February 8, 2025: Donald Trump presidency news

Our live coverage of Donald Trump’s presidency has ended for the day. Follow the latest updates or read through the posts below.

US President Donald Trump steps off Air Force One upon arrival at Palm Beach International Airport in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Friday.

We will not know the extent or the success of President Donald Trump’s purge of the federal bureaucracy for some time. There will be lawsuits to fight some of his firings and delay or derail his effort to shut down departments and agencies.

But it is safe to assume the government that emerges at the end of his last four years in office will be permanently different from the one he inherited. Trump wants the federal government to be more immediately responsive to his political aims, and there have been comparisons to the spoils system put in place by his presidential hero, Andrew Jackson.

CNN spoke with Daniel Feller, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Tennessee, who has written extensively about Jackson and the spoils system of the 19th century.

What is the spoils system? According to Feller, “It is a system by which government offices are filled by people whose major qualification is their political service to the president’s party.”

How did it come about during the Jacksonian era? Feller said the spoils system “wasn’t all Jackson’s doing.”

“What he thought he was doing was cleaning out the federal bureaucracy from people who would become lazy and arrogant and incompetent, and replacing them with better ones,” Feller said.

How is what Trump is doing different from the spoils system? “Trump’s overhaul of the patronage is much more policy driven, or much more policy-grievance driven than Jackson’s was,” Feller said.

Feller said Jackson said the people he removed had “become arrogant through long tenure — they had become indifferent to the needs of the public that they were serving.”

“Trump’s attack on the bureaucracy is much, much deeper,” he said, adding that “it’s an attempt not only to switch some people out and to improve efficiency, but to entirely restructure and in some cases overtly destroy aspects of the federal government.”

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President Donald Trump is eagerly dismantling an agency that was once championed by his daughter and senior adviser, Ivanka Trump.

The work of the US Agency for International Development was important enough to the president that during his 2019 State of the Union address, he unveiled a new key priority within the agency to be spearheaded by his daughter.

Days later in the Oval Office, joined by Ivanka Trump, top officials and women directly impacted by US funding for women’s economic empowerment abroad, he signed a presidential memorandum establishing W-GDP, the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity initiative, calling it a matter of national security and a “tremendous step for women.”

But six years later, Trump has frozen nearly all foreign assistance, and his administration is gutting USAID, which he’s said is run by “radical lunatics.” USAID staff around the world were supposed to be placed on leave with orders to return to the US on Friday, but a federal judge that afternoon temporarily ordered the administration to halt its plans.

The Trump administration’s targeting of USAID is hitting hard for some beneficiaries of Ivanka Trump’s work overseas.

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