Trump Trade Adviser Struggles to Explain Tariffs on Top U.S. Ally

Senator Mark Warner became exasperated Tuesday with Trump Trade Representative Jamieson Greer as he was unable to give a real answer as to why the president hit Australia—a key ally, with whom the U.S. has a trade surplus—with 10 percent tariffs on all imports.

“Australia is one of our strongest allies.… We have a free trade agreement with Australia. We don’t have tariffs,” Warner said. “We have a trade surplus with Australia.… With a trade surplus, with this strong relationship, Australia got hit with a 10 percent tariff as well?”

“Senator, Australia has the lowest rate available under the new program; they banned—”

“Ambassador, excuse me,” Warner interrupted. “There is a trade surplus. We already have a free trade agreement … so getting the least bad—why did they get whacked in the first place?”

“We’re addressing the $1.2 trillion deficit, the largest in human history, that President Biden left us with. We should be running up the score on Australia; they ban our beef, and they ban our pork—”

“Ambassador Greer, answer the question on Australia. We have a trade surplus with Australia; we have a free trade agreement. They’re an incredibly important national security partner. Why were they whacked with a tariff?”

“Senator, despite the agreement, they ban our beef, they ban our pork, they’re getting ready to impost measure—”

“But with your Greek letter formula, the fact that we have a trade surplus—”

“We have a global tariff on everyone,” Greer replied, continuing to evade the question. “We’re trying to address the $1.2 trillion deficit that Biden left us with, sir.”

“I think that answer.… Sir, you’re a much smarter person than that answer. The idea that we are gonna whack friend and foe alike, in particular friends … is both, I think, insulting to the Australians and it undermines our national security, and frankly makes us not a good partner going forward. The lack of trust from friends and allies based upon this ridiculous policy that goes into full effect at midnight tonight is extraordinary.

“A good day in hospice,” Warner continued. “I’m afraid if we keep these tariffs in effect, we’re looking like an economy that will be in hospice.”

The Supreme Court blocked an order Tuesday requiring the government to reinstate roughly 16,000 probationary federal employees ousted as part of the Department of Government Efficiency’s massive government layoffs across six different agencies.

In a brief two-page order, the court found that the nine nonprofit organizations that had brought the case lacked standing to do so. The ruling is a temporary win for the Trump administration’s efforts to gut the federal workforce, and for DOGE, which recommended the sweeping layoffs.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson would have denied the application, according to the order.

Last month, U.S. District Judge William Alsup in California ordered officials at the Departments of Veterans Affairs, Defense, Energy, Interior, Agriculture, and Treasury to “immediately” reinstate all fired probationary employees.

Alsup stated that the mid-February mass terminations were the result of an “unlawful” directive from the Office of Personnel Management, and torched the White House’s effort to claim that the decisions were based on supposed performance failures as “a gimmick.”

“It is sad, a sad day, when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that’s a lie,” Alsup said in a hearing ahead of his ruling.

Despite the high court’s ruling, the fight to reinstate the workers isn’t over yet.

Another judge, U.S. District Judge James Bredar in Maryland, issued a similar order to Alsup’s applying to workers fired from 12 departments: Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Labor, Transportation, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs.

Bredar’s ruling was on a case brought by a group of states with Democratic attorneys general, and wouldn’t be subject to the same standing issue as the case decided Tuesday.

This is the third time in two days that the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the Trump administration’s agenda. The court temporarily blocked an order Monday night requiring the government to return a man wrongly deported to El Salvador to the U.S. by midnight. In a controversial decision, the court also blocked an injunction stopping Trump’s deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.

This story has been updated.

The Trump administration’s calculations justifying the most consequential tariff scheme of the last century are all wrong.

In an op-ed for The New York Times published Monday, economist Brent Neiman, whose research was used to justify the White House’s implementation of reciprocal tariffs, wrote that the White House fundamentally misunderstood his work.

“My first question, when the White House unveiled its tariff regime, was: How on earth did it calculate such huge rates?” Neiman wrote in the op-ed. “The next day it got personal.”

Shortly after the Trump administration announced its plan to implement tariffs of 10 percent or more on 90 countries—which it claims will eliminate the trade deficit but has only spurred global economic chaos—the Office of the United States Trade Representative published its methodology for the tariff calculations, citing a paper by Neiman and four other economists.

“But it got it wrong. Very wrong. I disagree fundamentally with the government’s trade policy and approach,” Neiman wrote. “But even taking it at face value, our findings suggest the calculated tariffs should be dramatically smaller—perhaps one-fourth as large.”

So if the White House had done the math right, and wanted its absurd trade plan to actually work, 20 percent tariffs should have been … 5 percent.

