President Trump is building a reputation as the flip-flopper in chief — the president who, after announcing a bold new policy today, might well reverse it tomorrow, Axios' Felix Salmon and Zachary Basu write.

• Why it matters: In a chaotic world, the federal government normally acts as a stabilizing force. Under Trump, it's driving chaos.

🖼️ The big picture: Across-the-board tariffs on Mexico and Canada — two of America's three largest trading partners — have been on and then off, then on and then off. Colombia knows the feeling.

• The government put 80 million square feet of its real estate up for sale, only to then take the "for sale" sign down.
• Trump has fired federal employees at the CDC, the FDA, the National Nuclear Security Administration and the Agriculture Department, only to then re-hire them.
• He touted the use of military aircraft to carry out high-profile deportations, only to suspend the flights after finding them costly and inefficient.

In a matter of days, Trump denounced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, then made up and invited him to Washington — then chastised him in the Oval Office, then expressed openness to rebuilding ties, then cut off arms and intelligence sharing.

🏛️ Republicans in Congress have repeatedly found themselves boxed in by Trump's flip-flops.

• He spent weeks equivocating on whether Congress should pass his agenda in one bill or two — then blindsided the Senate by backing House Republicans' one-bill approach.
• He promised not to cut Medicaid, then backed a House GOP budget plan that could force exactly that in order to meet its proposed spending cuts.
• He has vowed to achieve the unthinkable by balancing the budget — while endorsing trillions of dollars in tax cuts, plus new campaign promises for no tax on tips or overtime.

Follow the money: The stock market is tiring of such shenanigans. On Wednesday, stocks fell on news that tariffs were being imposed. Yesterday, when those tariffs were suspended, stocks fell again.

• "I'm not even looking at the market," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office yesterday, disavowing his longtime favorite metric for economic success.

🔭 Zoom out: In crypto, a rug-pull is any project that's announced and then abandoned — often at great expense to anybody who believed the initial announcement.

Between the lines: Elon Musk — who may or may not be the head of DOGE, depending on who you ask — is at least partially responsible for the administration's "move fast and break things" ethos.

• "We will make mistakes. We won't be perfect. But when we make a mistake, we'll fix it very quickly," Musk said in a Cabinet meeting last week, pointing to the reversed cancellation of Ebola funding.

Share this story.

If there's one thing Elon Musk and President Trump have made clear: The U.S. is in its Big Boss Era, Axios Markets co-author Emily Peck writes.

• Why it matters: Workers had a moment of empowerment in the wake of the pandemic — remember the Great Resignation? Summer of Strikes? Quiet Quitting? Well, forget it. That time is in the rearview.

What's out: Work-life balance and flexibility. Unions. Diversity and inclusion.

• What's in: The office. Firing people who don't toe the line. Very long work hours.

👓 "This is a boss's administration," says Aaron Sojourner, a labor economist with the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.

• Keep reading.

Israel's concerns over the Trump administration's secret negotiations with Hamas erupted in a contentious call Tuesday between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-hand man and the U.S. official leading the talks, Axios' Barak Ravid reports.

• Why it matters: When Trump aides sounded out Israeli officials in early February about the possibility of engaging directly with Hamas, the Israelis advised them not to do it — particularly not without preconditions. Israel found out through other channels that the U.S. was moving ahead anyway.

Netanyahu has avoided publicly criticizing President Trump since Axios revealed the unprecedented U.S.-Hamas talks on Wednesday, saying only that Israel had made its opinion clear to the U.S.

• But Netanyahu's closest confidant, Ron Dermer, was much less restrained a day earlier in a call with U.S. hostage envoy Adam Boehler, the sources say.

🔎 Behind the scenes: The call happened several hours after Boehler met in Doha with Khalil al-Hayya, one of Hamas' most senior political officials and the head of its negotiating team.

• Boehler's negotiations in the Qatari capital began the week prior, with a meeting with lower-level Hamas officials.
• The talks centered on bringing home American hostage Edan Alexander, 21, and the bodies of four deceased American hostages — part of Boehler's mandate as hostage envoy.

The U.S. message was that such a deal would go a long way with Trump — who would then press for a broader deal involving a long-term truce, safe passage out of Gaza for Hamas leaders, the release of all remaining hostages, and the effective end of the war.

• The alternative was a renewed Israeli military campaign to destroy the group.

Trump and his advisers hoped for a breakthrough before his address to Congress.

• Keep reading.

Most U.S. cities are suffering from longer allergy seasons amid human-caused climate change, Axios' Alex Fitzpatrick writes.

