Trump Finally Confirms True Extent of China Tariffs

Donald Trump’s tariff reversal Wednesday reduced duties against most countries’ imports to 10 percent—except China, which was instead being raised to a staggering 125 percent, or so he announced at the time.

On Thursday, the White House confirmed to CNBC that tariffs against Beijing are at an even higher 145 percent—125 percent as a reciprocal measure against China’s tariff hikes, in addition to the earlier 20 percent tariffs because Trump claims the country isn’t doing enough to prevent fentanyl from coming into the U.S.

While Trump’s decision to back down from most of his tariffs helped international markets rally late Wednesday (and gave his billionaire friends a nice boost), those gains were wiped in half Thursday, with NASDAQ, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and the S&P 500 all down by at least 4 percent each.

China is a major trading partner with the United States, with many corporations such as Apple depending on the country. Tariffs against Canadian and Mexican goods not covered by the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, including automobiles and aluminum, are also still in place at 25 percent.

And there’s no telling what Trump will decide to do next, as he has reversed his tariff positions several times, opening himself up to online ridicule and having hedge fund managers wonder if he is insane. Wall Street, as well as markets around the world do not like uncertainty, and the president seems to have no real plan, making it up as he goes along. This self-inflicted financial crisis will not be ending for the foreseeable future.

Donald Trump may have reversed course on tariffs, but that doesn’t mean the economy has reversed course away from a recession.

Some of the country’s largest investment firms—including JP Morgan and MetLife—are still warning their clients that the country is on the verge of a recession, despite the seemingly temporary market frenzy sparked by Trump’s decision to cave on his trade war.

JP Morgan said Wednesday evening that it wouldn’t change its economic forecast, predicting a 60 percent chance of a recession both at home and around the world. Goldman Sachs said that the odds of entering an economic downturn had been slightly buoyed by Trump’s news, but the odds were still elevated at around 45 percent.

“My sense here is that the economy is still likely to fall into recession, given the level of simultaneous shocks that it’s absorbed,” Joe Brusuelas, chief economist of consulting firm RSM, told CNN. “All this does is postpone temporarily what will likely be a series of punitive import taxes put on U.S. trade allies.”

Before Trump announced the 90-day tariff pause (except those placed on China) on Wednesday, MetLife released a note indicating to its investors that Trump’s policies had done permanent damage to the American market.

“Even if there is a near-term resolution of the tariff and other trade issues, damage has been done to the economy and to consumer expectations,” the note reads. “It is also unlikely that markets will rebound fully meaning that for the large cohort of workers approaching retirement and for those workers striving toward home ownership, the boost in the savings rate prompted by this volatility may be sustained. “

Meanwhile, Trump is continuing to stoke tensions with China. After volleying with the foreign economic powerhouse over reciprocal tariffs for the bulk of Wednesday, Trump revealed yet another levy hike, bringing the total tariff on China to 145 percent. That was composed of a 20 percent fentanyl tariff—which the White House has claimed is effectively punishment for contributing to a domestic fentanyl crisis—tacked onto a 125 percent reciprocal tariff. Unfortunately for American wallets, that once again sent stocks tumbling.

Volatility in the bond market—which has traditionally served as an investment safe haven during the market’s rough waters—has also sparked fears that Americans no longer see the U.S. government as a stable, long-term investment.

Donald Trump is openly bragging about just how much money his billionaire buddies made off of his dangerous tariff gambit.

After announcing a 90-day pause Wednesday on his sweeping “reciprocal tariff” policy on nearly every country—with the exception of China—Trump was excited to take credit for making a buck for his guests at the Oval Office.

“He made $2.5 million today, and he made $900 million! That’s not bad,” Trump said, pointing to financial investor Charles Schwab and Roger Penske, a Nascar team owner, respectively.

Schwab’s estimated net worth is $12.6 billion, while Penske’s is $5.6 billion.

Bloomberg reported that Wednesday was the “best day ever” for billionaires, as the world’s wealthiest people raked in a heaping $304 billion as the markets shot back up.

The day’s biggest individual winner should come as no surprise: Elon Musk made a whopping $36 billion as Tesla stock soared up 23 percent. Trump’s surprising decision to temporarily back off his steep tariffs has sparked major concerns of obvious market manipulation, and even potential insider trading.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other Democrats are accusing Donald Trump and his administration of manipulating the market to their benefit. 

