Cognitive Decline? Trump Calls for Open Borders in Rant on Tariffs

Donald Trump responded to a question about confusing tariff language from his administration by adding to the confusion. 

During a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office Monday, a reporter asked the president about “mixed messages from your administration. You’re talking about negotiations and yet others in your administration are saying these tariffs are actually permanent.” 

Trump’s response was anything but clarifying. 

“Well, it can both be true,” Trump responded. “There can be permanent tariffs and there can also be negotiations, because there are things that we need beyond tariffs. We need open borders.”

Is Trump actually going back on his vehement anti-immigrant, pro–border closure stances? His words seem to make little sense coupled with his mass deportation policies and attempts to restrict border crossings. Perhaps he’s referring to fewer restrictions on trade, which is probably how his surrogates and spokespeople will try to spin his remarks, and it could also be a slip of the tongue related to his ongoing cognitive decline. 

Trump’s tariff policy is so erratic and ill thought out that it’s nearly impossible to know what he actually means by “open borders.” In his bonkers remarks about trying to make Canada the fifty-first state, he’s complained about an “artificial line” separating the U.S. from its northern neighbor, but he has also long complained about crime, drugs, and rapists coming from Mexico through the America’s southern border. One thing is likely, though: The president will contradict his own remarks within days or even hours. 

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent thinks that all the federal workers who were fired by DOGE will move to manufacturing and reinvigorate the domestic industry.

“We are shedding excess labor in the federal government and bringing down federal borrowings.… That will give us the labor we need for the new manufacturing,” Bessent said in an interview with Tucker Carlson released on Friday. “And we’re going to relever the private sector. So the private sector, in essence, has been in recession during the Biden years. And this is an opportunity to right-size the federal government and unleash the private sector again, because it’s been hemmed down by excessive regulation, and it’s been crowded out by the government.”

It sounds like Bessent—after weeks of federal DOGE layoffs and days of global market collapse from Trump’s tariff war—is suggesting that the federal bureaucrats who were formerly working at departments like Health and Human Services, Education, or Defense are willing and ready to do their best Rosie the Riveter impersonations in the name of restoring domestic manufacturing. This comes just days after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said that it’d be robots that would bring back American manufacturing.

Bessent went on to dismiss the widespread economic anxiety that his administration has caused.

“I think one of the things that we won’t get credit for but that this administration will have done is avoiding a financial calamity,” he said to Carlson. “We’re putting on the reinforced doors before the crash.”

The former top vaccine official at the Food and Drug Administration says he was forced out of his job for trying to protect vaccine data from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Dr. Peter Marks told The Associated Press Sunday he refused to hand over unrestricted access to a vaccine safety database to the Health and Human Services secretary and his team, fearing that the information might be misused, manipulated, or deleted altogether.

Initially, Marks said that he tried to be on good terms with his vaccine-skeptic new boss regarding vaccine safety, making plans to develop a “vaccine transparency action plan.” Marks also gave Kennedy and his team the ability to view reports from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, but drew the line at allowing them to edit the data.

“Why wouldn’t we? Because frankly we don’t trust [them],” Marks said, using an expletive. “They’d write over it or erase the whole database.”

Marks’s interview came the same day that Kennedy visited Seminole County in Texas, where a young child became the third person, and second child, to die from this year’s measles outbreak. None of the three had received the measles, mumps, and rubella, or MMR, vaccine. Kennedy has a long reputation of being anti-vaccine, which he tried to deny during his confirmation hearings.

But ever since Kennedy’s swearing in as secretary of Health and Human Services, his true colors have been on full display, as he has responded poorly to the initial deaths from the measles outbreak, expressed support for dubious measles treatments, ended support for vaccine initiatives, and even at one point claimed the measles vaccine was as bad as the disease itself.

Over the weekend in Texas, Kennedy attempted some damage control by saying, “The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.” But, while on that visit, he also met with two doctors who claim to have treated children with measles using the steroid aerosolized budesonide and the antibiotic clarithromycin, calling them “extraordinary healers.”

Both treatments are considered unproven and aren’t accepted by the medical community, once again showing that Kennedy hasn’t actually given up his vaccine skepticism, even as the measles outbreak continues to grow and his government agency fires the people responsible for fighting diseases.

