“Pissed” Trump Called Jeff Bezos to Yell About Amazon Tariffs Report

President Trump called Jeff Bezos Tuesday morning to fume at the Amazon founder about reported plans for the company to display a number alongside product prices that tells consumers exactly how much Trump’s tariffs are adding to the final cost, according to CNN. 

Amazon had planned the display in the wake of Trump’s unprecedented tariff war on imports from virtually the entire world inevitably leading to increased prices. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called it a “hostile and political act” when asked about the news. 

“This is a hostile and political act by Amazon. Why didn’t Amazon do this when the Biden administration hiked inflation to the highest level in 40 years? And I would also add that it’s not a surprise. As Reuters recently wrote: ‘Amazon has partnered with a Chinese propaganda arm,’” she stated. “So this is another reason why Americans should buy American; it’s another reason why we are onshoring critical supply chains here at home to shore up our own critical supply chain and boost our own manufacturing here.” 

At some point, the president placed a call to one of his most high-profile supporters, and after that the tariff price marker idea was dead. 

“Of course he was pissed.… Why should a multibillion-dollar company pass off costs to consumers?” an anonymous source told CNN, using pro-labor language to misrepresent the nature of the tariffs.

Amazon had an opportunity to show people everywhere what the impact of the president’s destructive trade policies actually looked like. Instead they seem to have fallen in line, even as Trump costs them. 

Donald Trump’s shady crypto business has a surprising partner: Zachary Witkoff, the son of the president’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff. But don’t worry, his dad is getting in on the action too.

A sweeping investigation published Tuesday by The New York Times found that the young Witkoff had found his way to becoming one of the top three managers of World Liberty Financial, or WLFI, the decentralized finance platform that is majority owned by a Trump business entity.

DT Marks DEFI LCC, which is affiliated with Trump and his family members, owns 60 percent of World Liberty and is entitled to 75 percent of $WFLI token sales after deduction of agreed reserves, according to the website.

Trump serves as the company’s “Chief Crypto Advocate.” It’s a sort of ironic title because, while Trump can promote the brand itself, he can also shape policy to the benefit of cryptocurrencies and influence the very markets to which crypto value is tied. The president’s sons, Eric and Don Jr., are both Web 3 ambassadors, while Barron, a freshman at New York University, is a “DeFi Visionary.”

A Securities and Exchange Commission filing lists Witkoff and his son as “promoters.” Witkoff, whose background is in New York real estate, has become a central figure in the floundering U.S.-brokered peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia.

The Times reported that Zachary Witkoff was one of three managers who oversee daily operations at World Liberty, alongside Chase Herro and Zak Folkman of Dough Finance, a lending app that was hacked in July, losing its customers more than $2 million. Coindesk previously reported that some of WLFI’s code was lifted directly from the defunct Dough Finance.

The young Witkoff recently traveled with Folkman and Herro to Pakistan to meet with Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif and other government officials to discuss World Liberty.

“The trip, complete with limousines, a dance performance and police escorts, seamlessly blended the president’s business interests with the trappings of a state visit,” the Times reported.

The trio also met this week with Changpeng Zhao, the founder and former chief executive of Binance, in Abu Dhabi to discuss USD1, WLFI’s stable coin, which is a cryptocurrency that maintains a value of $1. Zhao has been seeking a pardon from the Trump administration after he pleaded guilty to violating U.S. anti–money laundering laws, according to The Wall Street Journal.

World Liberty presents a golden opportunity for investors to curry favor with the Trump administration by allowing them to invest in a coin that directly benefits the president and his family.

World Liberty sent multiple firms a pitch saying that they could essentially pay somewhere between $10 million and $30 million for World Liberty’s endorsement, according to three firms that spoke with the Times. In return for tens of millions of dollars, World Liberty would buy a small amount of the firm’s cryptocurrency, signaling to the market that the firm’s coin was worthy of investment, while pocketing the rest of the cash.

Some firms turned them down. “It’s a very dishonest approach,” Dominik Schiener, founder of the IOTA Foundation, told the Times. His Berlin-based group “immediately” rejected the pitch, he said.

Crucially, World Liberty allows foreign investors to financially back Trump. Many of World Liberty’s early investors were from South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates. Early investors also included some foreign crypto entrepreneurs who had to make payments to the Securities and Exchange Commission over their misdeeds.

Crypto executives have used their purchases of $WLFI to raise their profile in the U.S. and globally, in addition to granting them leverage with the White House. Justin Sun, a Chinese billionaire who founded the crypto platform Tron and was sued by the SEC during the Biden administration, bought a whopping $75 million of $WFLI, late last year. A few months later, the SEC asked a federal judge to halt Sun’s case.

In March, Trump announced plans for a U.S. “crypto strategic reserve,” which presents as a blatant insider trading scam to make his billionaire crypto czar richer—funded by taxpayer money. It directly increased the value of World Liberty’s stash of ether, which was one of the coins included in Trump’s reserve.

