Axios AM

April 30, 2025
Good Wednesday morning! Smart Brevity™ count: 1,362 words ... 5 mins. Thanks to Sam Baker for orchestrating. Copy edited by Bryan McBournie.
💰 Deal watch: South Korean Industry Ministry officials will travel to Washington today for "technical discussions" with U.S. trade counterparts, hoping to make progress on a tariff deal. (Reuters)
1 big thing: Tariffs' long-lasting effects
President Trump's global trade war is only a few weeks old. But even if it stopped today, the impact on supply chains could eventually be measured in months and years.
- The U.S. economy is at risk of repeating pandemic-era scenes — empty shelves and shortages of popular goods, Axios managing editor Ben Berkowitz reports.
"We are in a period of unprecedented disruption that's not going to stop," said Bryan Gross, principal in operations transformation at PwC — a period that goes back to the pandemic and runs through today's global economic unrest.
- "I think we are surely out of equilibrium."
🚢 How it works: Commerce takes time.
- Even for companies with established business relationships, goods have to be manufactured, transported to port, loaded into a container and onto ships, cross the Pacific, dock at a U.S. port, be offloaded, transferred to a truck, driven to a distribution point, then eventually delivered to retail.
- That chain, experts say, takes multiple weeks end-to-end even if everything is going well. And it requires businesses to plan for the future, forecast demand, come up with capital, place orders and so on.
- That's difficult to do in an environment of on-again, off-again tariffs, and a trade war between two countries that can't even publicly agree whether or not they're talking with each other.
📦 For the record: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent insisted Tuesday that retailers had planned for tariff disruptions.
- "I wouldn't think that we would have supply chain shocks," Bessent said at a White House briefing. "I think retailers have managed their inventory in front of this."
2. 📜 Trump @ 100: "Just gotten started"

ABC News' Terry Moran asked President Trump during an Oval Office interview yesterday, on Day 100 of this administration, whether hard times are ahead because of tariffs.
- "I don't think so," Trump replied. "I think great times are ahead."
"Heading in the right direction": Trump said small businesses, some of which fear extinction if trade is interrupted, are "gonna make more money now."
- "Everybody's gonna be just fine," he added. "It wouldn't have been if I didn't do this. I had a choice. I could leave it — have a nice, easy time. But I think ultimately you would've had an implosion. Our country had inflation that was worse than ... ever ... Now the grocery prices are coming down. The energy prices are coming down. Gasoline's coming down. It's all heading in the right direction."

Trump celebrated Day 100 in campaign mode, flying to a rally at Macomb Community College in Warren, Mich., for a speech that included plenty of grudges and grievances.
- "We've just gotten started. You haven't even seen anything yet," he told the crowd in his 90-minute speech.

📊 Worthy of your time: From the Financial Times, "10 charts that define Donald Trump's tumultuous first 100 days." Gift link.
3. 🛑 Big Tech's MAGA speedbump
The furious reaction to a report that Amazon might itemize tariff surcharges on its website shows Big Tech still has a long way to go to ingratiate itself with the MAGA movement, writes Tal Axelrod, Axios' expert on MAGA media.
- Amazon says it won't do that and never planned to.
- A senior administration official tells us Trump and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos spoke on the phone yesterday and had a good conversation. Bezos "solved the problem very quickly," Trump told reporters as he left the White House yesterday afternoon. "And he did the right thing ... a good guy."
💡 Reality check: MAGA has longstanding grievances with Big Tech. Efforts by the industry's top executives to cozy up to Trump himself don't seem to have moved the needle with his most diehard supporters.
- "Now that President Trump is back in the White House, a lot of the executives have been singing different tunes," said Tim Murtaugh, a senior adviser to Trump's 2024 campaign and a communications representative for Rumble. "But I don't think MAGA is ready to buy that album just yet."
4. 🖊️ Charted: Trump's prolific pen

Talker stat: More than 200 lawsuits have been filed by various plaintiffs to try to block President Trump's policies. Keep reading.
5. 🇺🇦 🇺🇸 What Zelensky told Trump

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made his 15 minutes with President Trump in the Vatican count, urging Trump to take a tougher line with Vladimir Putin, two sources briefed on Saturday's meeting tell Axios.
- Why it matters: Zelensky's advisers were divided about whether he should even risk the tête-à-tête after the disaster in the Oval Office. But after it, Zelensky felt he'd managed to shift Trump's thinking about Putin for the first time, the sources say.
Behind the scenes: Zelensky received "signals" ahead of Pope Francis' funeral that Trump was prepared to meet on the sidelines, the sources say.
- Nothing was finalized in advance, and the idea was initially that they would try to meet after the funeral, one source said.
- But then the leaders bumped into each other upon arrival. They found a spot to meet alone in St. Peter's Basilica.
Zoom in: Zelensky told Trump that Putin won't budge unless Trump applies more pressure, the sources say.
- One source said Trump replied that he might have to change his approach to Putin, as he later stated in a Truth Social post.
- Zelensky also pushed Trump to return to his initial proposal of an unconditional ceasefire as a starting point for peace talks, which Ukraine accepted but Russia rejected.
The intrigue: The sources said one potential reason this Trump-Zelensky meeting was more positive was that Vice President Vance and White House envoy Steve Witkoff — whom the Ukrainians see as more supportive of the Russian position — weren't there.
- In a Day 100 interview with ABC News that aired last night, Trump said Putin "could be tapping me along a little bit," though he said he still thinks Putin wants to end the war.
6. ⚖️ Judge sidelined after arrest

The Wisconsin judge arrested by the FBI last week for allegedly trying to help an undocumented defendant avoid arrest was essentially suspended by the state's Supreme Court yesterday, Axios' Sareen Habeshian reports.
- The Wisconsin Supreme Court said in an order that it's "in the public interest" for Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan to be "temporarily relieved of her official duties."
Go deeper ... Read the order.
7. 🪖 Pentagon's climate bind
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says the Pentagon will no longer "do climate change crap" — but the changing climate has a lot in store for the U.S. military, Axios Future of Defense author Colin Demarest reports.
⛈️ The big picture: Every competition and conflict is influenced by weather. Consider the forecasts ahead of D-Day in 1944, or Napoleon's ill-fated jaunt into Russia in 1812.
- There's broad consensus in the national security community that the threats from climate change are real, and dismissing them is dangerous. A Pentagon study published in 2019 found dozens of installations were vulnerable to current or future flooding, drought and wildfire.
8. 🇻🇳 1 for the road: 50 years since Saigon fell

Today marks 50 years since April 30, 1975 — the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War.
- Vietnam today celebrated the 50th anniversary of the end of the war with the United States, and the formation of its modern nation, with a military parade and a focus on a peaceful future. Get the latest.
Remembering an era: Movies, books, songs and TV shows about the Vietnam War.

📷 Above: Henry Kissinger tells President Gerald Ford that a platoon of U.S. Marines was stranded on the roof of the U.S. Embassy.
- "The president, as you can see from this picture, was not pleased with the news," writes David Hume Kennerly, who captured the moment as Ford's official photographer. Kennerly had previously won a Pulitzer for his photography during the war.
55 more photos on one page: "In the Room — The Final Days of Vietnam," by David Hume Kennerly.
- Go deeper: "Inside the Final Days of the Vietnam War," by David Hume Kennerly.
📬 Thanks for reading! Please invite your friends to join AM.
Sign up for Axios AM




