On Tuesday, the Thornton Democrat announced her candidacy for the 8th Congressional District race in 2026. She’s seeking a return to the post she held for the first two years of the district’s existence, from 2023 until her loss by a whisker to Republican U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans in November.

Caraveo spoke to The Denver Post ahead of her announcement, the culmination of a decision she has been mulling for several weeks.

“I think that the district is always going to be incredibly competitive, right?” Caraveo said. “So I know this is going to be a tough race. But I think that that very narrow margin of loss is a testament to the fact that people saw that I was taking a moderate and middle-of-the-road path, really keeping in mind what the district wanted me to do.”

The 44-year-old pediatrician and daughter of Mexican immigrants acknowledged that her loss last year came in what “was not an ideal year for Democrats.” She’s staking hope on the likelihood that the political dynamic will be significantly different next year during midterm elections that historically have favored the party out of power.

Her main focus is on potential cuts to Medicaid that could come as part of a budget that President Donald Trump has made clear he wants to see slimmed down. At her former Thornton medical practice, 65% of her patients relied on the program.

“I know that those difficult conversations are taking place and that Gabe Evans doesn’t seem to have an interest in how deeply this is going to affect families,” Caraveo said.

But Caraveo won’t just have Evans to worry about next year.

She will first have to defeat at least one fellow Democrat, state Rep. Manny Rutinel, of Commerce City, in the primary election in June 2026. Rutinel, who launched his campaign in January, announced last week that he had raised more than $1 million since the beginning of the year.

Evans’ campaign responded to Caraveo’s announcement Tuesday morning by pointing to the contested primary.

“Democrats officially have a base problem and are in an all-out primary battle to the left,” spokeswoman Delanie Bomar said. “Meanwhile, Congressman Gabe Evans hit the ground running as he’s working to fix Colorado’s crime, immigration, and energy crises that Manny, Yadira, and their liberal friends created.”

The district has the heaviest concentration of Latinos among Colorado’s eight congressional districts. On immigration — where Caraveo’s position evolved from being heavily critical of federal immigration agencies when she was a state lawmaker to, last summer, lambasting the Biden administration for mismanaging the border — she says the Trump administration’s approach to the issue is wrong.

“They are not focusing on comprehensive reform,” she said. “They are looking at fear mongering and mass deportations, including of people who are here legally.”

During her 100 days out of office, Caraveo traveled to Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. She also grappled with how mental health challenges might play among voters in a new bid for Congress.

Those challenges led to several dark episodes last year in which Caraveo almost took her life with a near-overdose of sleeping pills and pain medication. She spoke publicly about her struggles last summer in an attempt to destigmatize the issue of mental health, but she has provided more details in recent interviews.

After a stint at Walter Reed Army Medical Center early last year to get treatment, Caraveo said she is feeling much better and on track to devote herself to public service again.

“Now that I’m getting that proper treatment and that I’m on the right medications — that I’ve really taken care of issues that I had been ignoring for a long time because I was putting other people ahead of myself — I’m in an even better position to represent this district,” she said.

She also said: “As long as you seek help, you can get better — you can still do hard things. It shouldn’t be held against you that you have these struggles.”

The 8th District, which stretches from Denver’s northern suburbs to Berthoud and Greeley in the north, was drawn by the state’s redistricting commission after the 2020 census to be the most politically competitive in Colorado. In 2022, Caraveo barely edged out Republican state Sen. Barb Kirkmeyer by fewer than 2,000 votes out of more than 236,000 cast.

Fast-forward two years, and Evans took the contest against Caraveo by fewer than 2,500 votes out of more than 333,000 cast.

The Cook Political Report once again positions the 8th District race as a toss-up in 2026 — one of only 18 races nationwide with such a ranking — while the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia includes the race among 19 with toss-up status in its rankings.

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WASHINGTON — After President Donald Trump reversed course on his tariffs and announced he would pursue trade negotiations, he had a simple explanation for how he would make decisions in the coming weeks.

“Instinctively, more than anything else,” he told reporters this past week. “You almost can’t take a pencil to paper, it’s really more of an instinct than anything else.”

It was the latest example of how Trump loves to keep everyone on edge for his next move. Trump has not only expansively flexed the powers of the presidency by declaring emergencies and shredding political norms, he has eschewed traditional deliberative procedures for making decisions. The result is that more of life around the country and the world is subject to the president’s desires, moods and grievances than ever before.

