Trump Makes Bonkers Claim About All His Trade Deals

Donald Trump has made the outrageous claim that he’s struck a whopping 200 trade deals with foreign leaders during his 90-day pause on his “reciprocal tariff” policy. But when pressed, the president refused to say with which countries any of the deals have been made.

In a sweeping interview with Time magazine about his first 100 days in office, Trump was asked whether Peter Navarro’s prediction that he would make 90 trade deals in 90 days was still possible, 13 days into his tariff pause, with zero trade deals announced. The president said he’d already surpassed it.

“I’ve made 200 deals,” Trump claimed.

When directly asked who the deals were with, Trump refused to answer the question and set off on a lengthy rant comparing the United States to a department store.

“Because the deal is a deal that I choose,” Trump said. “View it differently: We are a department store, and we set the price. I meet with the companies, and then I set a fair price, what I consider to be a fair price, and they can pay it, or they don’t have to pay it. They don’t have to do business with the United States, but I set a tariff on countries.”

Trump seems to have settled on a metaphor he likes to understand his high-risk trade policy, and mentioned department stores four times throughout his Time interview. He also made similar remarks to reporters in the Oval Office Thursday. One might suspect it has something to do with search engine optimization because historically when one Googles “Trump department store,” a very different subject comes up.

In reality, the U.S. is quite unlike a department store—if it was, the country wouldn’t have the hundred-billion-dollar trade deficit it does now. Americans want stuff from other countries way more than other countries want stuff from the U.S.

Trump said he would announce the supposed 200 trade deals in the “next three to four weeks,” but he seemed confused about whether the deals were actually done.

“And we’re finished, by the way,” Trump said.

“You’re finished?” Time asked.

“We’ll be finished,” Trump clarified.

“Oh, you will be finished in three to four weeks,” Time said.

“I’ll be finished. Now, some countries may come back and ask for an adjustment, and I’ll consider that, but I’ll basically be, with great knowledge, setting—ready? We’re a department store, a giant department store, the biggest department store in history. Everybody wants to come in and take from us,” Trump said, launching into another lengthy response that didn’t answer the question and again betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of U.S. trade policy.

Trump’s unwillingness to share details about the deals may prolong economic uncertainty that has rattled the U.S. economy and global trade for at least another month, if not longer.

Trump also claimed that China’s President Xi had called him but wouldn’t say when or what they’d discussed. “He’s called. And I don’t think that’s a sign of weakness on his behalf,” Trump said.

The U.S. president launched a trade war with China after escalating tariffs to a whopping 145 percent earlier this month. China in turn raised tariffs on American goods to 125 percent.

When asked what Xi had said, Trump again refused to answer. “If people want to—well, we all want to make deals. But I am this giant store. It’s a giant, beautiful store, and everybody wants to go shopping there. And on behalf of the American people, I own the store, and I set prices, and I’ll say, if you want to shop here, this is what you have to pay.”

The only legal representation available to MyPillow CEO and ardent election-denier Mike Lindell is, apparently, completely fake.

Attorneys for the longtime Donald Trump ally are facing possible discipline for filing an AI-generated brief with fabricated legal citations in order to defend their client.

After facing accusations from a federal judge, Lindell and his legal team confessed to turning in a brief with “nearly 30 defective citations.” One of Lindell’s attorneys, Christopher Kachouroff, claimed that he “personally outlined and wrote a draft of a brief before utilizing generative artificial intelligence,” according to a legal filing. That final draft, however, pointed to legal cases that never happened.

U.S. District Court Judge Nina Wang has given Kachouroff and Lindell’s other attorney, Jennifer DeMaster, until May 5 to prove why they should not face disciplinary proceedings and lose their legal licenses.

It is, shockingly, not the first time that Kachouroff has been caught with his pants down. Last year, the attorney was literally caught without any pants during a break in a Zoom court hearing, in which he was representing another election denier.

Lindell is accused of undermining U.S. democracy and leveraging his connection to Trump to boost his poly-foam pillow sales. At one point, the MAGA businessman’s company was generating as much as $300 million in annual revenue, according to court filings. But by mid-April, Lindell claimed that he still owed $70 million in debt and that his income had plummeted to $1,000 a week.

Last week, Lindell told a federal judge that he couldn’t afford to pay $50,000 in sanctions in one of the long-standing election fraud cases against him and that he was financially “in ruins” over the lawsuits as nobody will lend to him anymore.

“Not one dime,” Lindell said.

