Fake News Story on Tariffs Pause Causes Mayhem in Stock Market

The stock market is in such a dire state that an inaccurate report of a 90-day pause on Trump’s global tariffs gave investors real confidence, making the market shoot up before it crashed back down.

On Monday morning, Trump economic adviser Kevin Hassett went on Fox News and was asked if the administration would consider such a pause.

“The president is going to decide what the president is going to decide. There are more than 50 countries in negotiation with the president…. I would urge everyone, especially Bill [Ackman], to ease up the rhetoric a little bit,” Hassett replied vaguely. “Even if you think that there will be some negative effect from the trade side, that’s still a small share of the GDP. This idea that it’s gonna be a nuclear winter or something like that is completely irresponsible.”

Verified X user Walter Bloomberg mistook this quote for a resounding yes and reported that the administration was indeed considering a 90-day tariff pause “FOR ALL COUNTRIES EXCEPT CHINA.” The news was soon read on CNBC, causing the stock market to move positively for the first time in days, by 7 to 10 percent.

“INSANE market action right now. Market exploded higher on a headline attributed to Kevin Hassett,” said Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal. “And now nobody can figure out where it came from and the markets are diving again. An 8% surge and then a 3.5% plunge in a matter of seconds.”

The White House denied all claims of the pause and Bloomberg deleted his X post, falsely attributing the report to Reuters.

The Trump administration has basically no answer for why it imposed tariffs on a group of uninhabited islands off the coast of Australia.

In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper Sunday, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins insisted that there was something very smart about placing a levy on the penguin-populated Heard and McDonald islands.

“Well, I mean, that, come on, Jake,” Rollins said. “Here’s the bottom line: We live under a tariff regime from other countries.”

“The McDonald islands is not imposing—” Tapper interjected.

“Whatever. Listen, the people that are leading this are serious, intentional, patriotic, the smartest people I’ve ever worked with. I did not come up with the formulas, I’m the ag secretary,” Rollins continued, listing how she had helped farmers acquire soil and fertilizer.

The White House admitted last week that the tariffs were cooked up with bad and arbitrary math. As economists and financial writers attempted to understand the logic behind how Donald Trump’s team had determined the percentage of tariffs imposed by other countries, they discovered something wildly unusual.

The administration calculated the tariffs rate by only looking at goods provided, rather than the combined value of goods and services—something that “most economists seem to think is an odd way to calculate tariffs,” according to BBC Verify’s Shayan Sardarizadeh.

But none of that has swayed Rollins—or, apparently, the president.

“But I have no doubt that I speak on behalf of President Trump that he would say he has the utmost confidence in the team and what they have built and what they have put together,” Rollins said.

“We are unleashing a new golden age, and we will see an economy that will benefit not just every corner of America but our farmers and our ranchers and the people that have been left behind far too long by Republicans and Democrats,” she added.

By Monday morning, the stock market was swinging wildly as investors rushed to understand the potential global impact of Trump’s sweeping tariffs.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 756 points—or 2 percent—by 10:30 a.m. That followed a significant dive late last week, in which the market saw back-to-back 1,500-point losses “for the first time ever,” according to CNBC.

American businesses have, thus far, lost $9.6 trillion due to the instability, according to Forbes.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has argued that some foreign companies were attempting to circumvent levies by shipping through the McDonald and Heard islands before reaching the U.S.

“If you leave anything off the list, the countries that try to basically arbitrage America go through those countries to us,” Lutnick told CBS News on Sunday, calling it a “ridiculous loophole.”

And ridiculous it is—especially since practically a minuscule amount of trade goes through the islands.

“According to export data from the World Bank, the islands have, over the past few years, usually exported a small amount of products to the U.S.,” reported the BBC, noting that “in 2022 the U.S. imported $1.4m from the territory, nearly all of it unnamed ‘machinery and electrical’ products.”

The Heard and McDonald islands tariff was very obviously made in error, at least through the eyes of foreign officials. Australian Trade Minister Don Farrell told the Australian Broadcasting Network that the tariff was “clearly a mistake” and indicated a “rushed process.” Farrell extended a free trade agreement with the European Union last week, stating that “the world has changed” in the wake of Trump’s announcement.

Donald Trump may finally get his long-desired military parade through the streets of Washington. 

The Washington City Paper, citing an unnamed D.C. source, reports that the president has chosen June 14, 2025—the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army,  Flag Day, and coincidentally also his own 79th birthday—as the big day. If it goes ahead, the four-mile procession would go from the Pentagon in Arlington to the White House.

Seven years ago, Trump made his desire for a grand military parade well known after he saw a French parade in 2017, telling people at the time, “We’re going to have to try and top it.” But the idea got a lot of pushback from military leaders as well the D.C. government, who estimated that it would cost the military $92 million and the district over $21 million in public safety costs. 

Trump angrily abandoned the idea, accusing D.C. politicians of wanting “a number so ridiculously high that I canceled it. Never let someone hold you up!” At the time, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser shot down the idea on Twitter, saying she “finally got thru to the reality star in the White House with the realities ($21.6M) of parades/events/demonstrations in Trump America (sad).”

This time, though, Trump has overhauled military leadership, firing four-star Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as leaders in the Navy and Air Force,  including the top lawyers of those two branches and the Army. The legal firings presumably give Trump loyalists who would defend his parade if it is challenged in the courts. 

