Trump Backs Off Most of His Dumb Tariffs—but What’s Left Is Still Bad

Donald Trump has placed a 90-day pause on most of his reciprocal tariffs, despite repeatedly insisting that no such pause would take place. 

“Based on the fact that more than 75 Countries have called Representatives of the United States, including the Departments of Commerce, Treasury, and the USTR, to negotiate a solution to the subjects being discussed relative to Trade, Trade Barriers, Tariffs, Currency Manipulation, and Non Monetary Tariffs, and that these Countries have not, at my strong suggestion, retaliated in any way, shape, or form against the United States, I have authorized a 90 day PAUSE, and a substantially lowered Reciprocal Tariff during this period, of 10%, also effective immediately,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Wednesday.

Trump refused to stop his trade war with China, however, declaring in the same announcement that tariffs on the country would rise even more, to 125 percent. 

“Based on the lack of respect that China has shown to the World’s Markets, I am hereby raising the Tariff charged to China by the United States of America to 125%, effective immediately. At some point, hopefully in the near future, China will realize that the days of ripping off the U.S.A., and other Countries, is no longer sustainable or acceptable,” Trump wrote in the same Truth Social post.

While the 10 percent tariffs on remaining countries is a significant reduction, by the measure of just a few months ago, it’s still quite extreme.

Trump’s decision to renege on his aggressive “Liberation Day” tariffs was almost immediately met with allegations of caving at best and market manipulation at worst.  

“Wow. Trump just caved on the sweeping across-the-board tariffs, issuing a 90-day pause,” wrote Democratic strategist Sawyer Hackett. “All of that chaos, trillions of dollars evaporated—for nothing at all.”

“[Trump] has put our economy in disarray and near collapse. We have small businesses and Americans who are concerned about their well-being…. We have people that are planning to send their kids to college this fall, people who are retiring whose benefits have declined,” Representative Steven Horsford asked Trump Trade Representative Jamieson Greer at a hearing mere minutes after Trump tweeted out the news. “Is this market manipulation?”

“No,” said Greer.

“Why not? If it was always the plan, how is this not market manipulation? 

“It’s not market manipulation,” Greer insisted again. 

“So if it’s not market manipulation, what is it? Who’s benefiting? What billionaire just got richer? And all the while, there aren’t even any Republicans left in this hearing.” 

This story has been updated.

Lawyers for a man mistakenly deported to El Salvador slammed the Department of Justice for trying to claim that the foreign country could have its own reasons for keeping him in prison.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia was one of many alleged gang members that the Trump administration deported to El Salvador in mid-March, after invoking the Alien Enemies Act and denying detainees’ due process. The government later admitted that Abrego Garcia, who has no criminal record, was included on the flight manifest due to an “administrative error,” and had been subject to a protective order shielding him from deportation to El Salvador because he faced a legitimate threat of persecution there.

The Supreme Court on Monday halted a judge’s order to immediately retrieve Abrego Garcia. The government has continued to claim it cannot retrieve Abrego Garcia, who is among those incarcerated in El Slavador’s notorious mega-prison Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, for a plethora of reasons. In a filing Monday, the DOJ claimed one more, alleging that El Salvador’s government “may have its own compelling reasons to detain” Abrego Garcia, and “has its own legal rationales for detaining members of … foreign terrorist groups like MS-13”—which the U.S. government has yet to actually demonstrate that Abrego Garcia is.

But, in an eight-page filing Wednesday, lawyers for Abrego Garcia shot down the DOJ’s attempt to “ominously” introduce a flimsy excuse for leaving him there.

“These vague speculations are forfeited because they were never previously asserted and, in any event, devoid of factual support,” the lawyers wrote.

“There is no actual evidence that any nation has a criminal charge against Abrego Garcia. The only evidence is that he has never been charged or convicted of a crime in any country. And, of course, Abrego Garcia has not even lived in El Salvador since 2011—some 14 years ago—when he was 16 years old, rendering the Government’s claim implausible,” the lawyers wrote. “If the Government has evidence as to Abrego Garcia, it should say so. It refuses.

“The Government’s retreat to innuendo cannot bear the weight of the extraordinary relief it seeks: to perpetuate an unlawful incarceration that the United States itself engineered,” the lawyers added.

The U.S. economy is cratering, the White House has fractured some of the country’s longest-standing global alliances, and foreign nations are marking the end of American economic dominance. But speaking at the National Republican Congressional Committee dinner on Tuesday night, Donald Trump was apparently more interested in using the intraparty platform to slander and roast his first-term enemies than address or assuage concerns over America’s debilitating problems.