That wasn’t the only mistake, Neiman pointed out. The Trade Office claimed its reciprocal tariff calculations would eliminate trade deficits with each American trading partner. Neiman concluded that is not a “reasonable goal.”

“Trade imbalances between two countries can emerge for many reasons that have nothing to do with protectionism.… There are some reasonable arguments in favor of reducing the overall trade deficit, such as to reduce risks from our debt. But these arguments don’t apply country by country,” Neiman wrote, further exposing the White House’s lack of reasoning.

Even if all trade deficits are eliminated (which Neiman points out is basically impossible), reciprocal tariffs still won’t work.

“The administration’s tariff formula assumes that a tariff placed on one country won’t affect imports from any others and ignores any implications for exports,” Neiman said. “These assumptions may work for an action against one small trade partner, but not for the broad salvo announced last week.”

Neiman went on to decimate pretty much every justification the Trump administration has provided for tariff implementation, including its selective picking and choosing of his research results to support its claims.

“As a result of these and other methodological choices, Wednesday’s reciprocal tariffs will bring average tariff rates to their highest level in over 100 years. I would strongly prefer that the policy and methodology be scrapped entirely. But barring that, the administration should divide its results by four.” Neiman concluded, a grim reminder of the economic chaos yet to come.

The Trump administration is thinking about bombing Mexico.

Former and current U.S. military officials who spoke with NBC News said that communication between the White House, the Defense Department, and intelligence officials have included discussion of drone strikes on cartels and their networks in Mexico. No final decision has been made, but the report is still alarming.

The CIA and U.S. military have been conducting more surveillance flights over Mexico in the wake of President Trump last month designating drug cartels in the country as foreign terrorist organizations. While the flights have been approved by Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, the unilateral hostilities that the U.S, seems to be preparing for are not. This is set to make an already shaky relationship between the two allies even more unstable.

“We’re taking nothing off the table. Nothing,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in February when asked about military strikes in Mexico.

“There is no doubt if there were unilateral action inside Mexico, this would put the bilateral relationship into a nosedive,” former Mexican ambassador to the United States Arturo Sarukhán told NBC News. “It would be put in a tailspin, as it would represent a violation of international law and an act of war.”

Sheinbaum herself came out in staunch opposition to this very kind of activity from Trump back in February when the administration released the cartel terrorism designation.

“The people of Mexico, under no circumstances will accept interventions, interference or any other act from abroad that is harmful to the integrity, independence and sovereignty of the nation,” she said. “What we want to make clear with this designation is that we do not negotiate sovereignty, this can’t be an opportunity by the United States to invade our sovereignty…. They can call [cartels] whatever they decide, but with Mexico it is collaboration and coordination, never subordination, no interference and even less invasion.”

Donald Trump’s quest to slash the federal government appears to end with the Pentagon.

The president announced Monday that he wants the Department of Defense to have a $1 trillion budget, its highest ever, saying that “we have great things happening with our military.

“We also essentially approved a budget which is in the facility—you’ll like to hear this—of a trillion dollars, $1 trillion, and nobody’s seen anything like it. We have to build our military and we’re very cost conscious. But the military is something that we have to build, and we have to be strong, because you got a lot of bad forces out there now,” Trump said.

With the help of fellow fascism enthusiast Elon Musk, Trump has gutted key government agencies, firing several thousand federal workers and attempting to eliminate the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Department of Education.

Regarding the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had originally told DOD and military leaders in February to plan to cut 8 percent of the defense budget for each of the next five years. It seems that idea was doomed early on, especially considering Musk’s SpaceX contracts are being spared.

Musk will be making a killing from upcoming defense contracts to work on new rocket launchpads and rocket-booster landing zones, as well as Trump’s fantastical “Golden Dome” missile defense system. That idea will cost a whopping $2.5 trillion and isn’t necessary by any means. It looks like Trump will continue to keep the DOD bloated even though it has never passed an audit.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson slammed the “inequitable” and “inappropriate” way the court ruled to allow Donald Trump to proceed with his deportations under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.

In a scathing dissent, Jackson voiced her disapproval of the court’s Monday decision to strike down U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg’s injunction pausing deportations under the AEA, which was used last month to expedite the deportation of more than 100 alleged gang members to a prison in El Salvador notorious for human rights abuses.

“The President of the United States has invoked a centuries-old wartime statute to whisk people away to a notoriously brutal, foreign-run prison,” Jackson wrote. “For lovers of liberty, this should be quite concerning.”

The court’s newest justice also took issue with how her colleagues had ruled on the issue, as part of the bench’s emergency, or shadow, docket, which sees immediate action on issues ranging from scheduling proceedings to requests to halt lower court rulings—like the government’s request to halt Boasberg’s injunction.

“I lament that the Court appears to have embarked on a new era of procedural variability, and that it has done so in such a casual, inequitable, and, in my view, inappropriate manner,” she wrote.