MyPillow has been struggling since Lindell aggressively saddled himself up to flip Trump’s 2020 election loss. According to Lindell, his infomercial-heavy product lost $100 million in revenue after it was dropped by shopping networks and retailers, had its credit limit downsized by American Express, and had to auction off thousands of pieces of equipment. Last February, the company also lost a place to lay its head, facing eviction from its warehouses after Lindell failed to pay rent at the company’s Minnesota facilities.

The former millionaire spent months using every platform at his disposal to seed conspiracy theories following the 2020 presidential election, including against Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, claiming the electronic voting companies were complicit in a scheme to keep Trump from retaking the White House. That, however, cost Lindell $5 million and made him a major target in a $1.3 billion defamation suit brought by Dominion, in which Lindell is being sued not just for spreading the lies but also for attempting to profit off them.

FBI Director Kash Patel said Friday the agency has arrested a Wisconsin judge for “obstructing an immigration operation.”

Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan was arrested on charges of obstruction after she “intentionally misdirected federal agents away” from an immigrant man, Eduardo Flores Ruiz, to prevent his arrest, Patel wrote in a post on X Friday, which he initially deleted before reposting again two hours later.

Patel said FBI agents “chased down the man on foot,” and he is now in custody.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Marshals Service in Washington, D.C., confirmed Dugan’s arrest Friday morning, as did several Milwaukee judges, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported Friday. 

On Tuesday, the Journal Sentinel reported that the FBI was investigating Dugan over whether she tried to help an undocumented immigrant in her courtroom evade arrest. Federal agents reportedly came to the Milwaukee County Courthouse on April 18 with an arrest warrant. 

Their visit occurred the same day that Flores Ruiz, the man Patel accused Dugan of assisting, appeared in her courtroom for a pretrial conference related to three counts of misdemeanor battery, the Journal Sentinel reported.

“When they went to the chief judge’s office, Dugan directed the defendant and his attorney to a side door in the courtroom, directed them down a private hallway and into the public area on the 6th floor,” the report reads.  

The 30-year-old man originally from Mexico is now being detained by ICE at Dodge Detention Facility in Juneau, according to the federal detainee database. His arrest marks at least the third time in recent months that ICE agents have appeared at the courthouse with arrest warrants, according to the Journal Sentinel.

Dugan’s arrest comes as Trump continues his widespread attack on immigration judges, eight of whom have been fired or put on leave in the last week across California, Massachusetts, and Louisiana.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump has made a new promise to end the Ukraine war by Wednesday.

Trump repeatedly pledged on the campaign trail he’d end the war in Ukraine by the first day he returned to power. But as he fast approaches his 100th day in office, his inability to find a solution has become an increasingly obvious flaw of his presidency.

After a surprise attack on Kyiv killed at least 12 Ukrainians amid collapsing peace deal negotiations late Wednesday, the president reportedly told aides that he wants to resolve the conflict before his 100th day arrives next week, according to CNN.

Rising frustration over the ongoing conflict—and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s deep hatred for one another—has flustered Trump.

On Thursday, the president had resorted to begging Putin to stop the violence. At a White House press conference later that day, Trump claimed that Russia had offered major concessions in a possible peace deal. Those concessions, however, amounted to “stopping taking” the entirety of Ukraine. Senior officials in the Trump administration—including the president himself—have also verbally recognized Crimea as a part of Russia, a remarkable reversal of long-standing U.S. policy that made Kremlin propagandists on state-sponsored television laugh at the downfall of American power.

Trump has since tried to backtrack his initial promises over the war. In a 100-day retrospective with Time magazine, Trump claimed that his pledge to end the war “on day one” was little more than a joke.

“Obviously, people know that when I said that, it was said in jest, but it was also said that it will be ended,” Trump told Time.

But when pressed on when the war would finally end, Trump said, “I don’t think it’s long.”

“I mean, look, I got here three months ago,” he continued, again deflecting blame for the conflict onto former President Joe Biden.

“It’s Biden’s war. It’s not my war. I have nothing to do with it. I would have never had this war. This war would have never happened,” Trump said. “Putin would have never done it. This war would have never happened. [October] 6 would have never happened. [October] 7 would have never happened. Would have never happened. Ever. You then say, what’s taking so long? Do you hear this, Steve [Cheung]? The war has been raging for three years. I just got here, and you say, what’s taken so long?”

The walls seem to be closing in on Pete Hegseth.

The defense secretary—who has drawn ire for his Crusader-level white supremacy, his alcoholism, and his rank misogyny—appears to be losing it as his double Signalgate fiasco just got even worse.

