Trump Trade: U.S. President asks SCOTUS to uphold tariffs

Catch up on the top industries and stocks that were impacted, or were predicted to be impacted, by the comments, actions and policies of President Donald Trump with this daily recap compiled by The Fly:

TARIFFS: President Donald Trump is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold his global tariffs, seeking review in a case that could affect trade and give him broad new leverage over the world economy, Bloomberg’s Greg Stohr and Zoe Tillman report. The administration has asked the court to take up the case by September 10 and to put it on a highly expedited schedule with arguments in early November.

BREAK-UP: While Donald Trump’s administration has promised to cut more tech rules in the U.S., his administration is pursuing cases aimed at curbing the market power of Google (GOOGL), Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), and Meta (META), Stefania Palma and Michael Acton of The Financial Times report. After a federal judge rejected the Department of Justice’s, DOJ, request to break up Google, Gail Slater, head of the DOJ’s antirust division, said, “We’re not done.”

INVESTIGATION: The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook and issued subpoenas as part of the inquiry into whether she submitted fraudulent mortgage information, according to The Wall Street Journal‘s Brian Schwartz and C. Ryan Barber, citing U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

WIND FARM: Orsted A/S (DNNGY) sued the Trump administration in an effort to revive construction of its almost-finished offshore New England wind farm that the government blocked, kicking off what may become a major legal battle over recent policies targeting the industry, Bloomberg’s Erik Larson and Will Mathis report. Orsted’s Revolution Wind unit filed the suit Thursday in federal court in Washington, seeking an order forcing the Trump administration to let it finish the project off the coast of Rhode Island. The Revolution Wind farm was intended to provide energy for hundreds of thousands of homes in the state as well as Connecticut, the publication notes.

STRUGGLING FARMERS: John Deere (DE) is reported a record profit two years ago, but President Trump’s tariffs and trade policies have made the company worse off, Kevin Draper of The New York Times reports. Higher tariffs on steel and aluminum have cost the company $300M so far, with another $300M impact expected by the end of the year. Additionally, crop prices are lower, making it so farmers are tighter on cash and less willing to purchase new equipment.

NORWAY WEALTH FUND: President Donald Trump’s administration said it was “very troubled” Norwegian sovereign wealth fund’s divestment of Caterpillar (CAT) and is now engaging Norway’s government, Kanishka Singh and Gwladys Fouche of Reuters report. Last week, Norway’s wealth fund said it divested from Caterpillar on ethical grounds related to the use of the company’s products by Israeli authorities in Gaza. “We are very troubled by the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund’s decision, which appears to be based on illegitimate claims against Caterpillar and the Israeli government,” a U.S. State Department spokesperson said, according to Reuters.

HOSTING TECH CEOS: President Trump on Thursday will host two dozen high-profile tech and business leaders for an event in the White House Rose Garden, including Meta (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook, Microsoft (MSFT) founder Bill Gates and OpenAI founder Sam Altman, according to an invite list obtained by The Hill, Alex Gangitano and Brett Samuels report. The gathering is set to take place after CEOs and tech leaders attend a White House event on AI hosted by first lady Melania Trump. Attendees also include Google’s (GOOGL) Sundar Pichai, Oracle (ORCL) CEO Safra Catz, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Micron (MU) CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, though Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk, who served as a special government employee and top Trump adviser for the first few months of the year before feuding with Trump, is not on the invite list, according to the report.

COVID VACCINE: The FDA’s vaccine chief overruled staff scientists who favor widespread access to Covid shots, according to memos released in recent days by the FDA, The New York Times’ Christina Jewett reports. While agency staff members concluded that the FDA should allow a wide range of age groups to receive the vaccines, citing high hospitalization rates among young children with Covid and saying that the virus’s evolution is “complex and remains unpredictable,” Dr. Vinay Prasad, the agency official in charge of vaccines and gene therapies at the FDA., disagreed, overriding those scientists and deciding to issue very narrow eligibility limits. The agency last week said that no one under 65 was eligible to receive the Covid vaccines made by Moderna (MRNA) or Pfizer (PFE) unless they had underlying medical conditions that put them at risk for severe disease.

Meanwhile, Novavax (NVAX) issued a statement on publicly available COVID-19 vaccine data saying, “Novavax is a U.S.-based biotechnology company that is proud to have successfully developed a COVID-19 vaccine as part of President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed. Under President Trump’s leadership, this program enabled the ingenuity of the American scientific community to come together to solve the most pressing public health issue of our lifetime. For Novavax, this resulted in the development of the only non-mRNA, protein-based COVID-19 vaccine available in the U.S. and many markets around the world. We applaud President Trump’s call for available data, and consistent with that, we have shared clinical and preclinical data, and real-world evidence for Novavax’s COVID-19 vaccine via publication, at medical meetings, on our website and/or via press release. Additionally, we have made these data available to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, dozens of regulatory bodies around the world and scientific and medical experts in public health. A list of publicly available information is at the link here and we will continue to add additional information here. Novavax’s COVID-19 vaccine is based on a well-established, protein-based technology platform that includes our proprietary Matrix-M adjuvant. Through Operation Warp Speed and President Trump’s leadership, Americans have been given an important tool to protect themselves and ensure that they have choice in doing so.”

Moderna also added a new statement to its website, in which the company stated, “Moderna is committed to transparency and welcomes the opportunity to highlight the extensive research regarding our COVID-19 vaccine, which has been published in hundreds of peer-reviewed publications and shared with regulators. Moderna is a research-driven, American company and we are immensely proud of the role we played in the historic achievements of Operation Warp Speed. As President Trump said at the time, ‘we are the most exceptional nation in the history of the world… American companies were the first to produce a verifiably safe and effective vaccine.’ These vaccines helped end the COVID-19 pandemic, re-open economies and save millions of lives. Since 2021, the real-world effectiveness and safety of the vaccines have been confirmed by governments and health systems around the world. Moderna itself has conducted vaccine effectiveness studies every year, in more than 5 million people to-date. These studies consistently show that the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine confers a high degree of protection against hospitalizations among the most vulnerable. We have also actively monitored the safety of the more than one billion doses administered to-date, and have always transparently shared those results with regulators and with the public, including through peer-reviewed publications and presentations. We will continue to do so as part of our commitment to transparency. The promise of mRNA is immense. The same technology that helped turn the tide of a global pandemic is now paving the way for breakthroughs in cancer, autoimmune and rare diseases. To help ensure Americans have clear and accessible information, Moderna will be compiling previously disclosed information on our website throughout the day.”