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The president is on his way to Los Angeles next.
On his fifth day back in office, President Trump is making the rounds to recent disaster zones —- North Carolina, which is recovering from Hurricane Helene, and later Los Angeles, where fires are still burning. In the immediate aftermath of both catastrophes, Trump was quick to blame Democrats for their response. Touching down in North Carolina earlier today, he sounded the same tune as he proposed overhauling or even eliminating the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is responsible for disaster preparation and recovery nationwide.
On the tarmac, Trump told the press that his administration was “looking at the whole concept of FEMA,” saying he would rather states be solely responsible for disaster recovery. Later, at a hurricane recovery briefing, Trump said that he planned to sign an executive order that would “begin the process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA — or maybe getting rid of FEMA.” Trump dodged questions on details of the order or a timeline for implementation.
While speaking to a group of North Carolina families at a separate event, Trump told them, “Unfortunately, our government failed you, but it wasn’t the Trump government. It was a government run by Biden.” False claims about the hurricane response, stoked by Trump during the final month of his campaign against Kamala Harris, led FEMA to put up a “myth and fact” response page on its website to debunk swirling rumors.
It is true, however, that earlier this month, FEMA informed thousands of displaced North Carolina residents that their vouchers for temporary housing were about to expire for one of three reasons: their homes had been deemed “habitable,” the residents had not approved a FEMA inspection, or the agency couldn’t get in contact with them. Speaking to the families, Trump said this was unjustifiable given that “your government provided shelter and housing for illegal aliens from all over the world.” He claimed he would “surge housing solutions” to the state that went beyond FEMA’s temporary measures, but did not provide more details as to how.
After arriving in Los Angeles, where large swaths of the city have been devastated by still-active wildfires, President Trump met with Governor Gavin Newsom on the tarmac, striking a conciliatory tone as he said he wanted to “work together” to help L.A. recover. This disaster also prompted a flurry of misinformation when fire hydrants in the city temporarily ran dry. While the city’s water infrastructure simply wasn’t equipped to put out numerous simultaneous historic blazes, Trump put the blame squarely on Newsom and his previous opposition to a policy that would have redirected water from a river delta in Northern California to farms in the Central Valley and cities in Southern California, endangering a fish species called the Delta smelt.
Experts say this has nothing to do with the fires or the ability to put them out, as all water storage tanks were full and the blazes were due to a combination of drought and extreme winds. Yet Trump has continued to hold up the protection of the smelt fish as all that’s wrong with California’s fire response, even making it a feature of his recent executive order “Putting People Over Fish: Stopping Radical Environmentalism To Provide Water Solutions To Southern California.”
After a tour of the Pacific Palisades neighborhood and a photoshoot with L.A. firefighters, Trump met with city and state leaders and pledged to declare a national emergency that would allow him to waive all federal permits for rebuilding. “The federal permit can take 10 years. We’re not going to do that. We don’t want to take 10 days,” Trump said to applause. “I’d ask that the local permitting process be the same.”
L.A. Mayor Karen Bass agreed that she wanted to expedite the process but reiterated that before rebuilding efforts could begin in earnest, all the fire debris needed to be cleared. That’s an arduous process that the Army Corp of Engineers estimated could take 18 months to complete. While Bass vowed to speed up this timeline, Trump claimed that “the people are willing to clean out their own debris.”
Trump also repeated his promise to “open up the pumps and valves in the North,” though again, there’s no evidence that more piped water would have done anything to prevent these fires. “We want to get that water pouring down as quickly as possible. Let hundreds of millions of gallons of water flow down into Southern California, and that’ll be a big benefit to you.”
And he didn’t miss an opportunity to mention the smelt once more, telling the assembled leaders “it’s in numerous other areas. So it doesn’t have to be protected. The people of California have to be protected.”
Editor‘s note: This story has been updated to reflect Trump’s visit to Los Angeles.
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“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%.”
President Trump announced Tuesday during a cabinet meeting that he plans to impose a hefty tax on U.S. copper imports.
“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%,” he told reporters.
Copper traders and producers have anticipated tariffs on copper since Trump announced in February that his administration would investigate the national security implications of copper imports, calling the metal an “essential material for national security, economic strength, and industrial resilience.”
Trump has already imposed tariffs for similarly strategically and economically important metals such as steel and aluminum. The process for imposing these tariffs under section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 involves a finding by the Secretary of Commerce that the product being tariffed is essential to national security, and thus that the United States should be able to supply it on its own.
Copper has been referred to as the “metal of electrification” because of its centrality to a broad array of electrical technologies, including transmission lines, batteries, and electric motors. Electric vehicles contain around 180 pounds of copper on average. “Copper, scrap copper, and copper’s derivative products play a vital role in defense applications, infrastructure, and emerging technologies, including clean energy, electric vehicles, and advanced electronics,” the White House said in February.
