“These edicts reflect a national trade policy that now hinges on the president’s whims rather than the sound exercise of his lawful authority,” said the lawsuit, filed by the states’ attorneys general in the U.S. Court of International Trade.

The states, including New York, Illinois and Oregon, are the latest parties to take the Trump administration to court over the tariffs. Their case comes after California filed its own lawsuit last week, in which Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state attorney general accused the administration of escalating a trade war that has caused “immediate and irreparable harm” to that state’s economy.

Officials and businesses from Oregon, the lead plaintiff in the suit filed Wednesday, have also expressed concerns about the vulnerability of the state’s trade-dependent economy, as well as its sportswear industry, as a result of the tariffs.

“When a president pushes an unlawful policy that drives up prices at the grocery store and spikes utility bills, we don’t have the luxury of standing by,” said Dan Rayfield, Oregon’s attorney general, in a statement. “These tariffs hit every corner of our lives — from the checkout line to the doctor’s office — and we have a responsibility to push back.”

Asked about the latest lawsuit, Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, called it a “witch hunt” by Democrats against Mr. Trump.

“The Trump administration remains committed to using its full legal authority to confront the distinct national emergencies our country is currently facing,” he said, “both the scourge of illegal migration and fentanyl flows across our border and the exploding annual U.S. goods trade deficit.”

The other states in the suit are Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico and Vermont. All of the states have Democratic attorneys general, though Nevada and Vermont have Republican governors.

Mr. Trump’s tariffs have shocked and upended the global trade industry. He set a 145 percent tariff on goods from China, 25 percent on Canada, and 10 percent on almost all imports from most other countries.

The moves have drawn legal challenges from other entities as well, including two members of the Blackfeet Nation, who filed a federal lawsuit in Montana over the tariffs on Canada, saying they violated tribal treaty rights. Legal groups like the Liberty Justice Center and the New Civil Liberties Alliance have also sued.

“I’m happy that Oregon and the other states are joining us in this fight,” said Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, who is working on the Liberty Justice Center’s lawsuit.

He was not quite chastened, but it was a different Mr. Musk than a couple months ago, when the billionaire, at the peak of his power, brandished a chain saw onstage at a pro-Trump conference to dramatize his role as a government slasher.

Back then, Mr. Musk was inarguably a force in Washington, driving radical change across the government. To the president, he was a genius; to Democrats, he was Mr. Trump’s “unelected co-president”; to several cabinet secretaries, he was a menace; and to G.O.P. lawmakers, he was the source of anguished calls from constituents whose services and jobs were threatened by cuts from his Department of Government Efficiency.

As Mr. Musk moves to spend less time in Washington, it is unclear whether his audacious plan to overhaul the federal bureaucracy will have lasting power. The endeavor has already left an immense imprint on the government, and Mr. Musk has told associates that he believes he has put in place the structure to make DOGE a success. But he has still not come close to cutting the $1 trillion he vowed to find in waste, fraud and abuse.

Mr. Trump has constrained some of Mr. Musk’s influence over the past two months, telling cabinet secretaries that they were in charge of their own agencies. But the president also told the secretaries to work with Mr. Musk and DOGE to cut spending. At the same time, Mr. Musk has fought publicly and privately against the president’s steep tariffs that have threatened the manufacturing and profits of Tesla, his car company.

Mr. Musk has told friends that he has been frustrated by the encounters he has had with Mr. Trump’s trade advisers, according to a person briefed on the conversations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions. The billionaire has tried to work behind the scenes to persuade Mr. Trump to abandon his draconian protectionist posture, according to two people with knowledge of their conversations.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment, and a spokeswoman for Mr. Musk declined to comment. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump said the billionaire “was a tremendous help, both in the campaign and in what he’s done with DOGE.”

“He was always at this time going to ease out,” the president told reporters in the Oval Office.

Shaun Maguire, one of Mr. Musk’s closest friends and an adviser to DOGE officials, said that he was confident the endeavor would thrive without Mr. Musk’s full-time involvement. He compared DOGE to a Falcon 9 rocket — an initial thrust of energy powers the rocket even after it has separated from its engines.

“At this point, a rocket is only a couple hundred kilometers from Earth, but it has escaped its gravity well and can travel far into the solar system,” Mr. Maguire said. “DOGE has escaped D.C.’s gravity well.”