The end result was a hodgepodge of some of Trump’s greatest hits, begging the question if Trump is attempting to redirect conservative attention toward the rhetoric that got his base jazzed to support him in the first place. The subjects of his insults included President Joe Biden, former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and several liberal lawmakers who’ve dared to speak out against the president’s agenda.

Imploring Republicans to recenter their focus on winning their respective midterm elections, Trump warned that Democrats would “try to reverse all of the progress that we’ve made” should they retake the House in 2026.

“The House will be run by the same band of radicals and lunatics,” Trump said, shouting out House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Pelosi, and “weird” Al Green, the last of whom offered the only disruptive protest during Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress last month.

“He’s a weird dude,” the president continued. “He should have been treated very badly for the way he behaved that night.”

Six months after he won the election, Trump also took time away from his speech to ask the crowd if they’d rather he refer to Biden as “Crooked Joe” or “Sleepy Joe.” After equally muted applause for both options, Trump laughed.

“That’s my problem, it’s like the same—they both work, they both work beautifully,” Trump said.

Trump also devoted some of the night to speaking about California Senator Adam Schiff, whom Trump has previously referred to as the “enemy from within” for serving as the lead prosecutor in the first impeachment trial against him.

“Adam Schifty Schiff—can you believe this guy? He’s got the smallest neck I’ve ever seen,” the president said. “And the biggest head. We call him Watermelon Head.”

“I’d say how can that big fat face stand on a neck that looked like this finger? How can it? It’s the weirdest thing. It’s a mystery, nobody can understand it,” Trump continued, deriding Schiff as one of the “most dishonest human beings” he’d ever seen.

“How we can allow people like that to run in office is a shame,” the orange-coded convicted felon added. “He was in charge of the witch hunt. He was in charge of the fake witch hunt with Russia, Russia, Russia.”

The lawyers tasked with defending the Trump administration at the Supreme Court are fleeing in droves.

The Washington Post reports that half of the attorneys in the Office of the Solicitor General in the Department of Justice are either leaving their jobs or preparing to do so, for reasons including disagreements with directives handed down from the White House. Now at least eight of the office’s 16-member staff are leaving, dealing a blow to its credibility.

Earlier this week, Attorney General Pam Bondi suspended attorney Erez Reuveni from the department after he admitted to a federal judge that his government clients didn’t provide him vital information in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the government mistakenly deported to El Salvador.

“He was put on administrative leave by Todd Blanche on Saturday. And I firmly said on Day 1, I issued a memo that you are to vigorously advocate on behalf of the United States,” Bondi told Fox News on Sunday. “Our client in this matter was Homeland Security—is Homeland Security. He did not argue. He shouldn’t have taken the case. He shouldn’t have argued it, if that’s what he was going to do. He’s on administrative leave now.”

Such actions have alienated some members of the solicitor general’s office, which is traditionally nonpartisan, according to the Post, except for its top two positions. In the past, its hires have come from politically diverse backgrounds to broaden legal perspectives.

“The question is, who is left?” Georgetown University law professor Steve Vladeck said to the Post. “Who is going to argue against positions that might be good for team Trump but are inconsistent with the standards of the office—and potentially the long-term interests of the government?”

That remains to be seen as the Trump administration is repeatedly challenged successfully in court, leading to many appeals to the Supreme Court. The departure of top lawyers likely isn’t going to attract a similar caliber of hires to the office, leading to weaker arguments for the administration’s cases before the high court. But, considering the conservative bent on the court today, how much will that matter?

A new poll from Economist/YouGov released Wednesday shows that Donald Trump’s approval rating has dropped from +5 to -29 points among voters under 30 since his inauguration, a 34-point tumble. Trump also fell eight points with millennials and four points with boomers, but gained a point with Gen X.

Trump’s dramatic drop in favorability with Gen Z—after enjoying fairly positive standing with them during the election season—underscores the immediate negative reactions that policies like his trade war has elicited. Confidence in the future of this country and the future of one’s own personal security is quickly eroding under Trump’s leadership. The president has given the next generation absolutely nothing to look forward to besides increased prices, market instability, and ICE crackdowns on pro-Palestine activity. It seems that even the young crypto bros who were just in it for the tax cuts have turned on the president.

The future is bleak right now. Trump’s approval rating among Gen Zers is simply reflecting that.