As far as D.C. leadership, Bowser and the rest of the D.C. government appear to be cowed by the administration out of fear that Trump will follow through on threats to take over the local government. Bowser chose to remove a Black Lives Matter memorial to appease administration officials and has stepped up the removal of graffiti and homeless encampments following Trump’s complaints. 

Trump has also set up a federal task force on D.C. crime fighting that does not include a single local official, indicating that he plans to keep interfering with how the city runs. That will now include a massively wasteful parade for his own ego, spending millions of dollars from both local and federal coffers despite claims that his administration is eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse. Will anyone push back against it this time?

60 Minutes’ Cecelia Vega on Sunday confirmed what anyone who’s been paying attention already suspected: An overwhelming majority of the Venezuelan men that Trump deported to a Salvadoran megaprison have no criminal record whatsoever. Yet the president continues to call them Tren de Aragua gang members and terrorists to legitimize his invoking of the Alien Enemies Act.

60 Minutes was able to get access to government records of the Venezuelans and compare them to domestic and international arrest records and court filings. The news program reported that they “could not find criminal records for 75 percent of the Venezuelans—179 men—now sitting in prison.” Less than a quarter have an arrest record in the U.S., and they are mostly for nonviolent offenses. This proves that the Trump administration is carrying out its cruelty campaign indiscriminately—if you’re a South American immigrant with tattoos, you could find yourself in Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s infamous megaprison with a shaved head and without a day in court. 

The Trump administration told 60 Minutes that it were wrong and that the 179 men truly are “actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gangsters, and more. They just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.”

“Could it be possible that there is something that perhaps the government knows that you don’t?’ Vega asked Lindsay Toczylowski, the lawyer representing Andry Hernandez Romero, a gay makeup artist and theatre troupe member who was deported to the megaprison.  

“I don’t think that that is possible,” Toczylowski replied. “But if it was possible that they had some information, they should follow the Constitution, present that information, give us the ability to reply to it.” 

But the Trump administration is fighting tooth and nail to avoid doing that, even invoking the State Secrets Act to keep proof of its illegal disappearings in the shadows. There is no timeline for freedom for the many innocent Venezuelan men sitting in one of the world’s most brutal prisons.

Donald Trump loves the idea of deporting American citizens to El Salvador—no, seriously he said that.

A reporter asked Trump Sunday whether he was considering an offer from El Savador President Nayib Bukele to “take American citizens in the federal prison population.”

“Well, I love that,” Trump replied.

“If we could take some of our twenty-time wise guys that push people into subways and hit people over the back of the head, and purposefully run people over in cars, uh if he would take them, I would be honored to give them,” Trump continued.

“I don’t know what the law says on that, but I can’t imagine the law would say anything different,” Trump said, claiming that it could likely save the U.S. money to house their prisoners in El Salvador. In fact, the law does say something different: It is illegal to deport U.S. citizens.

“I would only do according to the law,” Trump said. “But I have suggested that, you know, ‘Why should it stop just at people who cross the border illegally?’”

There are significant legal barriers to the deportation of U.S. citizens, even if they are incarcerated in the federal prison system. One legal expert told ABC News that removal to El Salvador could violate the Eighth Amendment protection from “cruel and unusual punishment,” which prevents the U.S. government from inflicting humiliating or torturous punishments for federal crimes.

U.S. Code 3621 requires an incarcerated person in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons to be able to be transported back to court—which obviously would be impossible if the prisoner is removed from U.S. custody to El Salvador, where the U.S. government is already claiming that it cannot remove a man wrongfully deported there. It also requires certain standards for prisons, which cannot be met in a foreign prison such as El Salvador’s CECOT, which is notorious for human rights abuses.

U.S. Code 4100, which established the Prisoner Transfer Program, says that an incarcerated person can only be transferred out of the U.S. to the country where they are a citizen or national, and can only be removed from the U.S. with their consent. A U.S. citizen can only be transferred to the United States.

The U.S. also has a law prohibiting the government “from expelling, extraditing, or otherwise effecting the involuntary return of a person to a country in which there are reasonable grounds for believing the person would be in danger of subjection to torture,” which one federal judge has already argued could apply to all removals to the notorious prison in El Salvador where Trump has sent deportees.

In February, when Bukele first offered to take U.S. citizens as part of a deal to take the alleged gang members the U.S. government has designated terrorists, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said it was a “very generous” offer but that there were “obviously legalities involved,” like that pesky U.S. Constitution.

Meanwhile, Trump was initially enthusiastic about the idea.

“These are sick people. If we could get them out of our country, we have other countries that would take him. They could,” Trump said at the time.

At the time, Aaron Reichlin-Melchick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, rebuked Bukele’s offer in a post on X: “Bukele is undoubtedly trolling, but to emphasize again: this is so incredibly illegal that there’s not even a hint of possible way to do it under any circumstances whatsoever. It violates international law and the U.S. constitution. Period. End of story.”

But the Trump administration hasn’t seemed particularly interested in following the letter of the law, as it invoked a wartime law to suspend due process and carry out the mass deportation of over 100 Venezuelan nationals in likely violation of a court order. The government claimed that the deportees were members of violent gangs, but it seems that several of them just had innocuous tattoos.

This story has been updated.