“We have a democratic leader who seems to have the authority to act as whimsically as a 19th century European autocrat,” said Tim Naftali, a historian and senior research scholar at Columbia University. “He sneezes and everyone catches a cold.”

The White House rejects criticism that Trump is overstepping his authority or improperly consolidating power. Administration officials frequently emphasize that the Republican president won a clear election victory and is now pursuing the agenda that he campaigned on. In this view, resisting his will, such as when courts block his executive orders, is the real threat to democracy.

“Trust in President Trump,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Friday while answering questions about economic policy. “He knows what he’s doing.”

The presidency has been accumulating power for years, long before Trump ran for office, and it is not unusual for administrations to veer in various directions based on political and policy priorities. But Trump’s new term has been different in the early months, and he seems to recognize it.

“The second term is just more powerful,” Trump marveled recently. “When I say ‘do it,’ they do it.”

Although international trade offers the most extensive example of Trump’s inclination to act unilaterally since he returned to office in January the same approach has been evident elsewhere.

He installed himself as chair of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to overhaul programming at Washington’s premier cultural institution. He issued an order to purge “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution’s network of museums. He punished law firms associated with his opponents. He directed the Justice Department to investigate former officials who crossed him during his first term.

When Trump decided to remove regulations on household water efficiency — he wants more water flowing in showers — his executive order said the normal public comment period “is unnecessary because I am ordering the repeal.”

“What the president ends up having is what he wants, which is everyone’s attention all of the time,” Naftali said.

Trump’s ambitions stretch beyond the United States, such as his goal of annexing Greenland. Vice President JD Vance visited the island last month to talk about its strategic location in the Arctic, where Russia and China want to expand their influence, but also its importance to Trump himself.

“We can’t just ignore the president’s desires,” Vance said.

Trump has spent decades trying to turn his impulses into reality, whether it’s skyscrapers in Manhattan or casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey. He once sued a journalist for allegedly underestimating his net worth. During a deposition, Trump said “it goes up and down with the markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings.”

A lawyer for the journalist appeared puzzled. “You said your net worth goes up and down based upon your own feelings?”

Trump said yes. “I would say it’s my general attitude at the time that the question may be asked.”

He took a similar approach into the White House for his first term. While talking about the economy with The Washington Post, Trump said “my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.”

Leon Panetta, who was White House chief of staff under Democratic President Bill Clinton and later served in national security roles for Democratic President Barack Obama, said there normally is a more deliberative process for critical issues.

“If you throw all of that out of the window and operate based on gut instincts, what you’re doing is making every decision a huge gamble,” Panetta said. “Because you just haven’t done the homework to really understand all of the implications.”

“When you roll dice,” he added, “sometimes it’s going to come up snake eyes.”

Because Trump does not have a clear process for making decisions, Panetta said “that means everybody has to kowtow to him because that’s the only way you’re going to have any impact.”

Trump has seemed to enjoy that aspect of the ongoing controversy over tariffs. During a Republican dinner this past week, he said foreign leaders were “kissing my ass” to talk him out of his trade agenda.

The saga began on April 2 when Trump declared that trade deficits — when the U.S. buys more products from some countries than it sells — represented a national emergency, enabling him to enact tariffs without congressional approval.

The stock market collapsed and then the bond market began to slide. On Wednesday, Trump backed off his plans.

Although high taxes have been left in place on imports from China, many of the other targeted tariffs have been paused for 90 days to allow time for negotiations with individual countries.

“Americans should trust in that process,” said Leavitt, the press secretary.

Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the conservative Cato Institute, expressed concern that the course of international trade was becoming dependent on the “whims of a single dude in the Oval Office.”

Lincicome said the White House timeline to reach trade deals was “not credible” given the complexity of the issues. A more likely scenario, he said, is that the resulting agreements will be nothing more than “superficial nothingburgers” and Trump will ”declare a great victory and all this stuff settles down.”

Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade adviser, said in an interview with Fox Business Network that there’s “a whole portion of our White House working day and night” on negotiations.

“We’re going to run 90 deals in 90 days,” he said. “It’s possible.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department will seek the death penalty for a man accused of killing a fellow prisoner at the federal government’s “Supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado, while serving a life sentence for killing his cellmate at another lockup, the department announced Thursday.

