WSJ What’s News - Trump Targets Democratic Fundraising

Episode Date: April 25, 2025

A.M. Edition for April 25. President Trump directs the Justice Department to investigate the ActBlue fundraising platform, in an extraordinary effort to take on the opposing party. This as the administration faces a fresh round of legal challenges to its policies. Plus, CEO’s sound the alarm over tariff-induced uncertainty. And after the Trump administration pledges to curb a transition to renewable energy, the U.S. and Europe present contrasting ideas on energy security. Luke Vargas hosts. Sign up for the WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

President Trump takes aim at Democrats' main funding platform. Plus, big tech companies hold their breath ahead of a tariff-induced advertising slowdown. And as the U.S. bets that fossil fuels will provide growth and security, Europe shores up its sustainable energy sources. The United States is blessed with abundant energy resources. We are the top oil, gas and nuclear producer in the world. We need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and we need to reduce our dependence on clean technologies from abroad.

It's Friday, April 25th. I'm Luke Vargas for the Wall Street Journal and here is the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today. President Trump's trade policies are beginning to cast a shadow over the current earnings season, leading the CEOs of American Airlines, PepsiCo, and many others to warn that constantly changing tariffs are spooking consumers and making business planning virtually impossible. More updates are due today from the likes of Colgate, Palmolive, and HCA Healthcare,

but Journal Finance editor Alex Frangos told us we've heard enough results already to see a trend among top execs. They're basically saying they don't know what to do. We don't know what the tariffs really are going to be. So it's very difficult to plan. It's very difficult to tell your customers or your partners what's going to happen. So we've had CEO of United Airlines put out two sets of guidance to their investors saying here's what will happen if we're in a recession and here's what will happen if we don't.

I mean, it's just like basically saying we have no idea. And we had the CEO of Goldman Sachs this week, David Solomon, say this pause on the reciprocal tariffs that President Trump put in actually creates even more uncertainty because nobody knows what the heck's going to happen. So it's very difficult for companies to adjust. A few CEOs have voiced support for tariffs though, with one US steel producer welcoming levies on imported steel and aluminum, while the CEO of appliance maker Whirlpool said tariffs will level the playing field.

While among the companies less impacted by tariffs on foreign goods is Google Parent Alphabet, which rallied in off-hours trading after reporting solid earnings last night. However, even its outlook is clouding, with the company drawing a lot of its revenue from the $350 billion digital advertising industry. The market is preparing for a tariff-induced slowdown as brands pull back on advertising when their consumers are less likely to buy. That poses a risk to meta-platforms and Alphabet,

who rely on tens of billions of dollars in advertising revenue in order to finance expansions into other areas such as artificial intelligence. President Trump is targeting Democrats' main fundraising platform, asking the Justice Department to investigate ActBlue over allegations it allows illegal campaign donations. The platform gives small-dollar donors an easy way to contribute to Democrats' campaigns, with ActBlue having collected nearly $3.8 billion in individual contributions during the last election cycle.

A summary of Trump's memo makes no mention of WinRed, a prominent Republican online fundraising platform designed to replicate Democrats' success. Meanwhile, President Trump's approval rating fell to 45% in April, the second lowest for any post-World War II president, though slightly above his 41% rating from his first term. The Gallup poll comes as the president nears 100 days in office, over which time he's implemented 137 executive orders, over 100 more than the first three months of his previous term. In response, more than 80 lawsuits have been filed that challenge his executive orders on immigration, gender and diversity, and climate change,

and in rulings in some of those challenges, Trump suffered a string of legal setbacks yesterday. Federal judges across the country blocked or slowed core policy goals, including the administration's push to require proof of citizenship when registering to vote, as well as efforts to strip federal funding from sanctuary cities and public school districts with DEI programs. White House spokesman Harrison Fields said the administration was confident in securing an ultimate victory in the courtroom.