Just days after Trump announced his”Liberation Day” tariffs that sparked global financial chaos and tanked markets, Trump at the last minute paused most of the tariffs for 90 days, despite previous vehement claims that he would not back down on his plan.

Following the pause, stock performances across the board surged drastically—the Nasdaq jumped by 12.2 percent and the Dow Jones Industrial average increased by 3,000 points, the largest single-session increase ever recorded. Anyone who knew about the pause in advance would’ve made a killing.

“Any member of Congress who purchased stocks in the last 48 hours should probably disclose that now,” AOC wrote in a post on X on Wednesday. “I’ve been hearing some interesting chatter on the floor. Disclosure deadline is May 15th. We’re about to learn a few things. It’s time to ban insider trading in Congress.”

Her post was accompanied by a screenshot that showed a drastic spike in Nasdaq call volume right before Trump announced the pause, indicating the president may have leaked the information to his allies, who could have invested knowing stocks would soar. Just hours before his shocking flip went public, Trump also published a series of suspicious posts on Truth Social.

“BE COOL! Everything is going to work out well. The USA will be bigger and better than ever before!” he wrote Wednesday morning. “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY,” Trump posted minutes later.

AOC isn’t the only Democrat suspicious of the GOP’s brinkmanship. In a floor speech Wednesday, Senator Elizabeth Warren called for an investigation into Trump’s volatile change of course.

“We need an independent investigation into market manipulation because Americans need to know whether President Trump or anyone in his administration manipulated the market to benefit their donors, all while they are working for the American people, and while small businesses and those working families are paying the price,” Warren said.

Senator Adam Schiff warned the president’s “constant gyrations in policy provide dangerous opportunities for insider trading.”

“Who in the administration knew about Trump’s latest tariff flip flop ahead of time? Did anyone buy or sell  stocks, and profit at the public’s expense?” the California Democrat wrote in a Bluesky post. “I’m writing to the White House—the public has a right to know.”

The GOP is now left scrambling to defend Trump’s seemingly unjustifiable decision, as the fear of recession looms and U.S. legitimacy continues to dwindle.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency fired car safety experts in the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration who directly regulated Tesla.

The Financial Times reports that DOGE fired 30 employees from the agency back in February, including several from the office of vehicle automation safety, which is in charge of regulating self-driving vehicles, a key part of Musk’s car company.

The layoffs made up 4 percent of the agency’s 800-person staff, including employees who were due for promotions and workers who had just been hired. The automation safety staff were disproportionately affected because the office had only been formed in 2023 and was predominately made up of probationary hires.

In a Valentine’s Day email announcing the firings, poor performance was cited as the reason, although this was rejected by an unnamed senior employee still at NHTSA who spoke to the Times.

The NHTSA has eight active investigations against Tesla, including five focusing on Musk’s claims about the company’s Autopilot system and Full Self-Driving software, and has published over 10,000 complaints about the company from the public. The agency has also ordered multiple recalls of Tesla cars and delayed the rollout of the company’s self-driving and driver-assistance software.

Musk has promised to launch a driverless ride-hailing service in Austin, Texas, in June, and to start building a fleet of autonomous “cybercabs” next year, which would require an NHTSA exception because the cybercabs don’t have a steering wheel or pedals.

“Letting DOGE fire those in the autonomous division is sheer madness—we should be lobbying to add people to NHTSA,” one Tesla manager told the Times. They “need to be developing a national framework for [autonomous vehicles], otherwise Tesla doesn’t have a prayer for scale in FSD or robotaxis.”

And, much like DOGE’s other firings at agencies across the government that regulate or deal with Musk’s companies, the NHTSA layoffs have major ethical implications.

“There is a clear conflict of interest in allowing someone with a business interest influence over appointments and policy at the agency regulating them,” a former NHTSA employee told the Times.

Musk owes much of his wealth to government subsidies and contracts, and many of DOGE’s moves have squashed government oversight into his businesses. As long as Trump keeps giving him unprecedented power, the tech oligarch and fascism enthusiast will continue to keep serving his own interests.

Buried within Donald Trump’s executive order “undoing the left’s war on water pressure” was a shady phrase to help the president fast-track his deregulatory crusade.

In a section of the order signed Wednesday repealing a 13,000-word regulation defining “showerhead,” Trump noted that notice and comment on the recission would not be accepted. 