Ishmael Petty, who was separately convicted of assaulting prison employees, is the latest to face a possible death sentence as the Trump administration pushes to revive federal capital punishment. The Justice Department last week announced that it would seek the death penalty for Luigi Mangione in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi on her first day in office lifted a Biden-era moratorium on federal executions, and has said she will seek the death penalty “whenever possible.”

Petty, 56, was serving a life sentence at ADX Florence, the highest-security federal prison in the U.S., when prosecutors say he killed a fellow inmate in the same unit in 2020. He was sentenced to life in prison in 2002 for killing another fellow inmate after being locked up for a 1998 bank robbery conviction. He was also convicted in 2015 of attacking two prison librarians and a case manager who were delivering books to his cell, prosecutors said.

There was no attorney listed yet for Petty in the latest case. An attorney who previously represented him didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

Trump’s administration carried out 13 federal executions during his first term, more than under any president in modern history. He signed an order on his first day back in the White House compelling the Justice Department to not only seek the death penalty in appropriate federal cases, but also to help preserve capital punishment in states that have struggled to maintain adequate supplies of lethal injection drugs.

Federal executions were halted under the Biden administration after Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered a review of capital punishment protocols. In his final weeks in office, Democratic President Joe Biden recently converted to life in prison the sentences for 37 of the 40 federal death row inmates.

___

“We’re not waiting to make our case,” U.S. Rep. Jeff Crank said in an early morning video call with reporters. “We’re making our case and we’re doing it right now. We’re going to continue to fight — it makes sense that it be in Colorado. It’s already in Colorado.”

Crank is a freshman who represents the 5th Congressional District where Peterson Space Force Base, home to Space Command, sits. He was joined by Reps. Lauren Boebert, Gabe Evans and Jeff Hurd, who spoke from an office at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.

Members of Alabama’s congressional delegation have been spinning a different story this week, with U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers saying on a podcast that contractors are “ready to turn dirt” on a future Space Command headquarters at the Army’s Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville.

Rogers, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, told Auburn University’s “Cyber Focus” podcast Tuesday that he expected a final decision from the Trump administration this month.

“We do expect it to be announced right after the Air Force secretary is named,” he said.

President Donald Trump in January nominated former air crewman and space expert Troy Meink to lead the Air Force. He hasn’t been confirmed to the post yet.

But Colorado’s Republicans were hopeful that no move would happen.

“I’ve asked many of our senior military leaders: What is the military value of moving Space Command out of Colorado Springs?” Crank said Thursday. “And, point blank, they say there isn’t any.”

Evans, who represents Colorado’s 8th Congressional District and is an Army veteran, said he was encouraged by the fact that Trump didn’t immediately move Space Command upon taking office nearly three months ago — as was predicted by Rogers shortly after the November election.

“There were a lot of rumors swirling that this was going to be one of those first executive orders dropped on Jan. 20,” Evans said. “As we all know, there was no executive order on Day 1 talking about Space Command.”

Space Command, which is responsible for the nation’s military operations in outer space, was revived in 2019 under Trump’s first administration. Located first in Colorado Springs, it was set to move to Alabama after Trump announced that state as his selection for a permanent headquarters in the waning days of his first administration in early 2021.

But former President Joe Biden later reversed that decision and the command remained in Colorado. The Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce estimates it supports nearly 1,400 jobs and has a $1 billion impact on the local economy.

Huntsville, home to some of the earliest missiles used in the nation’s space programs, scored higher than Colorado Springs in a Government Accountability Office assessment of potential locations for the command. That same office, however, gave the selection process low marks for documentation, credibility and impartiality and said that senior U.S. officials who were interviewed conveyed that remaining in Colorado Springs “would allow U.S. Space Command to reach full operational capability as quickly as possible.”

With rising military threats from Russia and China, Boebert said Thursday that it was “even more critical for Space Command to avoid being moved across the country.”

The minimum $2 billion price tag to relocate the command would undermine the priorities the administration has set with its budget-cutting Department of Government Efficiency office.

“It really flies in the face of the DOGE operations that are taking place,” the congresswoman said on the call.

The Republican delegation on Monday sent a letter to the White House outlining Colorado’s position on the issue. They wrote that a move to Alabama “would introduce unnecessary risks, disrupt established operations and waste valuable resources.”

The state’s Democratic members of Congress, along with both of the state’s Democratic U.S. senators, have also been vocal about keeping the Space Command in Colorado.

On Thursday’s call, Crank said that with the president’s announcement during his first week back in office of the creation of the Golden Dome missile defense system — a futuristic network of U.S. weapons in space designed to destroy ground-based missiles within seconds of launch — it’s all the more critical to keep Space Command in Colorado.