And for further details on those rulings, check out the link we've left in our show notes. Coming up two months after Vice President JD Vance scolded European political leaders gathered in Germany for ignoring the will of voters, the US chided a gathering of energy ministers in London yesterday, suggesting that climate-motivated renewables policies were harming human lives. We'll go inside the growing rift in global energy policy after the break. Hey, wouldn't it be great if life came with remote control? global energy policy after the break. But pre-diabetes does. With early diagnosis and a few healthy changes, you can stop pre-diabetes before it leads to type 2 diabetes. To learn your risk, take the one-minute test today

at DoIHavePreDiabetes.org, brought to you by the Ad Council and its pre-diabetes awareness partners. Ten years after the Paris Climate Agreement joined more than 190 countries around goals of limiting emissions and pursuing less carbon-intensive energy sources, Washington is no longer reading from the same playbook. It was a fact made clear when U.S. official Tommy Joyce addressed an energy security summit in London yesterday as he touted President Trump's focus on cultivating energy sources that he said the

country had in abundance, the latest buzzword in energy policy. The United States is blessed with abundant energy resources. We are the top oil, gas and nuclear producer in the world and we're the fourth largest coal producer. He compared that strategy of abundance to what he cast as a policy of scarcity under former President Biden. Unfortunately, the focus during the last administration was on climate politics and policies leading to that scarcity. These policies have been embraced by many, not just in the United States, and harm human lives. Joyce called out those who support net zero emissions strategies. We oppose these harmful and dangerous policies. And surrounded by the heads of some of the world's largest renewable energy firms and

the ministers who've embraced that industry, he called the process of making energy grids compatible with wind and solar exponentially more expensive and suggested renewables were a mirage that played into the hands of Washington's chief geopolitical rival. We'd be training one form of dependency for another, putting abstract emission goals in the interest of our adversaries first and the security of our people last. A typical offshore wind turbine requires four tons of a permanent magnet made in the form of rare earth elements. And since China, the supplier of nearly all

of them, restricted their sale, there are no wind turbines without concessions to or coercion from China. Those remarks help to explain two recent moves by the Trump administration that have made waves in the energy community. The first, last week the Interior Department ordered energy company Equinor to stop work on a massive offshore wind project in New York, a step that trade groups and industry experts see as a chilling signal that even fully permitted projects bringing foreign investment into the U.S. aren't immune in Washington, where renewables growth is seen as a threat to America's

dominance in fossil fuels. And second, as a part of tariff negotiations earlier this month, President Trump suggested he'd call off his trade war with Europe if the EU purchased $350 billion in U.S. energy products, the value of the bloc's trade surplus in goods, a suggestion that's ruffled feathers across a continent that's all too familiar with Russia's weaponization of energy during the Ukraine War. Mark Faraci is France's Minister of Industry and Energy and told me Europe needs to break its dependence on foreign energy.

Ninety-nine percent of these fossil fuels and natural gas is imported. And we see that the relationship with the providers, with the countries that sell the fossils are not as stable as they used to be. I won't comment about the negotiation process with the U.S. because I'm not in charge. But I think that we have to stick to our strategy which aims at gaining sovereignty in every dimensions, and especially when it comes to energy. Farajii told me that sovereignty comes from staying local,

in France's case, cutting ties with Russian gas, not deepening its dependence on US gas, and trying to end reliance on clean energy technology from China. And that trend of staying local is one that Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, said explains many of the energy security policies he heard this week. Countries are more and more inclined to increase their domestic energy production as much as possible. In some cases it is nuclear power, in some cases it is natural gas, in some cases it is solar or wind and others in order to reduce reliance on other countries as the world is becoming a dangerous place

now a day. Corporate leaders told us they're seeing this shift too. Laurent O'Day is the chief commercial officer for nuclear energy giant Urenco, and Andreas Schierenbeck is the CEO of power grid equipment maker Hitachi Energy. We see a revival in Europe, I think, on the back of energy independence and energy security. And the beauty of nuclear is, you know, it's carbon-free electricity, but it's also baseload power that runs 24-7. Three, four years ago, energy safety, security, and resilience was not really on the agenda.

It was more the concern about energy prices and sustainability. I think that has changed lately from a political and from a technical point of view. The stakes are high as Europe pursues energy sovereignty and decarbonization. But across the developing world, there is a sense that energy security cannot afford to get too tied up in geopolitical rivalries. Enya Listiani-Dewi is Indonesia's director general for new renewable energy and energy conservation. Just hours before she spoke to us, Indonesia proposed closing its trade deficit with Washington

by buying U.S. goods, including American oil and gas. But as the country races to improve living standards for the world's fourth-largest population, it's not letting go of Beijing, the source of its renewable supply chain. Energy security means to make a better life for people. And the energy security is addressing two steps. One is the conventional energy. The second one is emerging energy. Because Indonesia is a non-block country, so we collaborate with China and also collaborate with the U.S.

And that's it for What's News for this Friday morning. Today's show was produced by Kate Bulevant and Daniel Bach. Our supervising producer is Sondra Kilhoff. And I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal. We will be back tonight with a new show. Otherwise, have a great weekend and thanks for listening.