Mr. Maguire, who was involved in interviews for Pentagon appointments during the presidential transition, said he believed that “history will judge DOGE very favorably, well beyond what is appreciated today.”

Mr. Musk has placed DOGE allies across the federal government, seeking to dismantle some agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The New York Times has identified more than 60 employees hired to work for Mr. Musk’s effort, although some have since left the federal government. Many have worked with the billionaire in the private sector, including at least 20 who have ties to Mr. Musk’s companies. DOGE is led by Steve Davis, Mr. Musk’s top adviser and enforcer.

Although Mr. Musk’s aides have pushed for staff reductions and have canceled contracts, some of the group’s most contentious work has been harnessing the federal government’s vast trove of personal data, in part to help drive Mr. Trump’s deportation policies.

DOGE staff members have overridden the objections of career civil servants at the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service to access closely held data about immigrants. Inside a Social Security database, Mr. Musk’s team put into place a system to list living immigrants they claimed were criminals as dead, in an effort to cut them off from financial services and to force them to leave the country.

All told, DOGE has tried to gain entry to more than 80 data systems across at least 10 federal agencies, The New York Times found. Those data sets include personal information about federal workers, detailed financial data about federal procurement and spending and intimate personal details about the American public.

Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers have watched anxiously as Mr. Musk has taken risky political swings at agencies that tens of millions of Americans rely on.

At the Social Security Administration, rushed policy changes have led to panicked beneficiaries overwhelming field offices. And a return-to-office policy and layoffs of probationary employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs have imperiled the agency’s mental health care program and threatened its ability to conduct medical research.

Mr. Musk came into the Trump administration claiming he would find governmental cost savings so large that they sounded impossible to budget experts.

In February, the group posted an online “wall of receipts” that detailed the savings from thousands of canceled grants, contracts and office leases. But that site included claims that confused “billion” with “million,” double- or triple-counted the same cancellations and even took credit for canceling programs that ended when George W. Bush was president.

Earlier this month, at a cabinet meeting, Mr. Musk said he had so far cut $150 billion from next year’s federal budget — far less than the $1 trillion he claimed he would extract.

DOGE has triggered sharp cuts to the federal work force and to the budgets of some agencies. But it is difficult to gauge exactly how much it has saved, because DOGE’s public claims have been riddled with errors and guesswork that inflated its success.

Mr. Musk’s slashing of the government has been politically costly, but he remains in good standing with the president, according to people familiar with Mr. Trump’s views.

While some of Mr. Trump’s close aides and advisers have argued with Mr. Musk, the president still praises him at nearly every opportunity, and still invites him to hang out at his clubs and to bring along his children.

Mr. Trump has told advisers that Mr. Musk put it all on the line for him. And he feels bad about what he calls left-wing “lunatics” attacking Tesla dealerships to protest Mr. Musk’s role in the Trump administration. Mr. Trump also respects the power of Mr. Musk’s social media platform, X, even as the president retains a commercial interest in Truth Social, his own platform.

In private, Mr. Trump has occasionally indicated to associates that it might be time for Mr. Musk to move on and spend more time with his companies. But the president is unlikely to ever pressure Mr. Musk to leave, or do anything deliberate to alienate him. He remains grateful for the hundreds of millions of dollars that Mr. Musk spent to elect him in 2024, and mindful of the additional $100 million that Mr. Musk has pledged to Mr. Trump’s political operation, the associates note.

Mr. Musk is now a financial cornerstone of the Republican Party, and will keep immense influence as long as he wants to stay involved in politics.

Still, Mr. Trump has recognized problems that Mr. Musk has caused, such as a plan for him to get briefed at the Pentagon on sensitive national security matters related to China — something even the president described privately as a conflict of interest and a meeting he was not told about in advance, according to people familiar with what took place. When Mr. Trump learned of that potential session from news reports, it was the first time people close to the president could remember him expressing displeasure with Mr. Musk.

Mr. Trump has also acknowledged to advisers that Mr. Musk has stumbled as a political force — most notably with his costly long-shot effort to flip a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat. Mr. Trump, a student of public opinion, has paid attention to the billionaire’s standing in opinion polls, watchful for any signs that Mr. Musk’s deep unpopularity might transfer.

