President Donald Trump’s tariffs stun the world and cause a stock market selloff, but his team is standing strong. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announces the end of different military standards for men and women. And Colorado’s Democrat-run legislature moves to make the state a “transgender sanctuary.”

It’s Friday, April 4, and this is the news you need to know to start your day. If you’d rather listen to your news, today’s edition of the Morning Wire podcast can be heard below:

“Liberation Day” Tariff Fallout 

Topline: As promised, Donald Trump reset the global economy this week with unprecedented tariffs — now foreign leaders, markets, and businesses are racing to react.

For decades, presidents in both parties have almost universally embraced free trade policies and kept tariffs at a minimum. Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ marked a fundamental shift in economic policy the likes of which we’ve rarely seen in modern history. Virtually every product entering the United States will be slapped with a 10% tax — many will face rates in excess of 30%.

If you’re a fan of buying the dip, you’re in luck, because Wall Street took a beating on Thursday, with trillions of dollars in market cap wiped out. Put simply, it was the worst day on Wall Street since COVID wrecked the global economy. Within hours of markets opening, the DOW plummeted 1,400 points, the S&P fell 4%, and the NASDAQ fell 5%. Elsewhere, major U.S. brands with supply chains outside the country, like Nike, Ralph Lauren, and HP, saw double-digit declines. Mid-size U.S. companies were hit the hardest — the Russell 2000 index, which includes smaller stocks, opened down nearly 7%. And the U.S. dollar slipped to its lowest point of the year, sinking more than 2% compared to the Euro, Japanese yen, and Swiss franc.

For their part, the White House urged patience, calling on Americans to trust Donald Trump’s plan. “To anyone on Wall Street this morning, I would say trust in President Trump,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said. “This is a president who is doubling down on his proven economic formula from his first term … this is indeed a national emergency … and it’s about time we have a president who actually does something about it.”

In response, some foreign leaders have dug their heels in: Beijing, for example, announced on Friday that China would impose a 34% retaliatory tariff on all goods imported from the U.S. starting April 10, while EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen is finalizing countermeasures, saying, “If you take on one of us, you take on all of us.” But other leaders expressed cautious optimism, and a willingness to cut a deal. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, for example, said the tariffs were “wrong” but that “we will do everything we can to work a deal with the United States.” Britain’s Keir Starmer reiterated that his “intention remains to secure a deal” — we saw a similar willingness to work on a deal from leaders in Brazil, Singapore, Switzerland, and Vietnam.

The White House is betting that we’re in a better spot than our competitors to withstand a trade war and that, eventually, even our foes will be forced to come to the table. “We are the consumer of the world,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CNN. “We buy $20 trillions worth of goods and we are basically the buyer of everybody else in the world’s items. So what is the point of them going higher so that we go higher?”

New Military Fitness Standards Irrespective of Sex

(Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Topline: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced this week plans to adopt the same fitness standards for both male and female service members.

Hegseth said he would officially address what he’s described as a decline in physical standards for service members in combat arms roles.

“ For far too long we allowed standards to slip and different standards for men and women,” Hegseth posted on X. “That’s not acceptable.”

The policy will not formally restrict women from taking on combat roles, but once the training standards are set, they will not be modified simply because the person doing the training happens to be female. Because combat training is — and should be — so intense, it’s entirely possible that this will mean fewer women are able to complete it. If that’s the case, there will be fewer women in combat roles, but those who meet the requirements will continue to serve in that capacity.

Hegseth followed his initial announcement with a second video explaining that the revised standards would only impact combat arms jobs. “We’re ensuring that any combat position, across any of the services — and the services are evaluating that — has the same standard for men and women, which means anybody can join, but the standard is to meet what it takes to do that combat job, rigorous physical standards so that your sons and daughters, those that join our military, have the best possible units, the most lethal units.”

Women did not serve in direct combat roles in the U.S. military until 2013 when former President Barack Obama’s Defense Secretary Leon Panetta opened up combat arms MOS’ (Military Occupational Specialties) to women. Before that point, women were already serving in supplemental roles that occasionally would put them in combat situations — they often served as medics or vehicle operators, for example — but they were not placed into positions where direct combat was the only way to perform their duties effectively.

Colorado “Trans Sanctuary Law” Advances Through Committee

(Photo by Helen H. Richardson/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

Topline: Colorado lawmakers move to make the state a “transgender sanctuary” and make so-called “deadnaming” and “misgendering” illegal through a series of radical Left policies. Morning Wire spoke with a Colorado state representative fighting to stop the law.

House Bill 1312, also known as “Legal Protections for Transgender Individuals,” advanced through the Colorado House Judiciary Committee on Thursday on a party-line vote.

Quoting directly from the text of HB 1312: “Section 2 provides that, when making child custody decisions and determining the best interests of a child for purposes of parenting time, a court shall consider deadnaming, misgendering, or threatening to publish material related to an individual’s gender-affirming health-care services as types of coercive control.”

“The most scary thing about this bill is now when you’re talking in terms of custody, the misgendering of a child is considered child abuse,” Colorado State Representative Jarvis Caldwell (R- District 20) told Morning Wire. “That means when a judge is making custody decisions, if one parent is not affirming of the child’s trans-identity crisis and the other parent is affirming of it, then the preference for custody is going to go to the affirming parent.”

Section 3 of HB 1312 also allows parents with split or disputed custody to move to Colorado to provide so-called “gender affirming care” without legal recourse for the other parent — that provision contravenes Article Four, Section One of the U.S. Constitution, which says very directly that “states will honor and recognize rulings of other states.”

“Basically, if one parent were to take a child to the state of Colorado to get ‘gender-affirming care,’ and the state that they came from did a court ruling to bring the child back – Colorado will not recognize [that ruling],” Caldwell told Morning Wire.

Sections 8 and 9 of the bill also “define deadnaming and misgendering as discriminatory acts in the ‘Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act,’ and prohibit these discriminatory acts in places of public accommodation.” Places of public accommodation include most spaces outside of a private home, including businesses, schools, and public transport. Under the proposed statute, citizens who “misgender” or “deadname” in these areas could be civilly liable for doing so.

The Colorado Democratic Party holds a trifecta in the state: it controls the governor’s mansion and has large majorities in the state Senate (23D – 12R) and House (43D – 22R), meaning so long as there’s broad consensus within its ranks, Democrats have a free hand to pass whatever legislation they want without any Republican support.