A recession is all perspective, according to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

The economic adviser attempted to convince Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo Wednesday that business executives she spoke with weren’t actually worried about the future under Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff plan, but rather had been lamenting about the past.

“I spoke with one CEO over the weekend; he said we are already in a recession,” Bartiromo said. “So how do you deal with that as you are trying to implement all these new policies, like deregulation, when you’ve got the market expecting a sharp slowdown in economic activity, Sir?”

“Well, Maria, I think what the CEO may have alluded to, and I said it in the past, that the manufacturing sector under the previous administration was in a recession,” Bessent said.

“So what we’re doing is what I call ‘reprivatizing’ the economy,” he continued. “We are also getting the deficit under control, rightsizing the federal workforce, and then on the other side we are going to re-lever the private sector through smart, safe, and sound bank deregulation. And then, as this CEO said, they can come out of recession because the—I expect that long-term interest rates should come down as we get the budget under control, inflation under control, energy prices come down, and then the private sector will have room to grow.”

But Republicans are not getting the deficit under control. Instead, their efforts to extend Donald Trump’s 2017 tax plan are expected to tack on an extra $5.5 trillion in debt, plus $1.3 trillion in interest.

And finance experts don’t predict good things should the White House push to further deregulate banks. Trump’s previous efforts to strip safeguards from regional banks during his first term created an environment that collapsed several regional banks in 2023, further consolidating assets under national umbrellas.

“The repercussions here will be wide-reaching, as the global financial system is tightly interconnected,” argued Florence School of Banking and Finance director Thorsten Beck in an op-ed for Politico Tuesday. “When Washington weakens its financial guardrails, others feel pressured to follow suit to stay ‘competitive.’ This sets off a ‘race to the bottom,’ which then risks unleashing the kind of instability last seen in 2008.”

But considering the fragile state of the current market—which is gripped by high volatility, struggling supply chains, conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, record levels of debt, and seemingly endless reciprocal tariffs that have pushed the U.S. economy to the brink of a recession—“this time, the fallout could be far worse,” according to Beck.

President Donald Trump counseled everyone to stay “cool” Wednesday following a disturbing escalation in his global trade war.

“BE COOL! Everything is going to work out well. The USA will be bigger and better than ever before!” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.

Trump’s insipid optimism comes as the European Commission agreed to levy tariffs of up to 25 percent on cigarettes from Florida, beef from Kansas and Nebraska, chicken from Louisiana, car parts from Michigan, and most importantly, soybeans—of which the European Union bought $2.43 billion worth in 2024. The Chinese government also announced that it would raise tariffs on U.S. exports to 84 percent, in response to the U.S. hiking tariffs to a whopping 104 percent.

JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon warned Wednesday that a recession was a “likely outcome” of Trump’s “reciprocal tariff” policy. The stock market continued to roil Wednesday, and financial analysts fretted over a sudden selloff in U.S. Treasury bonds. The yield on a 10-year note spiked Wednesday, in the largest increase over a four-day period since the 2008 financial crisis.

But, Trump had his own spin on his decision to kneecap the global financial markets.

“THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” Trump wrote in a separate Truth Social post.

If Donald Trump’s mass deportations weren’t already dystopian enough, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement says he wants to make them look like Amazon Prime.

Todd Lyons made the remarks at the 2025 Border Security Expo in Phoenix Tuesday, saying that he envisions lines of trucks arresting and detaining immigrants much like the retail website delivers orders across the U.S.

“We need to get better at treating this like a business,” Lyons said, adding that the detention process should be “like (Amazon) Prime, but with human beings.”

The arrests, detention, and transportation of immigrants seemed to be the whole theme of the conference, which hosted other Trump administration officials, including “border czar” Tom Homan and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. The main reason for the expo, though, was to showcase the many companies who stand to profit from arrests and deportations to government agencies, as Homan pointed out in his keynote address.

“We need to buy more beds, we need more airplane flights, and I know a lot of you are here for that reason,” Homan said to the crowd. “Let the badge and guns do the badge and gun stuff, everything else, let’s contract out.”

The audience was made up of countless security contractors with strong ties to the Trump administration, as well others such as private prison company Geo Group, whose stock has shot up since Trump’s election. Government agencies in attendance included Customs and Border Protection, the Army, local Arizona police, and countless more.

The fact that ICE and DHS’s deportation efforts have turned into flashy raids with right-wing influencers in tow, with agents dressed in ski masks and street clothes, make Lyons’s remarks all the more odious. The raids have even moved on to legal immigrants who are denied due process or arrest warrants over political opinions the Trump administration dislikes. And it seems there are several companies looking to profit from this destruction of civil liberties.