The Social Security Administration is falling apart at the seams as Elon Musk and his gang of reckless twentysomethings continue their never-ending pursuit to dismantle the federal safety net.

The agency’s website has crashed numerous times in recent weeks as people attempt to log into their Social Security accounts and access their benefits. Outages have lasted anywhere from 20 minutes up to a day, The Washington Post reported Monday.

The disastrous technical difficulties set off alarm bells for millions of Americans, and come as DOGE has cut more than 7,000 workers at the agency, including a 50 percent cut to the technology department. Musk and his cronies also plan to migrate Social Security data off its current programming language and rewrite the code in a matter of months, which could lead to further website outages, Wired reported last week.

The billionaire has long set his sights on attacking the program that provides benefits to more than 73 million Americans. He’s repeatedly called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” and spread numerous baseless claims against the agency, including that Democrats are using Social Security to attract illegal immigrants.

“By using entitlement fraud, the Democrats have been able to attract and retain vast numbers of illegal immigrants and buy voters,” Musk said during a podcast interview with Senator Ted Cruz last month. “Basically bring in 10, 20 million people who are beholden to the Democrats for government handouts and will vote overwhelmingly Democrat.”

The recent website outages are likely due to an untested fraud detector system put in by DOGE that couldn’t withstand such a high number of users, the Post reported. Though users received messages onscreen that said they weren’t receiving payments, their checks were still deposited—for now. Starting April 14, SSA identity certification will get a lot stricter: Recipients will have to verify their identity online or in person, which will supposedly limit fraudulent claims. People could previously verify their identity over the phone.

The unnecessary change will no doubt cause confusion and technical issues to an already overloaded system, putting millions of Americans’ benefits further at risk.

The Trump administration has removed a picture of Harriet Tubman from the National Park Service page on the Underground Railroad, as first reported by The Washington Post. It also changed the words “enslaved African Americans” to “enslaved workers” and removed a section that discussed Benjamin Franklin being a slave owner.

Tubman was born into slavery in Maryland in 1822 and escaped in 1849. She had the courage to come back and help 70 other enslaved African Americans escape via the Underground Railroad. She also served as a scout and spy for the Union Army during the Civil War, leading the raid at Combahee Ferry that freed 700 slaves. She is one of the most heroic Americans to ever live.

The Trump administration is downplaying the removal of Tubman’s picture and the softening of historically accurate language.

“We have dozens of pages about Harriet Tubman celebrating and memorializing her impressive role in American history,” an NPS spokesperson told The Hill. “The idea that a couple web edits somehow invalidate the National Park Service’s commitment to telling complex and challenging historical narratives is completely false and belies the extensive websites, social media posts, and programs we offer about Harriet Tubman specifically and Black History as a whole.”

But this move clearly aligns with the administration’s spiteful war on whatever it deems “woke,” as outlined in the Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History executive order that directs Vice President JD Vance to remove anything that portrays this historically racist country in a “negative light.” This is the same executive order that is bringing back Confederate statues that were removed in 2020.

The Trump administration is doing everything it can to keep a Maryland resident deported by mistake locked up in a notorious El Salvadoran mega-prison—and the Supreme Court is apparently happy to help.

Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily paused a deadline Monday for the government to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was wrongfully deported to his birth country of El Salvador last month, to the United States. Donald Trump had asked the high court earlier in the day to block U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis’s order to return Abrego Garcia by Monday at 11:59 p.m.

Roberts ordered that a full response to the government’s filing must be delivered Tuesday by 5:00 p.m. Around the same time Roberts issued the order, Abrego Garcia filed an opposition to the government’s request to vacate.

In her ruling Friday, Xinis called Abrego Garcia’s deportation a “grievous error” and ordered his return, an order Solicitor General D. John Sauer called “unprecedented and indefensible.”

“Even amidst a deluge of unlawful injunctions, this order is remarkable,” the Trump administration’s filing to the Supreme Court reads. “The United States cannot guarantee success in sensitive international negotiations in advance, least of all when a court imposes an absurdly compressed, mandatory deadline that vastly complicates the give-and-take of foreign-relations negotiations.”