“We have to have this seamless coordination between (Colorado Springs-based) Northern Command and Space Command, especially if we’re going to be successful implementing Golden Dome,” he said. “They literally share the same parking lot at Peterson Space Force Base, so I believe there would be a great loss in capability there.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Kathleen Sgamma, the president of a Denver-based oil and gas trade association called the Western Energy Alliance, withdrew her consideration to lead the Bureau of Land Management, Senator Mike Lee said during the beginning of a Thursday hearing that would have considered her nomination.

Lee, the chair of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, said White House officials informed him of the change early Thursday morning.

Trump nominated Sgamma, a vocal critic of the Biden administration’s energy and public land policies, for the position in February.

She previously called the volume of leases issued on federal lands under the Biden administration “ridiculously low” and praised one of Trump’s first executive orders of his second term that aimed to boost oil and gas production on public lands.

“It was an honor to be nominated by President Trump as Director of the Bureau of Land Management, but unfortunately at this time I need to withdraw my nomination,” Sgamma said in a statement shared by a White House spokesperson with The Denver Post. “I will continue to support President Trump and fight for his agenda to Unleash American Energy in the private sector.”

Sgamma did not return a voicemail seeking further information.

White House spokesperson Liz Huston said in an email to the Post that the administration accepted Sgamma’s withdrawal and looks forward to putting forth another nominee.

The Bureau of Land Management controls about 245 million acres of land, 700 million acres of subsurface and 30% of the country’s minerals, according to the agency. The lands have multiple uses, including energy development, mining, livestock grazing and conservation.

In Colorado, three national conservation areas, five wilderness areas, two national monuments and 53 wilderness study areas across a combined 8.3 million acres are all controlled by the agency.

The reason for Sgamma’s withdrawal remains unknown, but her criticism of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol surfaced in recent days.

On Tuesday, an investigative journalism project known as Documented released a 2021 memo Sgamma sent to oil executives detailing her “disgust” for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capital and “President Trump’s role in spreading misinformation that incited it.”

“We must listen and accept others whom we disagree with, even when they don’t return that respect,” she wrote. “We must stick to our nation’s founding principles of the sanctity and rights of every individual, even as many forces are undermining those basic principles.”

She ended the letter by wishing then-President-elect Joe Biden “the best of luck in his goal to return to normalcy and moderation.”

The former interior secretary under Trump, David Bernhardt, said her withdrawal was “self-inflicted,” and included a link to the website that posted her 2021 comments, according to reporting by the Associated Press. Bernhardt suggested that people whose views don’t align with Trump’s should not seek political appointments.

Officials with the Center for Western Priorities, a conservation group, and the Center for Biological Diversity, a national nonprofit based on environment advocacy, applauded the withdrawal.

The Center for Western Priorities’ Deputy Director Aaron Weiss told the Associated Press that Sgamma’s withdrawal underscored the Trump administration’s creation of a “loyalty test” to weed out subordinates who are out of step with him.

He said she had refused to publicly disclose the Western Energy Alliance’s members, preventing journalists and activists from identifying her potential conflicts of interest if confirmed to lead the BLM.

“Good riddance to Sgamma, whose withdrawal is good news for America’s public lands and imperiled animals,” Taylor McKinnon of the Center for Biological Diversity said. “There’s no doubt that Trump’s next nominee will also be a poisonous threat to our wildlife and wild places, but this speedbump gives senators a chance to ponder whether they really want to feed America’s public lands and monuments into the snapping jaws of the fracking and mining industries.”

Sgamma helped author the energy policy section of Project 2025, a policy document from conservative thinkers outlining proposed goals for Trump’s second term. The section she contributed to criticized the Biden administration for waging a “war on fossil fuels” and proposed maximizing oil and gas leasing across the country.

Sgamma joined the Western Energy Alliance in 2006. Before that, she worked 11 years in the information technology sector and three years as a military intelligence officer in the U.S. Army.

Sgamma was the second Coloradan to be nominated by Trump to lead a federal agency. Chris Wright, formerly CEO of Denver-based Liberty Energy, was previously confirmed as head of the U.S. Department of Energy.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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The request was made Wednesday to the Postal Regulatory Commission, which must OK the proposal. If approved, the 5-cent increase for a “forever” stamp and similar increases for postcards, metered letters and international mail would take effect July 13.