But people close to Mr. Trump have also said that Mr. Musk has been helpful as a “heat shield,” absorbing unrelenting attacks that would otherwise be aimed at the president.

On Tuesday, Mr. Musk told analysts that he planned to dial back his government work to “a day or two per week” to turn his attention back to his companies. Administration officials with knowledge of Mr. Musk’s schedule said that they have already noticed he has reduced the amount of time he spends in Washington.

By dialing back the number of days he spends working for the White House, Mr. Musk can also potentially stretch out the 130 days he is allotted as a “special government employee.”

Zach Montague, Emily Badger, Wilson Andrews and Alexandra Berzon contributed reporting.

A passing grade from accreditation companies, some of which have existed for more than a century, is crucial for colleges to gain access to $120 billion in federal financial aid approved each year. But Mr. Trump has blamed these businesses for promoting the kind of diversity, equity and inclusion policies that his administration has made a priority to stamp out.

During his last presidential campaign, Mr. Trump did not speak often about accreditors, which have long been a target of conservative Republicans. But when he did, he reserved some of his most biting attacks for them. In a policy video he posted in the summer of 2023, he vowed to take aim at “radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics.”

Mr. Trump’s order would make it easier for schools to switch accreditors and for new accreditors to gain federal approval, according to the White House, which provided fact sheets about the measures. The text of the orders was not immediately available.

Bob Shireman, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a liberal think tank that studies college accreditation policy, among other things, said that Mr. Trump’s order would undermine institutional independence, which, he said, “has helped our universities to be the best in the world.”

“The federal government has long stayed away from any involvement in a college’s curriculum or hiring, and current law prohibits this kind of intrusion into academic affairs,” Mr. Shireman said, adding that the executive order “steps far across this line.”

Linda McMahon, the education secretary, said the current accreditation system contributed to rising tuition costs and “pushes universities in ideological directions.”

“The Department of Education will create a competitive marketplace of higher education accreditors, which will give colleges and universities incentives and support to focus on lowering college costs, fostering innovation and delivering a high-quality postsecondary education,” she said in a statement.

The Trump administration has cast its campaign against elite institutions as a fight against antisemitism, along with an effort to root out diversity initiatives. Critics have said the push is more of an attempt to impose Mr. Trump’s political agenda on the nation’s schools.

Still, the president’s crusade against diversity programs has already affected accrediting bodies. Last month, the American Psychological Association, which sets standards for professional training in mental health, voted to suspend its requirement that postgraduate programs show a commitment to diversity in recruitment and hiring.

Mr. Trump also signed executive orders to encourage the use of artificial intelligence in schools, promote private-sector partnerships with historically Black colleges and universities, and increase the number of apprenticeships in skilled trade jobs. Another order instructed his administration to make it more difficult for universities to obscure details of foreign funding.

Two other orders focused on student discipline, which has been a political flashpoint for the past decade.

One order was to ensure that disciplinary policies were not based on D.E.I. policies. Another restricts the use of the so-called disparate impact rule, which civil rights groups have long said is an important tool for showing discrimination against minorities.

Tough disciplinary tactics, like suspensions, can help teachers manage classrooms by removing disruptive students. But they can also hurt students who are already struggling by forcing them to miss critical lessons. Black students have historically been disciplined more harshly than white students, an issue that has been crucial to progressive education activists and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Under President Barack Obama, school districts were told that if certain groups of students were disciplined more often than other groups, it could be considered a violation of federal civil rights law. Mr. Trump rescinded that order during his first term, but it was reinstated under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Mr. Trump’s order calls for new federal guidance on discipline in local schools.

Dana Goldstein contributed reporting.

And now Mr. Trump has acknowledged that the 145 percent tariffs on Chinese goods that he announced just two weeks ago are not sustainable. He was prompted in part by the warnings of senior executives from Target and Walmart and other large American retailers that consumers would see price surges and empty shelves for some imported goods within a few weeks.

Mr. Trump’s encounter with reality amounted to a vivid case study in the political and economic costs of striking the hardest of hard lines. He entered this trade war imagining a simpler era in which imposing punishing tariffs would force companies around the world to build factories in the United States.

He ends the month discovering that the world of modern supply chains is far more complex than he bargained for, and that it is far from clear his “beautiful” tariffs will have the effects he predicted.