But the only reason “sensitive international negotiations” are even needed is because the White House deported Abrego Garcia due to an “administrative error” last month, despite repeated claims that no errors were made in determining deportations.

In 2019, a U.S. immigration judge ruled Abrego Garcia faced legitimate threat of prosecution in El Salvador and was therefore barred from being sent back. The Trump administration deported him anyway, baselessly claiming that he has ties to the Salvadoran gang MS-13. Abrego Garcia is now being held in the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, the largest prison in Latin America and one notorious for human rights abuses.

The government’s attorneys had already asked the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to pause Xinis’s order, a request that the Fourth Circuit denied Monday.

“The United States Government has no legal authority to snatch a person who is lawfully present in the United States off the street and remove him from the country without due process,” the Fourth Circuit’s order reads. “The Government’s contention otherwise, and its argument that the federal courts are powerless to intervene, are unconscionable.”

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump threatened Monday to escalate his trade war with China by ratcheting up tariffs on exports to a staggering 104 percent.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump threatened to impose an additional 50 percent tariff on China if it did not rescind the retaliatory 34 percent tariffs on U.S. imports Beijing announced Friday.

These tariffs would be in addition to the 34 percent “reciprocal tariff” Trump announced last week, which was already added on top of two rounds of 10 percent tariffs that had been announced last month. The White House confirmed that Trump’s tariffs on China would be 104 percent.

Trump said that if China’s new tariffs weren’t withdrawn by Tuesday, his new tariffs could be imposed the following day.

“Additionally, all talks with China concerning their requested meetings with us will be terminated! Negotiations with other countries, which have also requested meetings, will begin taking place immediately,” he said.

Trump’s latest announcement is sure to send the already volatile stock market swinging. The Dow Jones plummeted more than 900 points at open Monday, after closing with 1,500-point losses for two consecutive days at the end of last week as investors reacted to China’s retaliatory tariffs.

Trump’s promise to once again increase the U.S. tariff rate on China is just the latest escalation in his ongoing mission to start a global trade war that he believes will send every world leader to his door, hoping to make a deal. In the meantime, major U.S. financial institutions predict an economic recession is on the horizon.

One of Donald Trump’s top economic advisers, Peter Navarro, is blowing off an offer from Vietnam to eliminate all of its tariffs on American goods.

In an interview on CNBC Monday, Navarro said that the country’s offer was not enough for the U.S. to lift its tariffs against Vietnam, saying that it “means nothing.”

“When they come to us and say, ‘We’ll go to zero tariffs,’ that means nothing to us because it’s the nontariff cheating that matters,” Navarro said, by which he meant the routing of Chinese products through Vietnam, intellectual property theft, and a value-added tax. Later, though, Navarro conceded that zero tariffs would be a “small first start.”

Navarro’s tone contradicts Trump’s post on Truth Social Friday where he bragged about Vietnam’s offer to cut tariffs to zero, showing that the Trump administration is not on the same page when it comes to the president’s tariffs, introduced last week on April 2 in an event Trump dubbed “Liberation Day.”

The chaos over the tariff plan has not only led to chaos in international markets but has spooked even officials within the Trump administration, such as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who is reportedly eyeing the exits. But not Navarro: He’s staked his career and what little remains of his credibility on the idea.

The Harvard-educated economist, who also worked in the first Trump administration, has been pushing for tariffs for years, citing the work of economics expert “Ron Vara” in many of his books. The problem is that Ron Vara is actually a person Navarro made up to bolster his own ideas, and the name is even an anagram of Navarro.

After serving four months in prison for defying a subpoena from Congress’s January 6 committee, Navarro was given a lifeline by Trump, who tapped him to work in his administration. Now it seems that Navarro is the idea man for these tariffs, having successfully convinced the president of the plan’s (not at all) genius. When the promised economic boom doesn’t come, will he get the blame?

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has finally admitted vaccines are needed, as measles cases continue to skyrocket across the country.

As of Friday, more than 600 measles cases across 22 states have been recorded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, marking the third-largest measles outbreak of the twenty-first century, less than halfway into the year.