The proposed changes would raise mailing services product prices approximately 7.4%.

The Postal Service contends, as it did last year when it enacted a similar increase, that it’s needed to achieve financial stability.

Former U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy previously warned postal customers to get used to “uncomfortable” rate hikes as the Postal Service seeks to become self-sufficient. He said price increases were overdue after “at least 10 years of a defective pricing model.”

DeJoy resigned in March after nearly five years in the position, leaving as President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency had floated the idea of privatizing mail service.

Deputy Postmaster General Doug Tulino has taken on the role of postmaster general until the Postal Service Board of Governors names a permanent replacement for DeJoy.

Trump has said he is considering putting USPS under the control of the Commerce Department in an effort to stop losses at the $78 billion-a-year agency, which has struggled at times to balance the books with the decline of first-class mail.

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But since 10-week-old Sam’s birth in January, she has also missed around 50 votes while staying home in Lakewood to care for him. That was all the more reason for Pettersen’s disappointment this week after a resolution she had co-authored — to give new parents in Congress the power to vote by proxy for 12 weeks as they care for their newborns — fizzled over the weekend.

“If you gave birth, it is a very intense few weeks in a recovery period, post birth,” Pettersen, a Democrat, said in a phone interview from Washington on Tuesday. “So this is not like you’re hanging out on vacation at home. These are very real medical circumstances that prevent you from being able to travel across the country to be there in person.”

Even though she was joined by Republican U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, plus nearly a dozen other GOP members of Congress, the push for the proxy vote ran into strong resistance from House Speaker Mike Johnson.

The Republican speaker has vigorously opposed the effort, calling it an affront to the Constitution that would open “Pandora’s box.”

On Sunday, Luna, also a young mother, announced that she had reached a compromise with the speaker. Rather than allow proxy voting, the agreement would formalize a “pairing” system long used in Congress, in which one member who is physically present in the House cancels out the vote of someone who is absent.

Pettersen, 43, on Monday took to X to thank Luna for her efforts on the issue but wrote that “this outcome does not address the barriers we’ve fought so hard to overcome.”

In her interview with The Post, she said that in the face of Johnson’s resistance, the push for a proxy vote “became insurmountable.”

“It makes no sense that in the 21st century, we are unable to accommodate for a vote being counted — just because we aren’t physically present when we’re unable to do so,” she said. “We’re so far behind the times in Congress (with) the way that we do things, you know, the focus and priorities. And that’s because we need to change the faces and voices and life experiences represented here — and I’m hopeful that we have young parents who have joined together to try to shake things up.”

Proxy voting had been put into effect under a Democratic-controlled Congress for around two years during the COVID-19 pandemic. But it didn’t last.

Last week, Johnson endured a decisive defeat after he staged an aggressive effort to squash the Luna-Pettersen proposal. Nine of his own Republicans joined all Democrats in rejecting his plan.

And just days after that vote, Pettersen’s resolution appeared to get an additional shot of life when President Donald Trump expressed support for it. Though the Republican president said he would defer to Johnson on the operations of the House, he also said: “I don’t know why it’s controversial.”

Pettersen said she was “very surprised” by the president’s position on the issue.

“You know, this is something that we agree on,” she said over the phone as Sam could be heard cooing in the background. “But this shouldn’t be controversial, and the rest of America agrees on that.”

As for the future of proxy voting for new parents in Congress, Pettersen said she was ready to continue to do battle. She said she wanted to start by forming a bipartisan parents caucus “so that we can have power in numbers when it comes to the schedule.”

“Obviously, we faced some setbacks, but the fight is far from over — and I know that we’re going to continue to work to get this done,” Pettersen said. “This issue is not going away.”

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

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Three genetically engineered wolves that may resemble extinct dire wolves are trotting, sleeping and howling in an undisclosed secure location in the U.S., according to the company that aims to bring back lost species.

The wolf pups, which range in age from three to six months old, have long white hair, muscular jaws and already weigh in at around 80 pounds — on track to reach 140 pounds at maturity, researchers at Colossal Biosciences reported Monday.

Dire wolves, which went extinct more than 10,000 years ago, are much larger than gray wolves, their closest living relatives today.

Independent scientists said this latest effort doesn’t mean dire wolves are coming back to North American grasslands any time soon.

“All you can do now is make something look superficially like something else”— not fully revive extinct species, said Vincent Lynch, a biologist at the University at Buffalo who was not involved in the research.