This is not, of course, the explanation of the events of the past few days that the White House is putting out. Mr. Trump’s aides insist that his maximalist demands have been an act of strategic brilliance, forcing 90 countries to line up to deal with the president. It may take months, they acknowledge, to see the concessions that will result. But bending the global trade system to American will, they say, takes time.

“Have some patience and you will see,” the president’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters on Wednesday.

Mr. Trump himself insisted to reporters at the White House that everything was going according to plan.

“We have a lot of action going on,” he said, repeating his now-familiar line that “we’re not going to be a laughingstock that got taken advantage of by virtually every country in the world.” He suggested again that the United States needed to return to the halcyon era from 1870 to 1913 — the year the country began to impose income taxes — when tariffs funded the government and “we had more money than anybody.”

And he repeated his prediction that “now we’re going to be making money with everyone, and everyone’s going to be happy.”

But happy did not seem to be the vibe around the White House in recent days.

It started with Mr. Trump’s declaration that the “termination” of the Fed chair, Jerome H. Powell, whom he appointed in 2017, “cannot come fast enough.” His most senior economic adviser, Kevin Hassett, went further, saying the administration was looking at the legal options to remove him.

Mr. Trump’s complaint is that Mr. Powell will not cut interest rates, for fear of stoking inflation. But the president was clearly concerned about the warnings from economists that the country could be headed to recession — one of his own making, one that his critics are already trying to label the Trump Slump even before it happens.

The tone of his comments seemed to suggest that if recession does come, the blame will fall on Mr. Powell.

But once Mr. Trump declared “if I want him out, he’ll be out of there real fast, believe me,” another market sell-off began. It made little difference that he doesn’t have the power to dismiss the Fed chair, as Mr. Powell has noted in recent days. The mere threat of it seemed to accelerate the sense that the United States has become the biggest source of market instability in the world.

Then, on Tuesday, Mr. Trump changed his tune. “I have no intention of firing him,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Powell. That didn’t stop him from continuing his critique of Mr. Powell as “Mr. Late” with rate cuts, but it was enough to reverse the market sell-off.

The next walk-back came with China.

The White House kept hinting that the Chinese were beginning to negotiate, seeking a way to end the tariffs. In fact, the strategy that Beijing appeared to be following was to wait for Mr. Trump to feel the pain of his own actions. The expected phone call from President Xi Jinping never came. And Mr. Trump didn’t want to be the first to call, either — a sign of desperation.

For weeks, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent seemed in obvious pain as he tried to justify the application of tariffs that, by many measures, outstrip those imposed by the Smoot-Hawley Act in 1930. (It is a historical comparison that no one in the White House wants to touch — other than to declare it a false analogy — because the cycles of retaliation triggered by that act of Congress worsened the Great Depression.)

“No one thinks the current status quo is sustainable” at those tariff rates, Mr. Bessent told investors at a closed-door meeting on Tuesday in Washington, where his comments immediately leaked. He said he was looking for a de-escalation with Beijing, which “should give the world, the markets, a sign of relief.” But he admitted that any negotiation with China was going to be slow and painful, “a slog.”

In private, some Trump officials concede that they did not accurately predict China’s reaction. Mr. Trump seemed to expect China to be among the first to come begging for relief, given the size of its exports to the United States.

“Back in 2017, the first time Trump imposed tariffs on China, Beijing was caught by relative surprise,” Nicholas Mulder, an economic historian at Cornell University, said on Wednesday. “But they have been preparing for further escalation for many years,” he said. Now, “they have much more tolerance for economic pain, and a greater ability to weather this ratcheting up.”

By late Tuesday Mr. Trump was publicly mulling lowering the Chinese tariffs, saying “145 percent is very high, and it won’t be that high, not going to be that high.” He added, “It got up to there,” as if the number had floated to that height by itself.

On Wednesday, Ms. Leavitt said Mr. Trump would not lower the tariffs until the United States and China negotiated a new trade agreement — another mixed message out of the White House on the state of negotiations.

“Let me be clear: There will be no unilateral reduction in tariffs against China,” Ms. Leavitt said on Fox News.

Other powers are clearly watching the Chinese approach and taking notes. Mr. Xi’s closest ally, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, is engaged in his own high-stakes negotiation with the United States, over Ukraine. Iran is in the midst of talks about its nuclear program. They are looking for signs of weakness, or little indications of what could test Mr. Trump’s nerves.