The AP reported Thursday that Hegseth wanted to brag about his war plans on Signal so badly that he installed a “dirty” or public internet connection in his private Pentagon office. This allows him to send messages from that connection without using his Defense Department IP address, effectively making him invisible as a user. This public connection usage also makes the highest-ranking defense official in the country much more vulnerable to hacking and spying.

Hegseth is supposed to use either the Nonclassified Internet Protocol Router Network, the Secure Internet Protocol Router Network, or the top secret Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System.

Shortly after, The Wall Street Journal published another damning report. Apparently Hegseth has been filled with anxiety and paranoia as turnover in his inner circle increases with each passing scandal. At least five Pentagon employees have been fired or resigned, and Hegseth even wants some of them to be criminally investigated. One staffer described it as a “revolving door” so bad that they weren’t sure who they were actually working with anymore, as Hegseth was at one point without a chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, or senior adviser.

The Journal reports that Hegseth is on edge, suspects his own staffers of leaking information about his activities, and is more than anything scared of being fired by President Trump. And while Hegseth continues to attribute all of his struggles to some media witch hunt, the scandals continue to pile up.

“I didn’t believe he had the requisite experience and skills to handle the toughest job in the cabinet before he was confirmed, and I have seen nothing in his performance so far that would disconfirm that judgment,” former Republican Pentagon official Eric Edelman told the Journal.

Hegseth is only four months into his tenure as defense secretary. We’ll see how far he makes it from here.

The White House fired an official because he knew the guy who criticized President Donald Trump in the famous “Anonymous” op-ed in The New York Times seven years ago, The Washington Post reported Friday.

The executive director of the Office of Trade Relations at Customs and Border Protection, George E. Bogden, was abruptly asked to leave his post over apparent ties to Miles Taylor, the author of the anonymous 2018 op-ed, sources told the Post. Taylor was Trump’s chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security at the time, and the piece revealed his and his colleagues’ internal efforts to thwart parts of the president’s agenda. Taylor made his authorship public in 2020 after leaving his position as chief of staff.

The president has reportedly been obsessed with the op-ed ever since. He ordered the Department of Justice to investigate Bogden’s seemingly thin ties to Taylor, despite Bodgen’s centrality to implementing the president’s absurd tariff scheme. Bodgen’s job was to listen to the trade industry’s complaints and grievances amid the economic chaos spurred by Trump in recent weeks.

It’s unclear what the DOJ found to merit Bogden’s ousting, and there are few ties connecting the two men other than a Facebook photo of Bogden at Taylor’s wedding in 2019, one year before Taylor revealed he wrote the op-ed. Sources told the Post that Bogden and Taylor “have not been close” and that “few Trump allies, including Bogden, were aware of Taylor’s role in writing the piece at the time it was published or by the time of the wedding.”

Taylor’s humiliating revelation to the public clearly instilled a deep sense of paranoia in the president that hasn’t dissipated even seven years later. “From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s comments and actions,” Taylor wrote at the time. “Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.”

As Trump works to rid his administration of any Taylor-like officials, his firing of a yearslong supporter like Bogden (while he continues to defend a Cabinet member who shared national security information over text) is a stark reminder that the president values unwavering loyalty above all else.

In the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s presidency, Elon Musk lost nearly twice as much money as he cut in government spending as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency.

Following a particularly humiliating earnings report from Tesla Tuesday, Musk told investors that starting in May, he would be reducing the amount of time he spends in the White House to pay more attention to his struggling electric car company.

In the first three months of the year, Tesla’s profits crashed 71 percent, falling to a mere $409 million, compared with $1.39 billion from the same quarter last year. The drop is undoubtedly a direct result of Musk’s entanglement with Trump’s administration, where Tesla has become a symbol of extreme cost-cutting measures that have led to sweeping layoffs and essential services being gutted.

During his time in the White House, Musk’s net worth has plummeted a whopping $122 billion, nearly twice as much as the $61.5 billion he was able to save the government, according to the Musk Watch DOGE Tracker, which tallies DOGE’s itemized cuts to contracts, grants, and real estate. Only $12.6 billion worth of cuts have actually been verified, according to the tracker.

DOGE still claims a far higher figure of $160 billion in estimated savings, but a closer look at Musk’s activities at DOGE show that the billionaire bureaucrat barely made a dent in the trillions of dollars he set out to slash in government spending.