🧮 By the numbers: The freeze-free growing season lengthened between 1970 and 2024 in nearly 90% of the 198 cities analyzed by Climate Central, a research and communications group.

• Among those cities, the freeze-free season lengthened by 20 days on average.

🗺️ Zoom in: Reno, Nev. (96 more consecutive freeze-free days from 1970 to 2024), Myrtle Beach, S.C. (52), and Toledo, Ohio (45), have had some of the biggest increases among the cities analyzed.

• Conversely, the number of consecutive freeze-free days decreased in Waco, Texas (-14), Tulsa, Okla. (-14), and Denver (-8).

🧠 What's happening: "Climate change makes pollen seasons not only longer, but also more intense due to heat-trapping pollution," per Climate Central's report.

• "Higher levels of planet-warming CO2 in the air can boost pollen production in plants, particularly in grasses and ragweed."

Share this story.

President Trump signed an executive order last night to create the long-awaited Strategic Bitcoin Reserve as a "store of value" for the nation — and the original cryptocurrency promptly dropped $5,000 in an hour, Axios' Brady Dale writes.

Why it matters: It was not an auspicious warm-up for this afternoon's first-ever White House crypto summit.

• "Buy the rumor, sell the news" is a common practice in the crypto world. This announcement was "the news."
• Those hoping for a big splash may have been disappointed that the new reserve isn't actually buying bitcoin (yet).

White House fact sheet on Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile.

• Go deeper: The crypto reserve is all about forfeited assets ... Get Axios Crypto.

President Trump said in a Truth Social post yesterday that he's directed Cabinet secretaries and DOGE to work together for "very precise" cuts of federal workers.

• "We say the 'scalpel' rather than the 'hatchet,'" Trump asserted — the opposite of the approach until now.

💡 Between the lines: The move "appeared to be a step aimed at restraining Elon Musk," the N.Y. Times' Eileen Sullivan and Maggie Haberman write (gift link)

🥊 Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that his message to Cabinet secretaries is: "Keep all the people you want — everybody that you need ... The people that aren't doing a good job — that are unreliable, don't show up to work, etc. — those people can be cut."

• "Elon and [DOGE] are going to be watching them," Trump added. "And if they can cut, it's better. And if they don't cut, then Elon will do the cutting."

AI development is replicating the "STEM vs. humanities" divide that has always split college-student populations — or, in high school terms, freaks and geeks, Axios' Scott Rosenberg writes.

Why it matters: On the one hand, the latest wave of "reasoning models" excel at computer programming and quantitative analysis. They're AI's nerdy tech geniuses.

• On the other hand, a handful of new projects show AI getting much better at replicating the nuances of how humans communicate. These are AI's English majors and theater kids.

🔬 Zoom in: Three developing stories this week show the process at work...

1. Alibaba's Qwen surprise. Chinese tech giant Alibaba yesterday released a new model, called Qwen QWQ-32B, that matches the performance of DeepSeek's R1 — but requires a fraction of the computing power to run.

• Like DeepSeek, the new Qwen model is open source. Both Chinese projects are reasoning models that excel at technical work.

2. OpenAI's taste-maker. After a week of hands-on experience with OpenAI's latest and biggest model, GPT-4.5, AI experts remain a little puzzled by it, given that it costs a fortune to use yet doesn't break benchmark records.

• One consensus has emerged among fans of GPT-4.5: The new model has "taste." Economist-blogger Tyler Cowen wrote: "I view it as a model that attempts to improve on the dimension of aesthetics only."

3. Sesame's charmed voice. One recent buzz magnet in AI circles is Sesame's Conversational Speech Model, released last week.

• Many testers of the live demo say Sesame's AI achieves a new level of confident ease in imitating the conversational flow and subtle imperfections of an actual talking human.

Share this story ... Get Axios AI+.

SpaceX's massive Starship rocket exploded minutes after it launched from Texas last night — causing flight delays and setting up stunning images of flaming debris over the U.S. and the Caribbean, Axios' Sareen Habeshian writes.

• Why it matters: It's the second consecutive Starship test flight from Elon Musk's space technology company to end with destruction. Another such launch resulted in an explosion nearly two months ago.

SpaceX caught the first-stage booster back at the pad with giant mechanical arms, but engines on the spacecraft on top started shutting down as it streaked eastward for what was supposed to be a controlled entry over the Indian Ocean.

• Contact was lost as the spacecraft went into an out-of-control spin.

Share this story.