Copper prices had risen around 25% this year through Monday. Prices for copper futures jumped by as much as 17% after the tariff announcement and are currently trading at around $5.50 a pound.
The tariffs, when implemented, could provide renewed impetus to expand copper mining in the United States. But tariffs can happen in a matter of months. A copper mine takes years to open — and that’s if investors decide to put the money toward the project in the first place. Congress took a swipe at the electric vehicle market in the U.S. last week, extinguishing subsidies for both consumers and manufacturers as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. That will undoubtedly shrink domestic demand for EV inputs like copper, which could make investors nervous about sinking years and dollars into new or expanded copper mines.
Even if the Trump administration succeeds in its efforts to accelerate permitting for and construction of new copper mines, the copper will need to be smelted and refined before it can be used, and China dominates the copper smelting and refining industry.
The U.S. produced just over 1.1 million tons of copper in 2023, with 850,000 tons being mined from ore and the balance recycled from scrap, according to United States Geological Survey data. It imported almost 900,000 tons.
With the prospect of tariffs driving up prices for domestically mined ore, the immediate beneficiaries are those who already have mines. Shares in Freeport-McMoRan, which operates seven copper mines in Arizona and New Mexico, were up over 4.5% in afternoon trading Tuesday.
“We had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them.”
A member of the House Freedom Caucus said Wednesday that he voted to advance President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits – raising the specter that Trump could try to go further than the megabill to stop usage of the credits.
Representative Ralph Norman, a Republican of North Carolina, said that while IRA tax credits were once a sticking point for him, after meeting with Trump “we had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them in his own way,” he told Eric Garcia, the Washington bureau chief of The Independent. Norman specifically cited tax credits for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version would phase out more slowly than House Republicans had wanted.
It’s not entirely clear what the president could do to unilaterally “deal with” tax credits already codified into law. Norman declined to answer direct questions from reporters about whether GOP holdouts like himself were seeking an executive order on the matter. But another Republican holdout on the bill, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, told reporters Wednesday that his vote was also conditional on blocking IRA “subsidies.”
“If the subsidies will flow, we’re not gonna be able to get there. If the subsidies are not gonna flow, then there might be a path," he said, according to Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News.
As of publication, Roy has still not voted on the rule that would allow the bill to proceed to the floor — one of only eight Republicans yet to formally weigh in. House Speaker Mike Johnson says he’ll, “keep the vote open for as long as it takes,” as President Trump aims to sign the giant tax package by the July 4th holiday. Norman voted to let the bill proceed to debate, and will reportedly now vote yes on it too.
Earlier Wednesday, Norman said he was “getting a handle on” whether his various misgivings could be handled by Trump via executive orders or through promises of future legislation. According to CNN, the congressman later said, “We got clarification on what’s going to be enforced. We got clarification on how the IRAs were going to be dealt with. We got clarification on the tax cuts — and still we’ll be meeting tomorrow on the specifics of it.”
Neither Norman nor Roy’s press offices responded to a request for comment.
The state’s senior senator, Thom Tillis, has been vocal about the need to maintain clean energy tax credits.
The majority of voters in North Carolina want Congress to leave the Inflation Reduction Act well enough alone, a new poll from Data for Progress finds.
The survey, which asked North Carolina voters specifically about the clean energy and climate provisions in the bill, presented respondents with a choice between two statements: “The IRA should be repealed by Congress” and “The IRA should be kept in place by Congress.” (“Don’t know” was also an option.)
The responses from voters broke down predictably along party lines, with 71% of Democrats preferring to keep the IRA in place compared to just 31% of Republicans, with half of independent voters in favor of keeping the climate law. Overall, half of North Carolina voters surveyed wanted the IRA to stick around, compared to 37% who’d rather see it go — a significant spread for a state that, prior to the passage of the climate law, was home to little in the way of clean energy development.
But North Carolina now has a lot to lose with the potential repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has pointed out. The IRA brought more than 17,000 jobs to the state, per Climate Power, along with $20 billion in investment spread out over 34 clean energy projects. Electric vehicle and charging manufacturers in particular have flocked to the state, with Toyota investing $13.9 billion in its Liberty EV battery manufacturing facility, which opened this past April.
North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis was one of the four co-authors of a letter sent to Majority Leader John Thune in April advocating for the preservation of the law. Together, they wrote that gutting the IRA’s tax credits “would create uncertainty, jeopardizing capital allocation, long-term project planning, and job creation in the energy sector and across our broader economy.” It seems that the majority of North Carolina voters are aligned with their senator — which is lucky for him, as he’s up for reelection in 2026.