“DOGE’s verified savings have been less than 1/10 of 1 percent of federal spending,” Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow and budget expert at the conservative Manhattan Institute told Axios Friday. “There have been embarrassing accounting errors, lots of public statements that turned out to be false or misleading, or actions slapped back by the courts.”

Reidl told Axios that Musk’s minute cuts will likely be offset by the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts at the IRS.

“The spending savings are so small that they will be undoubtedly overwhelmed by the significant tax revenue losses which result from gutting IRS tax enforcement,” she said. “It makes a mockery of claims that DOGE is really just about cutting deficits.”

Musk’s net worth began sinking last month after Trump failed to dispel rumors of a recession on the horizon, wiping out $29 billion of his ally’s own wealth. Things only got worse after Trump announced his sweeping “reciprocal tariff” policy at the beginning of April.

Sure, Musk was the biggest individual winner when Trump announced a 90-day pause on tariffs, sending Tesla stock shooting up 23 percent. But his time in the White House has taken a bite out of his wealth and done considerable damage to Tesla’s brand.

“The brand damage caused by Musk in the White House/DOGE over the past few months will not go away,” said Wedbush Securities analyst and beleaguered Tesla bull Dan Ives, according to Axios.

It seems that Musk may not be long for Washington—Trump even referred to him in the past tense Thursday. His status as a special government employee is set to expire next month anyway. And he clearly isn’t getting along with members of the administration, publicly picking fights over the IRS with the treasury secretary and starting rows with Trump’s top trade adviser over tariffs.

But it’s too soon to rejoice at the permanent departure of the billionaire bureaucrat. He told investors that he’d be cutting down to one or two days a week but that he’d have to continue working with the White House at least until Trump’s term had ended. But if Musk is hoping for a brand reset, he may have another think coming. No amount of cutting days in the office can erase the image of Musk gleefully waving a chain saw around.

President Trump told Time magazine that he is essentially doing nothing to comply with the Supreme Court order to bring back wrongly deported immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia from the CECOT megaprison in El Salvador.

In an interview published Friday, Trump said he hadn’t asked Salvador President Nayib Bukele to release Abrego Garcia because “nobody asked me to ask him that question.”

Here is the transcript of that absurd moment.

In our interview last year, Mr. President, you committed to complying with all Supreme Court orders.

I said what?

You committed to complying with all Supreme Court orders—

Yeah.

When you and I spoke last April. Are you still committed to complying with all Supreme Court orders?

Sure, I believe in the court system.

The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that you have to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia. You haven’t done so. Aren’t you disobeying the Supreme Court?

Well, that’s not what my people told me—they didn’t say it was, they said it was—the nine to nothing was something entirely different.

Let me quote from the ruling. “The order properly requires the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.” Are you facilitating a release?

I leave that to my lawyers. I give them no instructions. They feel that the order said something very much different from what you’re saying. But I leave that to my lawyers. If they want—and that would be the Attorney General of the United States and the people that represent the country. I don’t make that decision.

Have you asked President Bukele to return him?

I haven’t, uh, he said he wouldn’t.

Did you ask him?

But I haven’t asked him positively, but he said he wouldn’t.

But if you haven’t asked him, then how are you facilitating his release?

Well, because I haven’t been asked to ask him by my attorneys. Nobody asked me to ask him that question, except you.

Do you believe he deserves his day in court?

I believe that they made him look like a saint, and then we found out about him. He wasn’t a saint. He was MS-13. He was a wife beater and he had a lot of things that were very bad, you know, very, very bad. When I first heard of the situation, I was not happy, and then I found out that he was a person who was an MS-13 member. And in fact, he had a tattooed right on his—I’m sure you saw that—he had it tattooed right on his knuckles: MS-13. No, I believe he’s a man who has got quite a past. This is no longer just a nice, wonderful man from Maryland, which people, which the fake news had me and other people for a period of time believing. Now, nobody believes that. And I think this is a very bad—I think this is another men [in] women’s sports thing for the Democrats.

Trump’s answers here convey both a disdain toward Abrego Garcia and an active ignorance of the critical situation he and the likely hundreds of other wrongfully detained migrants are in. The Supreme Court orders him unanimously to bring back Abrego Garcia, and he just shrugs his shoulders and tells Time that his lawyers said otherwise—“They feel that the order said something very much different from what you’re saying.… Nobody asked me to ask him that question, except you.”

In the same interview, Trump states again that he would “love to” send U.S. citizens to jails like CECOT if he could.

Donald Trump suggested Thursday that the fate of the world rested on the United States gaining control of Greenland.