Elizabeth Economy, who has written extensively about Chinese trade policy and served in the Commerce Department during the Biden administration, said the Trump team appeared to have ignored three fundamentals about China: the depth of the Chinese retaliatory tool kit, the extent of China’s economic leverage over the United States, and the ability of Mr. Xi to make the United States the scapegoat for China’s economic ills.

“This game of chicken has done nothing but enable Xi Jinping to boost his standing in and outside China, while the United States appears uninformed and unmoored,” she said.

American presidents typically enter office with a groundswell of support that wanes over time. But Mr. Trump’s approval has been dropping slightly faster than that of his predecessors.

Mr. Trump started his term with the second-lowest approval rating for a president in modern history. The only recent president to have started in a worse position was Mr. Trump the first time he took office.

The polling average, assembled by The New York Times, includes nearly all publicly released polls that track Mr. Trump’s approval rating. The goal of a polling average is to balance the biases of individual polls, which can vary in quality and frequency, and to make it easier to track changes in public opinion over time.

The average does not directly address the causes of the decline in approval, or whether they are driven by specific actions like his enactment of tariffs, his threats toward allies or gyrations in the markets.

On average, across all polls, Mr. Trump’s numbers continued to fall after he issued sweeping global tariffs by executive order. Though few high-quality polls have been conducted before and after the tariff announcement, most showed no major decline after what Mr. Trump called “Liberation Day.”

It is still too early to fully capture how an event like that has shaped public opinion.

In his second term, Mr. Trump has sought to reshape the global economy, crack down on immigration, shrink the federal government and overhaul American law firms and universities. The blitz is part of a “flood the zone” strategy devised by Mr. Trump’s aides and allies to overwhelm any opposition.

Mr. Trump is following through on many of the promises he made as a candidate, but even some supporters have registered concerns about some of his actions. In particular, the sweeping tariffs on dozens of countries have rankled allies and adversaries. The trade war plunged global economic markets into turmoil, before Mr. Trump paused the tariffs for 90 days, citing talks with other countries about new trade deals.

Polls show little drop in his support among Republican voters.

Much of the decline in approval has come from voters who identify as independent, according to Quinnipiac University polling. His standing with that crucial voting bloc in January stood at 41 percent approval and 46 percent disapproval. In Quinnipiac’s mid-April poll, 58 percent of independents said they disapproved of the president’s job performance, while just 36 percent approved.

Pollsters still struggle to fully gauge the strength of Mr. Trump’s support. In 2024, pre-election polls underestimated Mr. Trump on average by around 3 percentage points. But even the polls that most accurately assessed his support, such as AtlasIntel, now show net negative approval ratings.

Mr. Trump sees his second term as a resounding success. He has bragged about a significant drop in illegal border crossings, billions of dollars in new U.S.-based investments, the release of Americans imprisoned abroad and rooting out diversity initiatives in the public and private sectors.

Mr. Trump has also promised that new trade deals, including with China, are on the horizon.

“We’re going to be making money with everyone, and everyone’s going to be happy,” he told reporters outside the White House on Wednesday.

Irineo Cabreros contributed data analysis.

In an astonishing escalation of the Trump family’s efforts to profit from crypto, a website promoting $TRUMP, the president’s so-called memecoin, announced on Wednesday that the coin’s largest buyers would be invited to meet him. The effort was, in effect, an offer of access to the White House in exchange for an investment in one of Mr. Trump’s crypto ventures.

“Have Dinner with President Trump and the $TRUMP Community!” the invitation said. “Let the President know how many $TRUMP coins YOU own!”

For months, Mr. Trump’s forays into crypto have created ethical conflicts with little precedent in presidential history. As he markets digital currencies to the public, Mr. Trump has also appointed regulators who are scaling back crypto enforcement and called for legislation that would boost the industry’s prospects in the United States.

As news of the dinner invitation spread on social media, the memecoin’s price surged more than 60 percent, suggesting that investors were rushing to accumulate enough coins to qualify for a dinner seat.

“This is really incredible,” said Corey Frayer, who oversaw crypto policy for the Securities and Exchange Commission during the Biden administration. “They are making the pay-to-play deal explicit.”

