Trump Has Gross Plan for Ceremony for Soldiers Who Died in Lithuania

Donald Trump will be fine dining Friday, instead of attending a ceremony for four fallen U.S. soldiers.

The commander in chief chose to attend the LIV Golf dinner reception in Florida Thursday night, financed by the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia, flying over Delaware’s Dover Air Force base where four service members who died on training grounds in a Lithuanian swamp were being honored.

Those soldiers include 25-year-old Sergeant Jose Duenez Jr. of Joliet, Illinois; 25-year-old Sergeant Edvin F. Franco of Glendale, California; 21-year-old Private First Class Dante D. Taitano of Dededo, Guam; and 28-year-old Staff Sergeant Troy S. Knutson-Collins of Battle Creek, Michigan.

The M88 Hercules armored recovery vehicle the team had been using was discovered 16 feet underground, a day after the soldiers went missing, but the massive machinery took days to unearth in its entirety. The last soldier’s body was recovered Tuesday, capping a weeklong search by hundreds of personnel in the U.S. military and Lithuania’s emergency services.

The soldiers were honored during a dignified departure ceremony in Lithuania attended by Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda. Trump’s decision to not attend the arrival ceremony suggests that the U.S. military leader cares less about America’s armed forces than the leaders of foreign countries.

Meanwhile, this very important dinner kicks off a three-day LIV Golf tournament hosted at Trump National Doral Golf Club.

Trump has had a bad history with honoring the Army’s dead. In 2020, HuffPost reported that Trump stopped attending dignified transfers after the father of slain Navy SEAL William “Ryan” Owens refused to meet or shake Trump’s hand. Owens died during a controversial raid on Yemen that Trump greenlit just one week into his first term.

“I told them I don’t want to meet the president,” Bill Owens told the Miami Herald at the time. Owens would go on to accuse Trump of trying to “hide behind my son’s death” in order to avoid an investigation into the incident.

But it’s possible that the deceased servicemen don’t matter at all to Trump. Last week, the president was caught completely in the dark more than 24 hours after the soldiers first went missing.

At an Oval Office news briefing, Trump casually admitted that he was not aware that the U.S. army members had disappeared during a training exercise in Lithuania.

“Have you been briefed about the soldiers in Lithuania who are missing?” a reporter asked.

“No, I haven’t,” Trump said, failing to offer the soldiers or their families any well wishes.

Trump is slated to visit Saudi Arabia in the coming weeks, marking his first trip abroad since reentering the White House, reported The Wall Street Journal. Saudi Arabia is currently the center of peace talks between Ukraine and Russia.

The Trump administration is attempting to use the positive jobs report from March to assuage widespread economic panic over the unprecedented trade war the president launched on Wednesday.

“Today’s jobs report shows the private sector is roaring back under President Donald J. Trump—smashing expectations for the second straight month as the Golden Age of America is well on its way,” the White House announced in a press release emailed to reporters with the subject line “JOBS, JOBS, JOBS.” “In March, the U.S. added 228,000 jobs—nearly 100,000 more jobs than economists predicted and the fourth-highest month for private payroll growth in the past two years.… The report highlights a resilient labor market as companies aggressively onshore jobs amid President Trump’s bold trade and economic agenda.”

The administration’s rhetoric is the living embodiment of the “This is fine” burning-house meme. It’s baffling to watch it try to fool Americans with this faux excitement over a jobs report as the stock market craters, panic grows, and tariff-related layoffs begin. How can manufacturers hire more, how can consumers continue to spend and invest when everything across the board becomes more expensive?

“GREAT JOBS NUMBERS, FAR BETTER THAN EXPECTED. IT’S ALREADY WORKING,” the president wrote on X, referring to his massive tariffs on virtually every U.S. trading parter. “HANK TOUGH, WE CAN’T LOSE.” (Trump later changed his misspell from ‘Hank” to “Hang.”)

“GREAT NEWS! The economy is starting to roar with a strong 228,000 jobs added in the month of March—well ahead of the market’s expectation,” wrote press secretary Karoline Leavitt. “There was also a sharp increase in transportation, construction, and warehousing employment. The President’s push to onshore jobs here in the United States is working. The Golden Age of America is on its way!”

These are insane messages to broadcast to the country as fears of stagflation set in. Even Trump’s cheerleaders at Fox Business weren’t buying the fake joy over last month’s jobs numbers.

“These numbers aren’t gonna make any difference at all,” one host said plainly. “What the market is worried about is what’s gonna happen in the future. Who’s gonna hire now in this uncertain environment? I think people are very very concerned, and that’s why … we need to get to work, we need to act on negotiating now, we need to get tax cuts now, we need to get deregulation now before this gets out of control the other way.”

“We want as quick a deal on these tariffs as soon as possible because every country would benefit,” another host chimed in. But Trump himself has made it crystal clear that there will be no deal—or, for that matter, negotiations. These tariffs are final, and help is not on the way.

