, which is China.”

Why call Maduro’s regime terrorists?

|As a part of Trump’s lengthy post on social media, the president also said the “Venezuelan regime” was an FTO, which the State Department designated it as in November.

Trump and State officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have repeatedly said Maduro is a narco-terrorist and the head of a narco-terrorist organization, adding that Maduro is not the legitimate leader of Venezuela.

Trump is likely referring to the designation of the Cartel de los Soles when he points to the “Venezuelan Regime” in his post.

The State Department alleges in its designation that Maduro and other high-ranking officials head the Cartel de los Soles and have “corrupted Venezuela’s military, intelligence, legislature, and judiciary.”

Maduro’s government categorically denies the existence of the cartel.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said in November that the designation of Maduro as a terrorist gives the U.S. more military options in its anti-trafficking operation and public pressure campaign on the Venezuelan president.

The FTO designation “brings a whole bunch of new options to the United States,” Hegseth said. “It gives more tools to our department to give options to the president.”

Legal experts have told ABC that the designation does not in itself constitute an authorization of force. But administration officials have consistently pointed to these designations publicly when disclosing strikes on alleged drug traffickers.

Notably, while the Maduro regime has been targeted as a foreign terrorist organization, the country of Venezuela has not yet been placed on the official “State Sponsor of Terrorism” list.

Only Iran, North Korea, Syria and Cuba are currently listed as state sponsors of terrorism.

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