More than 75 percent of the country’s cases have been recorded in Texas, which has seen almost 500 cases—nearly all of which have been among unvaccinated people. On Saturday, an unvaccinated 8-year-old girl died from the disease, marking the second death of a child from measles since February.

Kennedy, who traveled to West Texas on Sunday to meet the families of the two victims, seems to at last be realizing just how deadly the infection can be, after years of downplaying its effects and spreading baseless vaccine claims, including that the vaccine is as dangerous as the infection itself.

“I came to­ Gaines County, Texas, today to comfort the Hildebrand family after the loss of their 8-year-old daughter Daisy,” he wrote in a statement on X Sunday. “My intention was to come down here quietly to console the families and to be with the community in their moment of grief.

“The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine,” Kennedy added, admitting to the benefits of the only evidence-based method proven to prevent measles infection.

But Kennedy hasn’t totally given up on his anti-vaccine agenda. Just hours after the Hildebrand family’s funeral, Kennedy posted on X praising two anti-vax doctors who he claimed had cured “300 measles-stricken Mennonite children” using “aerosolized budesonide and clarithromycin.” Budesonide is a corticosteroid used to treat asthma and inflammatory bowel disease, and clarithromycin is an antibacterial drug.

The health secretary has previously touted cod liver oil, which is rich in vitamin A, as a cure for the infection, despite there being little medical evidence to support the claim. In high doses, vitamin A can also lead to nausea, vomiting, blurred vision, and liver damage, which has been recorded in the lab work of some of the 50 children who have been hospitalized for measles in Texas.

In his statement, Kennedy said HHS is partnering with Texas health officials to better “control the measles outbreak,” as well as deploy CDC teams across the state. It’s a long-awaited response from the HHS, but it’s too little too late for some.

President Donald Trump said that he hopes to erase the U.S. trade deficit with other countries—but anyone who understands economics knows that wouldn’t be a good thing. 

“I spoke to a lot of leaders—European, Asian—from all over the world. They are dying to make a deal, but I said, ‘We’re not gonna have deficits with your country,’” Trump told reporters on board Air Force One Sunday. “We’re not gonna do that, because to me a deficit is a loss. We’re gonna have surpluses or at worst we’re gonna be breaking even.”

A trade deficit isn’t a “loss,” regardless of what Trump thinks. A trade deficit simply means that one country spends more on goods from another country than that country spends on goods from them. 

Crucially, economists say that having a trade deficit is not an inherently bad thing at all, because the U.S. simply can’t and shouldn’t make everything. Trump’s insistence that the U.S. is being taken for a ride betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of economics that is built on a dislike of other countries and a desire to be the dealmaker responsible for a new world order. 

Trump warned that it would be the “worst” for China. In 2024, the United States had a $295.4 billion trade deficit with China. Trump said that China would need to “solve their surplus” before he would be willing to make a deal on tariffs. 

The president predicted that his “reciprocal tariffs” would raise $1 trillion in the next year and that “thousands” of companies would relocate manufacturing to the U.S.  

China announced Friday that it would impose 34 percent tariffs on imports from the U.S. in response to Trump’s new “reciprocal” 34 percent tariff, which was added on top of two rounds of 10 percent tariffs that had been announced last month.

Trump’s announcement of “reciprocal tariffs” last week sent the U.S. stock market plummeting to its worst day since 2020, and major financial institutions updated their recession projections for 2025. But Trump merely compared the financial chaos to a sick patient taking their “medicine.”

Trump was widely mocked for his ridiculous plan to eliminate the trade deficit. 

Tahra Jirari, director of economic analysis at the Chamber of Progress, wrote on X Sunday that “a trade deficit isn’t a ‘loss,’ it just means we import more than we export. Countries run trade deficits for all kinds of healthy reasons (like strong consumer demand). ‘Breaking even’ isn’t how global trade works.”

Zeteo News’s editor in chief Mehdi Hasan wrote on X Sunday that Trump was “an ignoramus the like of which we have not seen in our lifetimes. Wharton must be so embarrassed.”

Jonah Goldberg, editor in chief of The Dispatch, wrote in a post on X Monday that “Trumpers slavishly defend one man unilaterally screwing up the economy and the America-led global order because he’s some kind of genius. And it turns out—as was apparent for decades—he just doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”