“At least when the Court went off base in the past, it left a record so posterity could see how it went wrong,” she wrote. Jackson then cited Korematsu v. United States, in which the Supreme Court had ruled that the government was right to order the incarceration of Japanese American citizens during World War II. President Franklin Roosevelt had used the Alien Enemies Act to justify the brutality of Japanese internment.

The Supreme Court condemned its ruling in Korematsu in 2018, calling it “morally repugnant” and “gravely wrong” but at the same time rubber-stamped Trump’s travel ban targeting six Muslim-majority countries.

Jackson argued that the court hadn’t learned anything.

“With more and more of our most significant rulings taking place in the shadows of our emergency docket, today’s court leaves less and less of a trace. But make no mistake: We are just as wrong now as we have been in the past, with similarly devastating consequences. It just seems we are now less willing to face it,” she wrote.

In recent years, justices have begun to issue far more significant rulings through the shadow docket, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Unlike the 60 or 70 merit docket cases that the justices decide each term, shadow docket cases do not receive extensive briefings or hearings, and their decisions are accompanied by scant explanations.

“Surely, the question whether such Government action is consistent with our Constitution and laws warrants considerable thought and attention from the Judiciary,” Jackson wrote.

“But this Court now sees fit to intervene,” she said, “hastily dashing off a four-paragraph per curiam opinion discarding the District Court’s order based solely on a new legal pronouncement that, one might have thought, would require significant deliberation.”

In his latest rewrite of European history, Donald Trump made a ridiculous and sympathetic declaration about the Nazis.

Amid the tariff chaos he spurred, Trump met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office Monday, where he was asked by reporters about his plan to bring about the release of the 59 Israeli hostages being held captive in Gaza by Hamas.

In typical Trump fashion, the president dodged the question and went on a bizarre rant that seemingly remembered Nazis for … their sympathy.

“I said to them, was there any sign of love?” Trump said, recounting his conversation with released hostages.

“Did the, Hamas, show any signs of like, help? Or liking you? Did they wink? Did they give you a piece of bread extra? Did they give you a meal on the side? … Like, you know, what happened in Germany?” Trump said, absurdly comparing the hostages’ situation to the Holocaust, which murdered six million Jews.

“People would try and help people that were in unbelievable distress,” the president went on, suggesting that the Nazis were known for their generosity.

“No, they didn’t do that, they’d slap us,” Trump said the hostages told him about Hamas, while sitting next to the man who is currently leading Israel’s genocide in Gaza. “Their hatred is unbelievable.”

Trump’s claim about Nazi kindness sent people reeling on social media.

“This isn’t just delusional. It’s Holocaust cosplay. He’s romanticizing genocide like it’s a fucking history podcast,” one user wrote on X.

“Equating hostages held by Hamas to victims in Nazi Germany isn’t just offensive, it’s also a grotesque distortion of history,” wrote another. “He’s always saying the first thing that pops into his head without understanding the weight of those words. And he’s sitting next to Israeli Prime Minister. Crazy stuff!”

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee sent a letter to the Department of Commerce Tuesday as part of a new investigation into Elon Musk’s glaring conflicts of interest.

In a six-page letter to acting General Counsel John K. Guenther, Ranking Member Gerry Connolly and Vice Ranking Member Jasmine Crockett requested information about how Commerce intends to prevent Musk from skirting ethics rules to use the department to enrich himself. 

The letter, shared exclusively with The New Republic, outlined several instances where Commerce’s operations had openly benefited Musk’s businesses. The representatives requested that the department provide a range of communications and documents by April 22 to demonstrate how the officials intended to prevent the billionaire bureaucrat from exploiting the government.  

“At Commerce, where Mr. Musk’s companies have received significant financial benefits and have the potential to receive vast amounts of new business, his defiance of recusal laws and control of Commerce’s operations directly benefit his businesses,” the members wrote. “The known conflicts of interest presented by this arrangement are illegal and must be addressed immediately.”

The representatives argued that Musk had been wrongly classified as a “special government employee” as part of an effort to skirt ethics requirements and that his authority to conduct sweeping cuts and recommend massive layoffs as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency was consistent with being in a high-level officer position that requires Senate confirmation. Still, ethics laws were in place to prevent special government employees from taking part in matters that could affect their personal finances. 

“The law, however, has not stopped Mr. Musk. On the contrary, Mr. Musk’s ability to enrich himself through DOGE is a textbook example of corruption at the taxpayers’ expense,” the letter stated.   

The letter cited several instances in which Donald Trump’s Department of Commerce had been poised to enrich Musk’s businesses, which have raked in a whopping total of $38 billion from government contracts over the past 20 years. 