A business entity linked to Mr. Trump owns a large tranche of the coins, meaning the president personally profits every time the price increases, at least on paper. Mr. Trump and his business partners also collect fees when the coins are traded, a windfall that amounted to nearly $100 million in the weeks after the coin debuted in January.

Victoria Haneman, a law professor at Creighton University, said the offering raised concerns about the ways Mr. Trump and his businesses “may maneuver to profit off the presidency.”

Early this year, the S.E.C. issued official guidance saying memecoins, a type of cryptocurrency based on an online joke or celebrity mascot, will not be subject to oversight by the agency. Crypto skeptics criticized the policy as a risky move that could open the door to rampant fraud by memecoin promoters.

As president, Mr. Trump has broad immunity from laws governing conflicts of interest, a loophole he has pointed out in the past. Representatives for the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Mr. Trump’s son Eric, who helps run the Trump Organization, a sponsor of the $TRUMP coin, declined to comment.

Once a cryptocurrency skeptic, Mr. Trump embraced digital currencies on the campaign trail last year, as crypto companies poured tens of millions of dollars into the 2024 election.

In the fall, Mr. Trump and his sons, Donald Jr., Eric and Barron, said they were starting a company, World Liberty Financial, that offered a digital currency called WLFI. So far, $550 million of those coins have been sold, according to the company.

Not long after, Mr. Trump’s social media firm, Trump Media & Technology Group, moved to offer crypto-related financial products to amateur investors and announced a partnership with Crypto.com, a digital trading platform.

But Mr. Trump’s memecoin venture has generated the most attention.

Just three days before the inauguration, Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social, his social media site, that he was selling the coin. Sales of $TRUMP immediately spiked, making the president-elect a crypto billionaire on paper.

Memecoins tend to rise and fall quickly, and $TRUMP’s price soon cratered. Traders who had accumulated the coin suffered more than $2 billion in cumulative losses.

The dinner announcement appeared calculated to ignite more interest in the coins.

When $TRUMP went on sale in January, a large stash of the coins were allocated to the project’s backers. But rules built into the offering prevented those insiders from selling any of the coins until last week, raising fears that they would try to offload their holdings and cause $TRUMP’s price to drop further.

Instead, the price gradually climbed in the days before the invitation was released and then surged as the announcement went live.

On the memecoin’s website, the $TRUMP promoters set up a leaderboard of the coin’s biggest investors — essentially an online game allowing buyers to track their place in the rankings. Dinner invitations would go to the “top 220 average $TRUMP owners” between April 23 and May 12, the website said. The top 25 buyers would win access to a reception with Mr. Trump before the dinner and a V.I.P. tour of the White House. (At the moment, the 25th-ranked investor on the chart owns about 4,000 coins, worth roughly $54,000.)

“The more $TRUMP you hold — and the longer you hold it — the higher Your Ranking will be,” the website said.

The dinner with Mr. Trump is scheduled to take place on May 22 at the Trump National Golf Club, the website said, calling it the “Most Exclusive Once in Lifetime Invitation.”

Most of Europe’s largest economies, including France and Germany, met the 2 percent threshold, while Italy was among the few that did not. NATO introduced the military spending guideline after Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, but President Trump’s persistent criticism of his European allies has brought a new sense of urgency to the military alliance.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said Tuesday that Spain was meeting an extraordinary moment in global politics.

“We did not choose this international situation,” he said during a news conference in Madrid. “But we do choose how to confront it.”

As leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, Mr. Sánchez secured a second term in 2023 by campaigning under a banner of social spending and economic growth, and by cobbling together a coalition of progressive parties.

“If you asked me years ago about my government’s investment priorities in security and defense, it’s obvious my response would have been different,” Mr. Sánchez said during his announcement.

“That’s not because our values have changed,” he added. “It’s because the world has.”

Relations between the United States and Western Europe have frayed the decades-old alliance. Mr. Trump has demanded that Europe foot more of the bill for NATO.

Spain’s government will not raise taxes or cut social spending to reach its military spending goal, Mr. Sánchez said. Still, he faced sharp criticism from within his own governing coalition and was accused of caving to pressure from the United States.

“It’s a proposal that came from the United States,” Yolanda Díaz, Spain’s second vice president, said, adding that a coordinated European response “is not about increasing budgets.”