Colossal scientists learned about specific traits that dire wolves possessed by examining ancient DNA from fossils. The researchers studied a 13,000 year-old dire wolf tooth unearthed in Ohio and a 72,000 year-old skull fragment found in Idaho, both part of natural history museum collections.

Then the scientists took blood cells from a living gray wolf and used CRISPR to genetically modify them in 20 different sites, said Colossal’s chief scientist Beth Shapiro. They transferred that genetic material to an egg cell from a domestic dog. When ready, embryos were transferred to surrogates, also domestic dogs, and 62 days later the genetically engineered pups were born.

Colossal has previously announced similar projects to genetically alter cells from living species to create animals resembling extinct woolly mammoths, dodos and others.

Though the pups may physically resemble young dire wolves, “what they will probably never learn is the finishing move of how to kill a giant elk or a big deer,” because they won’t have opportunities to watch and learn from wild dire wolf parents, said Colossal’s chief animal care expert Matt James.

Colossal also reported today that it had cloned four red wolves using blood drawn from wild wolves of the southeastern U.S.’s critically endangered red wolf population. The aim is to bring more genetic diversity into the small population of captive red wolves, which scientists are using to breed and help save the species.

This technology may have broader application for conservation of other species because it’s less invasive than other techniques to clone animals, said Christopher Preston, a wildlife expert at the University of Montana who was not involved in the research. But it still requires a wild wolf to be sedated for a blood draw and that’s no simple feat, he added.

Colossal CEO Ben Lamm said the team met with officials from the U.S. Interior Department in late March about the project. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum praised the work on X on Monday as a “thrilling new era of scientific wonder” even as outside scientists said there are limitations to restoring the past.

“Whatever ecological function the dire wolf performed before it went extinct, it can’t perform those functions” on today’s existing landscapes, said Buffalo’s Lynch.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — President Donald Trump said Sunday that he won’t back down on his sweeping tariffs on imports from most of the world unless countries even out their trade with the U.S., digging in on his plans to implement the taxes that have sent financial markets reeling, raised fears of a recession and upended the global trading system.

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, Trump said he didn’t want global markets to fall, but also that he wasn’t concerned about the massive sell-off either, adding, “sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.”

His comments came as global financial markets appeared on track to continue sharp declines once trading resumes Monday, and after Trump’s aides sought to soothe market concerns by saying more than 50 nations had reached out about launching negotiations to lift the tariffs.

“I spoke to a lot of leaders, European, Asian, from all over the world,” Trump said. “They’re dying to make a deal. And I said, we’re not going to have deficits with your country. We’re not going to do that, because to me a deficit is a loss. We’re going to have surpluses or at worst, going to be breaking even.”

The higher rates are set to be collected beginning Wednesday, ushering in a new era of economic uncertainty with no clear end in sight. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said unfair trade practices are not “the kind of thing you can negotiate away in days or weeks.” The United States, he said, must see “what the countries offer and whether it’s believable.”

Trump, who spent the weekend in Florida playing golf, posted online that “WE WILL WIN. HANG TOUGH, it won’t be easy.” His Cabinet members and economic advisers were out in force Sunday defending the tariffs and downplaying the consequences for the global economy.

“There doesn’t have to be a recession. Who knows how the market is going to react in a day, in a week?” Bessent said. “What we are looking at is building the long-term economic fundamentals for prosperity.”

U.S. stock futures dropped on Sunday night as the tariffs continued to roil the markets. S&P 500 futures were down 2.5% while that for the Dow Jones Industrial Average shed 2.1%. Nasdaq futures were down 3.1%. Even the price of bitcoin, which held relatively stable last week, fell nearly 6% Sunday.

Asian shares, meanwhile, nosedived. Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 index lost nearly 8% shortly after the market opened. By midday, it was down 6%. A circuit breaker briefly suspended trading of Topix futures after an earlier sharp fall in U.S. futures. Chinese markets also tumbled, with Hong Kong’s Hang Seng dropping 9.4%, while the Shanghai Composite index lost 6.2%.

Trump’s tariff blitz, announced April 2, fulfilled a key campaign promise as he acted without Congress to redraw the rules of global trade. It was a move decades in the making for Trump, who has long denounced foreign trade deals as unfair to the U.S. He is gambling that voters will be willing to endure higher prices for everyday items to enact his economic vision.

Countries are scrambling to figure out how to respond to the tariffs, with China and others retaliating quickly.