The letter pointed to DOGE’s mass layoffs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, launching concerns that Musk intended to use contracts for his companies SpaceX and Starlink to fill in the holes he’d created and that he could reasonably access information at NOAA that could give him an advantage over his competitors.

In March, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced that his department would begin an overhaul of the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment Program, or BEAD. After four years, the $42.5 billion project to expand internet access across the country hadn’t yet connected a single person, and Lutnick blamed “woke mandates, favoritism towards certain technologies, and burdensome regulations.”

Lutnick’s promise of a “tech-neutral” approach, which will make way for the use of satellites in addition to fiber-optic cables, could offer a bigger piece of the pie to Musk’s Starlink. The company was originally expected to haul in around $4.1 billion under the previous rules but could rake in anywhere from $10 billion to $20 billion if Lutnick’s changes are accepted.

BEAD’s outgoing director sent a blistering email to colleagues warning that Musk was poised to profit at the expense of the very people they were trying to help. 

“Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington,” former BEAD Director Evan Feinman wrote in mid-March.

But Starlink isn’t the only one of Musk’s businesses to benefit from the actions of Commerce. 

When Tesla’s sinking stock started tanking last month, Lutnick appeared on Fox News to urge viewers to buy shares of the billionaire bureaucrat’s electric car company. 

“I mean who wouldn’t invest in Elon Musk, you gotta be kidding me!” Lutnick raved. Notably, Cabinet members do not typically endorse products, as the Code of Federal Regulations bars public servants from “using their office’s platform to endorse companies and products.”

And Lutnick isn’t Musk’s only ally at Commerce. Michael Grimes, a finance executive who worked closely on deals for Musk’s companies, was recently made senior adviser at Commerce, where he will reportedly head a U.S. sovereign wealth fund that could potentially direct billions to his old friend. 

The letter also pointed to Trump’s dismissal of the inspector general at Commerce, who would’ve acted as a watchdog for any corruption or abuse. 

Connolly and Crockett’s letter set an April 22 deadline for Commerce to provide detailed lists of all Commerce matters involving Musk’s businesses, all steps Commerce is taking to ensure compliance with ethics laws related to Musk’s businesses, and all actions Commerce is taking to ensure that Musk was not receiving information that would give him a business advantage over his competitors. 

The letter also requested the names of any federal employees at Commerce who had been “in any way removed” from their positions by Musk or DOGE, as well as a list of all exemptions that Commerce has received from Trump’s freeze on federal funding. 

Elon Musk, who wants AI to replace federal workers, is now using it to spy on them.

After speaking to 20 people close to the situation, Reuters has reported that officials within the Trump administration told federal employees that DOGE “technologists” are using AI to monitor “anti-Trump or anti-Musk language” at the Environmental Protection Agency. One person also said DOGE is using Musk’s Grok AI chatbot—an aspiring ChatGPT competitor—to make massive cuts to the government.

“Be careful what you say, what you type and what you do,” a manager allegedly told one of Reuters’s sources.

This is a grimly ironic development for Musk, who constantly claims that he and his X platform are bulwarks of free speech. The EPA has yet to comment.

“[It] sounds like an abuse of government power to suppress or deter speech that the president of the United States doesn’t like,” government ethics expert Kathleen Clark told Reuters.

DOGE employees are also using Signal—the app that landed Mike Walz in hot water for a week—to message each other. And on top of that, DOGE employees are working live on Google Docs instead of using the single copy vetting and chain of custody process that is standard operating procedure for the government.

If these allegations of spying, Signalgate II, and the use of Google Docs are true, they’re a very serious breach of security and a demonstrable lack of transparency from DOGE.

In any sane reality, President Trump’s deportation of immigrants based on an eighteenth-century law, with no right to due process, would be swiftly remedied by the courts. But to conservatives, such an action is tantamount to treason.

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett sided with the high court’s liberals Monday by dissenting against Trump’s use of the “Alien Enemies Act,” drawing the ire of the MAGA faithful. While the court still ruled to uphold the president’s deportation by a 5–4 margin, Barrett, appointed by Trump in 2020, still received vitriol from the right for her decision.

Even a U.S. senator got in on the attacks, along with tech oligarch Elon Musk.

A few commentators engaged in some thinly veiled racism targeting Barrett’s adopted children.

This isn’t the first time that Barrett has broken with conservative orthodoxy in her rulings, showing that at times she thinks for herself, much to the right’s consternation. The funny part is that she is still quite conservative, voting to overturn Roe v. Wade and reliably joining her fellow right-wing justices in rulings regarding religious freedom, capital punishment, and affirmative action. While her dissent Monday wasn’t enough to tip the court’s ruling, it shows that there’s a glimmer of hope on the Supreme Court that it won’t always rubber-stamp Trump’s abuses of power.