Analysts at the world’s largest bank say that a recession is more likely to happen than not.

Analysts at JP Morgan, the marketing side of JP Morgan Chase & Co., adjusted their prediction Thursday that the United States would experience a recession in the next year, raising their forecasts to a whopping 60 percent from an already troubling 40 percent, according to The Wall Street Journal.

This decision comes after Donald Trump announced sweeping 10 percent tariffs on imports from nearly every country in the world, with additional country-specific tariffs levied on top.

Analysts predicted that retaliatory tariffs could lead to huge disruptions in the supply chain and that the tariff rate, which they expect to increase by 20 percentage points, would be equivalent to the biggest tax hike since 1968, which also led to a recession, according to Reuters.

Trump’s announcement continued to send the stock market tumbling Thursday, amid concerns over a global trade war. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 1,679.39 points, marking its worst session since June 2020, while the Nasdaq Composite saw its steepest drop since March 2020.

When Trump was asked about the crashing markets Thursday, he responded, “I think it’s going very well.” Blatant denial seems to be the name of the game, messaging-wise, as the White House insisted that it was not watching the market.

Trump also enacted a “permanent” 25 percent tariff on all imported vehicles and autoparts—which is already kneecapping the U.S. auto industry. The president has already levied steep 25 percent tariffs on America’s closest trading partners, Mexico and Canada.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced Thursday that the era of U.S. global leadership on trade was “over,” and said his country would begin looking elsewhere for trade partnerships.

Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts University student brazenly abducted by masked immigration agents on a public street in Massachusetts, is suffering serious health issues in Homeland Security custody.

Representative Ayanna Pressley, whose district includes the university, posted on Bluesky Thursday night that Öztürk has had three separate asthma attacks in custody while being denied access to her required medications, “a violation of her fundamental right to medical care.”

“This is cruelty, it is neglect, and it is a damning moral and legal failure,” Pressley’s post said.

Öztürk, a doctoral student on Fulbright scholarship, was allegedly detained for engaging “in activities in support of Hamas,” a DHS spokesperson said last week without offering any evidence supporting that charge. Secretary of State Marco Rubio also refused to offer any explanation of why Öztürk was detained without a court order or access to legal counsel, attacking the student for coming “into the U.S. as a visitor” and creating “a ruckus for us.”

Rubio claims to have revoked the visas of “more than 300” international students so far, with no word on whether the State Department, DHS, or Immigration and Customs Enforcement is following due process. Tufts University has offered its support to Öztürk, making a declaration before the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts seeking “relief so that Ms Öztürk is released without delay so that she can return to complete her studies and finish her degree.”

Meanwhile, Öztürk continues to be held in an ICE facility in Louisiana without access to her medication as her attorneys seek to have her transferred back to Massachusetts. True relief, however, will only come if she is granted due process, released from custody, and given the chance to address the allegations against her, if they even have any merit.

A right-wing group with financial ties to Leonard Leo and the Koch network is aiming to halt Donald Trump’s tariff plan.

The New Civil Liberties Alliance sued the president Thursday, claiming that Trump’s decision to invoke the International Emergency Economic Powers Act did not give him the power to “usurp” Congress’s right to control tariffs or “upset the Constitution’s separation of powers.”

In a press release, the group argued that the emergency statute “authorizes specific emergency actions like imposing sanctions or freezing assets to protect the United States from foreign threats.” 

“It does not authorize the President to impose tariffs,” the NCLA wrote.

“Congress has sole authority to control tariffs, which it has done by passing detailed tariff statutes. The President cannot bypass those statutes by invoking ‘emergency’ authority in another statute that does not mention tariffs,” the group continued. “His attempt to use the IEEPA this way not only violates the law as written, but it also invites application of the Supreme Court’s Major Questions Doctrine, which tells courts not to discern policies of ‘vast economic and political significance’ in a law without explicit congressional authorization.”

The NCLA further argued that Trump had massively overstepped his presidential powers by leaning on the wartime statute.

“In its nearly 50-year history, no other president—including President Trump in his first term—has ever tried to use the IEEPA to impose tariffs,”  they wrote. “NCLA’s lawsuit does not quibble with President Trump’s declaration of an opioid-related emergency, but it does take issue with his decision to impose tariffs in response, without legal authority to do so.”

The group sued Trump on behalf of Simplified, a Florida-based home goods company whose business relies on imported materials from China, arguing that Trump’s move to impose even more tariffs on China would crush the company’s profits. In a filing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida, the NCLA asked the court to declare the tariff unlawful, vacate the increase reflected in the U.S. tariff schedule, and effectively block the tariff in its entirety.

“By invoking emergency power to impose an across-the-board tariff on imports from China that the statute does not authorize, President Trump has misused that power, usurped Congress’s right to control tariffs, and upset the Constitution’s separation of powers,” stated NCLA senior litigation counsel Andrew Morris.