Some of Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters are expressing dread and alarm as the president’s tariff policy continues to throttle the stock market and hurt their own pockets. 

Last weekend, DOGE slasher in chief, Elon Musk, said that he preferred a “zero-tariff situation”—in other words, the exact opposite of what Trump is doing now. 

“I’m hopeful, for example, with the tariffs, that at the end of the day, I hope it is agreed that both Europe and the United States should move ideally, in my view, to a zero-tariff situation, effectively creating a free-trade zone between Europe and North America,” he said in a video interview on Saturday. “That’s what I hope occurs. And also, more freedom of people to move between Europe and North America if they wish to work in Europe, if they wish to work in America, they should be allowed to do so in my view. So that has certainly been my advice to the president.”

Barstool founder and manosphere B-teamer David Portnoy also complained he’d lost up to 15 percent of his net worth “in stocks and crypto” due to Trump’s retaliatory tariffs. 

“I’m down seven million bucks, in stocks and crypto. And it’s a tariff city. Trump has put his tariffs all over the place. I’ve been trying to understand ’em, I don’t,” Portnoy said last weekend on his livestream. “And everything’s in the shitter because of it.”

Senator Ted Cruz urged the president to make and take deals to lower tariffs, something the Trump administration has said it absolutely will not do. 

“Take the deal, make deals, and actually work to lower tariffs,” Cruz said. “President Trump has the opportunity for the most extraordinary economic win for the American people right now by making a deal.… And I do wanna give a word of warning: There are voices in the administration that, rather than take a deal, are saying, ‘We want to have tariffs as a permanent feature of the economy.’ I think that’d be a mistake.”

Legendary right-wing shill Ben Shapiro also voiced his disagreement with Trump’s so-called  “Liberation Day” tariffs, noting that the move was “probably” unconstitutional. “Trump’s reciprocal tariffs imposed hundreds of billions of dollars of new taxes on Americans. It’ll be the largest tax increase since the Revenue Act of 1968, one of the biggest tax increases on American consumers in the history of America. It’s gonna cost American consumers; it’s gonna cost American producers who use inputs from other countries,” Shapiro said on his podcast. “There are real world implications for this sort of stuff. Trade wars are in fact not good, and not easy to win, particularly if you don’t actually have a plan. It is predicated on a bad idea of how international trade works.” 

Perhaps the staunchest voice of opposition was billionaire Trump donor Bill Ackman. 

“By placing massive and disproportionate tariffs on our friends and our enemies alike and thereby launching a global economic war against the whole world at once, we are in the process of destroying confidence in our country as a trading partner, as a place to do business, and as a market to invest capital,” he wrote on X. “If … we launch economic nuclear war on every country in the world, business investment will grind to a halt, consumers will close their wallets and pocket books, and we will severely damage our reputation with the rest of the world that will take years and potentially decades to rehabilitate.… We are heading for a self-induced economic nuclear winter, and we should start hunkering down. May cooler heads prevail.”

Everyone has started to feel the tariff pain.

In a town hall hosted by Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Tuesday, Senator John Kennedy said that he hopes Donald Trump “takes a deal” in order to reduce the reciprocal tariffs that are dampening business and driving costs around the globe.

Still, the plea came packaged with an effusive review of the White House’s economic agenda that has brought one of the most robust economies in U.S. history to the brink of a recession.

“I think most fair-minded people would agree with this: Other countries have used trade barriers to take advantage of the American people and American businesses,” Kennedy said.

“Number two, President Trump has said enough,” Kennedy continued, noting that dozens of countries around the world are attempting to negotiate with the president in order to lower their respective tariffs. “We would not be in this situation today had he not been a pitbull.”

“He’s like the pitbull, though, who caught the car,” the Louisiana Republican said. “I don’t know what the president’s going to do next.… I hope he takes a deal. I hope he and (Treasury Secretary) Scott Bessent go to every one of those countries and reduce those tariffs and trade barriers down to zero and let American businesses compete with those foreign businesses. Competition makes us better.”

In the week since he announced his sweeping tariff plan, Trump has cost American businesses upward of a trillion dollars. The ensuing reciprocal tariffs from America’s longtime trade partners have further destabilized the stock market.

On Wednesday, China—one of the country’s biggest trading partners—announced that it would raise the reciprocal tariff rate on U.S. goods to 84 percent. The move came as a retaliatory act after Trump hiked import duties on Chinese goods to 104 percent.