During a press conference with Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, Trump made a dramatic claim as he dismissed a question about securing NATO backing in his outlandish bid for control of the world’s largest island.

“Greenland’s gonna be interesting, but that’s for another day,” Trump said. “I think we need that for international peace, and if we don’t have that it’s a big threat to our world. So I think that Greenland is very important for international peace.”

Trump has been outspoken about his pipe dream to acquire the Danish-controlled territory for its value as a geopolitical asset and mineral and oil resources. Crucially, Greenland is strategically significant to the United States because it sits between Russia and the eastern coast of the United States and is the fastest way from Europe to New York.

Greenland is also located beside the Norwegian Sea, which connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Arctic Ocean and the Barents Sea, where the Russian Navy’s Northern Fleet operates.

In March, Trump told NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte that he could be very “instrumental” in helping the U.S. acquire the semiautonomous territory from Denmark, which the U.S. desperately needed for “international security, not just security.”

Rutte responded by saying he wouldn’t drag NATO into the issue but that the island did have critical proximity to Chinese and Russian routes.

For now, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Trump appear as allies, as the president attempts to conduct Ukraine peace negotiations that will result in a fruitful deal for the U.S. and Moscow. But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy warned during his visit in February that although there was a “nice ocean” between them, the U.S. might “feel” Russia’s war in the future.

Meanwhile, tensions with China have only continued to rise as Trump struggles to de-escalate his foolish trade war, which has seen tariffs on Chinese imports to the U.S. rise to 145 percent.

As preposterous as Trump’s dreams of acquiring the island are, the Trump administration has already set to work to make it a reality, holding multiple meetings of the White House National Security Council about the proposal and launching a massive public relations campaign intent on somehow convincing Greenlanders to annex themselves. In Greenland and Denmark, the reception to such efforts has been about as frosty as the icy tundra.

A group of Democratic lawmakers are demanding answers from nine major law firms that struck deals with Donald Trump’s administration to avoid being targeted by the president’s fury.

In a series of letters Thursday, 16 Democratic lawmakers warned the managing partners of several large law firms that the agreements they’d made with the Trump administration—offering millions of dollars in pro bono work on issues that support the president’s agenda, among other concessions—were unenforceable and potentially violated federal and state laws.

The 16 lawmakers that sent the letters included Representatives Dave Min of California, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and Becca Balint of Vermont. They warned that by issuing executive orders targeting certain law firms, the Trump administration had used “coercive and illegal measures to target certain law firms and threaten their ability to represent and retain their clients.” In total, the law firms had pledged a whopping $940 million in pro bono work to the Trump administration.

The letters alleged that Trump’s scheme to blackmail firms into abolishing their DEI practices and cough up millions in free work could potentially violate federal laws against bribery, defrauding the public, and even racketeering. The deals could also potentially violate the Hobbs Act, according to lawmakers, which “prohibits obstruction, delay, or affecting commerce by extortion under color of official right.”

The deals potentially violated state laws and rules of professional conduct too, the lawmakers said.

Not every firm that struck a deal, or received a letter, had been openly targeted by the Trump administration. Several had preemptively approached the government to make concessions, according to statements from the firms. The lawmakers warned that the deals would have a “chilling effect” on “the availability of legal services for those clients and matters targeted by the Trump administration.”

The nine law firms that received letters were Allen Overy Shearman Sterling LLP; Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft LLP; Latham & Watkins LLP; Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP; Milbank LLP; Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP; Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP; Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP; and Kirkland & Ellis LLP.

In the letters, each firm was asked a series of questions about the details of their individual deals with the Trump administration, and how exactly they’d come about.

For example, Paul Weiss, the first law firm to bow to Trump, had agreed to acknowledge that one of its attorneys, Mark Pomerantz, had committed wrongdoing, according to the White House. Trump had targeted Pomerantz for his efforts to build a case against the president when Pomerantz served at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office—not illegal in the slightest. The lawmakers asked Paul Weiss to explain specifically what alleged “wrongdoing” Pomerantz had committed. Like many of the other firms, Paul Weiss had also offered millions in free legal services and revoked their hiring practices that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Other questions were the same for every firm. “Outside observers have also stated that these agreements represent a ‘Sword of Damocles,’ with a risk that the administration will again threaten to target firms with Executive Orders if they do not again yield to the President’s demands,” one question read, asking what the firm planned to do to “ensure that the administration will not be able to require more from the firm beyond the provisions currently in place?”

Earlier this week, Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut penned letters to five major law firms that they accused of being “complicit in efforts to undermine the rule of law.”