Trump government: A journalist came into the Signal Group

Good morning dear readers,

At this point she welcomes a new face. My name is Mirjam BittnerI can replace my colleague Gideon Ötinger and accompany you in the coming weeks. The issue of this newsletter is created in Seoul. The South Korean capital with around ten million inhabitants is one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world.

Here and in other parts of Asia, investors are squinting at the stock markets this morning. The radical all-round of the US President Donald Trump – also called customs package – at the moment sends the stock exchanges on a descent. According to the negative guidelines of Wall Street, the Nikkei index on the guiding exchange in Tokyo fell by more than eight percent. The stock exchanges in China, Hong Kong and Australia also showed significant losses in early trade.

This Tohuwabohu of the US Presidentwho could not be dissuaded from the golf on the weekend because of such little things like the global economy. Trump said journalists on board the Air Force One, he didn’t want anything to go down. “But sometimes you have to take medicine to get something in order,” quotes Reuters news agency. “I can’t tell you what will happen to the markets. But our country is much stronger.”

Strong or not – even a mighty player like the USA, it cannot be sold with all trading partners in the long run. Under certain conditions, Trump wants to negotiate again: if China, the European Union and other countries compensate for its trade deficit. These countries are currently exporting more into the USA than importing them from there. Trump therefore accuses them of treating the USA “very, very bad”. In the star Let’s keep them up to date.

I wish you a nice start to the week – hopefully without “very, very bad” treatments. Kind regards from Seoul

They may still remember a certain chat group that the US President would probably like to drop under the table. At the end of March, the US magazine “The Atlantic” had made the highly sensitive content of a chat public after his editor-in-chief was invited to the Signal Group. He was added by Trump’s national security advisor Michael Waltz Höchst.

The British “” has now reconstructed how it came to the breakdown. As so often, the problem was in front of the screen. Apparently, “The Atlantic” editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg had already asked for a different topic in October, still in the election campaign. Goldberg’s email was then forwarded to the then Trump spokesman Brian Hughes, who sent the mail together with the contact information to Waltz. The number mentioned there is said to have saved Waltz – as Brian Hughes. So an oversight.

When Waltz then used the chat group at Signal to discuss a US military mission against the Huthi militia in Yemen, he apparently added the journalist Goldberg instead of Trump spokesman Hughes.

More and more children in the United States fall ill. The state of Texas is particularly affected: the second child died there this year as part of a measles eruption. The child was not vaccinated and had no known previous illnesses. US Health Minister Robert F. Kennedy-a vaccination skeptic-is now calling for vaccinations.

How does Europe react to the new US tariffs? The EU Minister of Trade in Brussels advise on this. One of the possible countermeasures: a new tax on digital services. This could mainly hit large digital companies such as Meta or Google. Meaning, or not? They discuss this star-Politics heads Veit Medick and Jan Rosenkranz in the “5-minute talk”:

With material from the agencies.