Top White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett acknowledged that other countries are “angry and retaliating,” and, he said, “by the way, coming to the table.” He cited the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative as reporting that more than 50 nations had reached out to the White House to begin talks.

Adding to the turmoil, the new tariffs are hitting American allies and adversaries alike, including Israel, which is facing a 17% tariff. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to visit the White House and speak at a press conference with Trump on Monday, with his office saying the tariffs would be a point of discussion with Trump along with the war in Gaza and other issues.

Another American ally, Vietnam, a major manufacturing center for clothing, has also been in touch with the administration about the tariffs. Trump said Vietnam’s leader said in a telephone call that his country “wants to cut their Tariffs down to ZERO if they are able to make an agreement with the U.S.” And a key European partner, Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, said she disagreed with Trump’s move but was “ready to deploy all the tools — negotiating and economic — necessary to support our businesses and our sectors that may be penalized.”

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick made clear there was no postponing tariffs that are days away.

“The tariffs are coming. Of course they are,” he said, adding that Trump needed to reset global trade. But he committed only to having them “definitely” remain “for days and weeks.”

In Congress, where Trump’s Republican Party has long championed free trade, the tariff regiment has been met with applause but also significant unease.

Several Republican senators have already signed onto a new bipartisan bill that would require presidents to justify new tariffs to Congress. Lawmakers would then have to approve the tariffs within 60 days, or they would expire. Nebraska GOP Rep. Don Bacon said Sunday that he would introduce a House version of the bill, saying that Congress needs to restores its powers over tariffs.

“We gave some of that power to the executive branch. I think, in hindsight, that was a mistake,” said Bacon, adding that getting a measure passed would be challenging unless the financial markets continue to react negatively and other indicators such as inflation and unemployment shift.

Wyoming’s John Barrasso, the No. 2 member of the Senate’s GOP leadership, said Trump is “doing what he has every right to do.” But, he acknowledged, “there is concern, and there’s concern across the country. People are watching the markets.”

“There’ll be a discussion in the Senate,” Barrasso said of the tariffs. “We’ll see which way the discussion goes.”

Trump’s government cost-cutting guru, billionaire businessman Elon Musk, had been relatively silent on Trump’s tariffs, but said at a weekend event in Italy that he would like to see the U.S. and Europe move to “a zero-tariff situation.” The comment from the Tesla owner who leads Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency drew a rebuke from White House trade adviser Peter Navarro.

“Elon, when he is on his DOGE lane, is great. But we understand what’s going on here. We just have to understand. Elon sells cars,” Navarro said. He added: “He’s simply protecting his own interest as any business person would do.”

Trump indicated he disagreed with Musk, saying Sunday of the European Union, “They want to talk, but there’s no talk unless they pay us a lot of money on a yearly basis.”

Lawrence Summers, an economist who was treasury secretary under Democratic President Bill Clinton, said Trump and his economic team are sending contradictory messages if they say they are interested in reviving manufacturing while still being open to negotiating with trade partners.

If other countries eliminate their tariffs, and the U.S, does, too, he said, “it’s just making a deal, then we don’t raise any revenue nor do we get any businesses to relocate to the United States. If it’s a permanent revenue source and trying to get businesses to relocate to the United States, then we’re going to have these tariffs permanently. So the president can’t have it both ways.”

Bessent was on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Hassett and Summers appeared on ABC’s “This Week,” Lutnick and Barrasso were on CBS’ “Face the Nation” and Navarro was interviewed on Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”

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Gomez Licon reported from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Associated Press writer Giada Zampano in Rome contributed to this report.

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. visited the epicenter of Texas’ still-growing measles outbreak on Sunday, the same day a funeral was held for a second young child who was not vaccinated and died from a measles-related illness.

Kennedy said in a social media post that he was working to “control the outbreak” and went to Gaines County to comfort the families who have buried two young children. He was seen late Sunday afternoon outside of a Mennonite church where the funeral services were held, but he did not attend a nearby news conference held by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the outbreak.

Seminole is the epicenter of the outbreak, which started in late January and continues to swell — with nearly 500 cases in Texas alone, plus cases from the outbreak believed to have spread to New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas and Mexico.

The second young child died Thursday from “what the child’s doctor described as measles pulmonary failure,” and did not have underlying health conditions, the Texas State Department of State Health Services said Sunday in a news release. Aaron Davis, a spokesperson for UMC Health System in Lubbock, said that the child was “receiving treatment for complications of measles while hospitalized.”