“Notice and comment is unnecessary because I am ordering the repeal,” the order stated.  

Notice-and-comment rulemaking, as outlined by the Administrative Procedure Act, or APA, requires federal agencies to give the public time to comment after presenting a new rule. The agency must then consider all relevant, timely submitted comments before publishing the final rule. 

But in his order, Trump implies that because he was the one rewriting the rule, the public would not be given the opportunity to comment, essentially fast-tracking any deregulation effort he pitches in the future. 

Legal experts were quick to challenge Trump’s rulemaking rule change. 

“This is so illegal. Just utterly, utterly unlawful,” wrote Aaron Reichlin-Melchick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, in an X post Wednesday. “The President cannot overturn the commands of the APA by just declaring ‘because I said so.’”

“If President Biden could have written executive orders requiring rules just be written without comment, we’d have a whole helluva lot of new regulations on the books protecting consumers, workers, and the environment,” Todd Phillips, an assistant law professor at Robinson College of Business, wrote on X. 

In a separate post, Phillips warned that rescissions would be challenged “so, so, so quickly. And in the D.C. Circuit.”

In a separate executive order signed Wednesday, Trump ordered U.S. agencies to get moving on rescinding “unlawful” regulations under several Supreme Court decisions, including Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, by once again skipping the process of notice and comment—this time claiming a “good cause” exception. 

“In effectuating repeals of facially unlawful regulations, agency heads shall finalize rules without notice and comment, where doing so is consistent with the ‘good cause’ exception in the Administrative Procedure Act,” the order stated. “That exception allows agencies to dispense with notice-and-comment rulemaking when that process would be ‘impracticable, unnecessary, or contrary to the public interest.’”

In February, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a statement revoking its long-standing policy of using notice-and-comment rulemaking, which could potentially allow for expedited reforms to Medicaid programs. 

The public reaction to Donald Trump’s tariff reversal has not been good.

CNN’s John Berman decided to spew off a list of headlines Thursday morning related to the market frenzy while introducing Republican strategist David Urban, who was left with little more than sticks and stones and some misdirection to defend the president’s whiplash tariff rollout and his subsequent cave.

“Let’s go over some of the headlines and leads in today’s papers,” Berman started. “The Washington Post, ‘Trump Blinked.’ Wall Street Journal opinion, ‘Trump Blinks.’ The New York Times lede says ‘Bond Yields cause Mr. Trump to blink.’ The Financial Times, ‘Why did Donald Trump buckle?’

“And just for the sugar on top here, Politico says, ‘Getting yippy with it,’ and Puck says, ‘Un-liberation Day,’” Berman continued.

“So David Urban, blink, blink, buckle,” Berman concluded, before asking Urban, “Was this all bungled?”

“No, John, I don’t think it was bungled. I think that the markets got a little skittish,” Urban said. “I think the House and Senate are working diligently to get this tax bill done and get some things pushed through.”

Urban then blamed the markets, claiming that if investors “were a bit more patient,” they would have seen the administration get “a lot of good things done.” The lobbyist then posited that a forthcoming “stablecoin bill” would make the U.S. dollar stronger again on a global scale.

“However, you know, the bond markets, as you noted there, really put a scare into the administration, I think, when the cost of borrowing for the federal government goes way, way up and the U.S. dollar doesn’t become the reserve currency, which was what it looks like when you have a bond market sell-off like it was happening,” Urban said. “I think that’s what caused the pause button to be pushed.”

But Urban conceded, ultimately, that no one can know how the markets will react.

Trump appeared to intentionally sow volatility last week, when he announced some 200 tariffs on countries around the world (whose rates were discovered to be founded on bad math). After a week of panicked investors and a tanking economy, as well as a midday trade war with China, Trump decided to undo it all, with the White House revealing that it would be pausing the majority of its tariffs (except on China) and lowering the tariffs to a universal baseline rate of 10 percent. That sent the market into a different kind of frenzy, whose biggest winners were the demographic already with the most money: billionaires.

In its latest attack on the free press, the Trump administration is withholding pool reports that make it look bad.

Two recent dispatches from White House pool reporters, a rotating group of reporters designated to cover the president and share information with the rest of the press corps, never made it public, Status reported Wednesday.