This is the third known measles-related death tied to this outbreak. One was another elementary school-aged child in Texas and the other was an adult in New Mexico; neither were vaccinated.

It’s Kennedy’s first visit to the area as health secretary, where he said he met with families of both the 6- and 8-year-old children who died. He said he “developed bonds” with the Mennonite community in West Texas in which the virus is mostly spreading.

Kennedy, an anti-vaccine advocate before ascending to the role of nation’s top health secretary earlier this year, has resisted urging widespread vaccinations as the measles outbreak has worsened under his watch. On Sunday, however, he said in a lengthy statement posted on X that it was “the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles.”

The measles, mumps and rubella vaccine has been used safely for more than 60 years and is 97% effective against measles after two doses.

Dr. Manisha Patel, CDC incident manager, said in a Sunday news conference that the MMR vaccine is the best way to protect against measles. She also told parents in Gaines County that it was important not to “delay care” for a child who is sick with measles.

“Call your doctor and make sure you’re talking to a health care professional who can guide you on those next steps,” Patel said.

Kennedy’s social media post said CDC employees had been “redeployed.” CDC spokesman Jason McDonald clarified late Sunday that the first CDC team arrived in early March and left Gaines County on April 1, while a team led by Patel “was redeployed and arrived today to assess needs” as ordered by Kennedy and requested by Texas’ governor.

Asked about the outbreak Sunday by reporters on Air Force One, Trump said, “they’re doing reports on it,” adding that if the outbreak “progresses, we’ll will have to take action very strongly.”

Neither the CDC nor the state health department included the death in their measles reports issued Friday, but the CDC acknowledged it when asked Sunday.

The number of cases in Texas shot up by 81 between March 28 and April 4, and 16 more people were hospitalized. Nationwide, the U.S. has more than double the number of measles cases it saw in all of 2024.

Republican U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy from Louisiana, a liver doctor whose vote helped cinch Kennedy’s confirmation, called Sunday for stronger messaging from health officials in a post on X.

“Everyone should be vaccinated! There is no treatment for measles. No benefit to getting measles,” he wrote. “Top health officials should say so unequivocally b/4 another child dies.”

Cassidy has requested Kennedy to appear before his health committee Thursday, although Kennedy has not publicly confirmed whether he will attend.

A CDC spokesperson noted the efficacy of the measles vaccine Sunday but stopped short of calling on people to get it. Departing from long-standing public health messaging around vaccination, the spokesperson called the decision a “personal one” and encouraged people to talk with their doctor. People “should be informed about the potential risks and benefits associated with vaccines,” the spokesperson added.

Misinformation about how to prevent and treat measles is hindering a robust public health response, including claims about vitamin A supplements that have been pushed by Kennedy and holistic medicine supporters despite doctors’ warnings that it should be given under a physician’s orders and that too much can be dangerous.

Doctors at Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock, where the first measles death occurred, say they’ve treated fewer than 10 children for liver issues from vitamin A toxicity, which they found when running routine lab tests on children who are not fully vaccinated and have measles. Dr. Lara Johnson, chief medical officer, said the patients reported using vitamin A to treat and prevent the virus.

Dr. Peter Marks, the Food and Drug Administration’s former vaccine chief, said responsibility for the death rests with Kennedy and his staff. Marks was forced out of the FDA after disagreements with Kennedy over vaccine safety.

“This is the epitome of an absolute needless death,” Marks told The Associated Press in an interview Sunday. “These kids should get vaccinated — that’s how you prevent people from dying of measles.”

Marks also said he recently warned U.S. senators that more deaths would occur if the administration didn’t mount a more aggressive response to the outbreak.

Experts and local health officials expect the outbreak to go on for several more months if not a year. In West Texas, the vast majority of cases are in unvaccinated people and children younger than 17.

With several states facing outbreaks of the vaccine-preventable disease — and declining childhood vaccination rates nationwide — some worry that measles may cost the U.S. its status as having eliminated the disease.

Measles is a respiratory virus that can survive in the air for up to two hours. Up to 9 out of 10 people who are susceptible will get the virus if exposed, according to the CDC. The first shot is recommended for children ages 12 to 15 months, and the second for ages 4 to 6 years.

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Seitz reported from Washington. Photojournalist Annie Rice in Seminole, Texas, and AP reporter Matthew Perrone in Washington contributed to this report.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.