On Tuesday evening, Dallas Morning News reporter Joseph Gordon, who was in the pool that day, sent a standard email noting that reporters were following Trump to a dinner but that two photographers from the Associated Press were “turned away from joining the pool.” The pool report never made it to news outlets, Gordon later learned. In February, the Associated Press was banned from the White House press pool for refusing to adopt Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, but a judge ordered the White House to lift the ban Tuesday.

Also earlier this week, Philip Wegman of RealClearPolitics sent a report noting the abrupt cancellation of a joint press conference with Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. That report also never made it to press, Status reported.

The White House press pool is essential to distributing information to news outlets across the country, and the censorship of its reports marks yet another attempt by the Trump administration to control journalists. In February, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced Trump’s press team would take over the press pool and determine which journalists get to travel with the president, declaring the job “a privilege, not a legal right.”

The announcement broke decades of historical precedent and marked the beginning of unparalleled hostility between the White House and reporters. Trump, Leavitt, and other MAGA members have since tried a number of ways to control the media and avoid being held accountable for their attack on democracy—it looks like censoring pool reports is their next attempt to do so.

Donald Trump claimed that his party was “working nicely together,” just hours after House Republicans’ infighting forced them to delay a vote on a multitrillion-dollar budget bill.

“Great News! ‘The Big, Beautiful Bill’ is coming along really well. Republicans are working together nicely. Biggest Tax Cuts in USA History!!! Getting close,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Thursday morning.

House GOP members were anything but united. The night before, Republican Representative Rich McCormick told CNN’s Manu Raju that there were still 15 Republican holdouts on the bill, which would provide the funding for Trump’s sweeping agenda, including tax cuts and bolstering immigration initiatives.

Representative Thomas Massie, who has become a regular holdout against Republican-backed government spending bills, said that a provision Republicans had added that would prevent efforts to roll back Trump’s tariffs was “illegal.”

“They used the Rules Committee resolution to circumvent U.S. law,” Massie told Raju.

On Wednesday night, House Speaker Mike Johnson said he hadn’t decided how best to rally Republican support behind the budget blueprint.

“We have a pretty well-developed playbook, and it’s got a number of plays in it, and I just haven’t made the call on which one it is yet,” he said.

House Republicans are expected to vote again on the bill at 10:20 a.m. before setting off on a two-week recess.

Donald Trump is taking revenge against two officials from his first term.  

On Wednesday, the president issued directives stripping the security clearances of Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor and ordering the Department of Justice to open investigations against them, characterizing Taylor’s criticisms of him as “treasonous” and calling Krebs “a significant bad-faith actor.” 

Krebs, who ran the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, affirmed Joe Biden’s election victory in 2020, saying at the time that “claims [of fraud] either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent” and authorizing a statement from CISA that the election was secure. Trump subsequently fired him by tweet.

Later, Krebs was a witness for the House January 6 committee, providing information on securing the 2020 election, testifying that “Republican officials, senior officials, including the former president, lied to the American people about the security of the 2020 election.”

Krebs now works at cybersecurity company SentinelOne, and Trump’s order not only targets him but strips the security clearances of anyone at the company who works with him. As Trump signed the order against Krebs Wednesday, he let everyone know that he still isn’t over losing in 2020, calling the election “rigged.” 

“It was proven by so many different ways in so many different forms,” Trump said. “We’re going to find out about this guy too, because this guy is a wise guy.”

Taylor famously wrote an anonymous New York Times op-ed criticizing Trump in 2018 while working for the Department of Homeland Security. He left the Trump administration in 2019 and, upon revealing his identity, wrote a book detailing the chaos he observed from Trump. He went on to endorse Biden before the 2020 election, although Trump on Wednesday said, “I barely remember him.” 

“Somebody that went out and wrote a book and said all sorts of terrible things that were all lies,” Trump said. “I think he’s guilty of treason.”

The order against Taylor is so broad that it even suspends the security clearances of “individuals at entities associated with Taylor, including the University of Pennsylvania, pending a review of whether such clearances are consistent with the national interest.”

On X, Taylor posted that “I said this would happen.” 

“Dissent isn’t unlawful. It certainly isn’t treasonous. America is headed down a dark path. Never has a man so inelegantly proved another man’s point,” Taylor wrote. 

All of this shows that Trump would not only escape consequences for his actions if he was reelected but that he always planned to take revenge on his critics if he was able to return to the White House. Now the checks on his power are minimal at best.