In Oklahoma City Thursday, about 20 federal immigration agents raided the wrong home, forcing a woman out of the house with her three daughters, not even leaving them enough time to get dressed, and then seized their phones, laptops, and life savings.

The woman had only moved into the house two weeks earlier, after relocating to Oklahoma from Maryland. The armed agents told the woman, identified by local TV station KFOR as “Marisa,” that they had a search warrant, but the named suspects on the warrant didn’t live in the house and weren’t connected to anyone in the family.

“We just moved here from Maryland,” Marisa said. “We’re citizens. That’s what I kept saying. We’re citizens.”

The agents, who identified themselves as U.S. marshals, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and FBI agents, didn’t seem to care, waking the family up, forcing them outside in their underwear, ransacking the house, and taking the family’s belongings as “evidence.”

“I told them before they left, I said you took my phone. We have no money. I just moved here,” said Marisa. “I have to feed my children. I’m going to need gas money. I need to be able to get around. Like, how do you just leave me like this? Like an abandoned dog.”

“They were very dismissive, very rough, very careless,” the woman added. “I kept pleading. I kept telling them we weren’t criminals. They were treating us like criminals. We were here by ourselves. We didn’t do anything.”

One agent told the family, “I know it was a little rough this morning.”

“It was so denigrating. That you do all of this to a family, to women, your fellow citizens. And it was ‘a little rough’? You literally traumatized me and my daughters for life. We’re going to have to go get help or get over this somehow,” Marisa said. The agents told her that it could take days or months for the family’s stuff to be returned, and wouldn’t even give her a business card.

It all fits a pattern of cruelty from the Trump administration in its efforts to deport as many people as it can. The White House doesn’t believe in due process or following the law, or even standards of basic decency. The violent raid in Oklahoma City would be wrong even against a family of undocumented immigrants, let alone U.S. citizens like Marisa and her daughters. Hopefully, she and other victims of the administration’s wanton behavior can get restitution.

UPS plans to fire 20,000 people before the end of the year, in the midst of a Trump-induced drop in deliveries from Amazon, the postal service’s biggest customer. This amounts to a staggering 4 percent of its workforce. UPS will also shut down 73 buildings.

“In connection with our anticipation of lower volumes from our largest customer, we began our Network Reconfiguration, which is an expansion of Network of the Future and will lead to consolidations of our facilities and workforce as well as an end-to-end process redesign,” UPS stated in a regulatory filing. 

Trump’s 145 percent tariffs on Chinese imports are likely to have a massive impact on Amazon, as 60 percent of its sales come from smaller, independent retailers that depend on said imports. Even Amazon CEO Andy Jassy admitted that the cost of countless products “made in China” will shoot up. Earlier on Tuesday, a report indicated that Amazon had plans to display how much each product’s final cost had been impacted by Trump’s tariffs, though it later caved under White House pressure and said that’s no longer the case. 

These are thousands of good union jobs here getting eliminated by Trump’s destructive trade policy. UPS is the single largest employer in the Teamsters Union, with over 61 percent of its employees maintaining union membership. This critical blow comes as Teamsters President Sean O’Brien continues his shameless support of the clearly anti-labor Trump administration.

And even more troubling: UPS is in serious negotiations with an AI start-up that would have hundreds of gray, humanoid robots replace human workers at the UPS packaging conveyor belt, as this bleak, sterile clip from the company’s X profile shows. Tariffs aren’t getting negotiated, prices are rising, people are being fired, and a team of soulless assembly-line robots is waiting in the wings.  

The Trump administration may not be telling the truth on deporting undocumented immigrant mothers with their U.S. citizen children.

Attorneys for the women and three U.S.-born children say their deportations over the weekend were illegal and the administration’s claims that the children were placed on deportation flights at their mothers’ request are false. One mother wasn’t allowed to speak with a lawyer or her family before she was deported with her children, even though Immigration and Customs Enforcement knew that one of them has stage 4 cancer.

That child, a 4-year-old boy, left the country without access to his cancer medication along with his 7-year-old sister, also a U.S. citizen. Their mother “did not consent to any of this,” according to attorney Mich P. González.

“She did not sign anything, did not write anything, and did not consent to anything expressly. The entire time she was trying very aggressively to speak to her lawyer,” González told NBC News. “As a matter of fact, she was trying to get ahold of a phone to try to call her family and her attorney. But she wasn’t being allowed.”

In another case, a mother of a 2-year-old American citizen about to be deported was given less than two minutes on the phone with her husband to decide what to do with their child. She had been told by ICE to take her children to her routine check-in, moved up from the original date, when she was detained.

Her attorney told MSNBC that “at every single point ICE denied anybody the ability to know where this family was, denied everybody the ability to contact with them and communicate with them.”

The child’s father “barely had any opportunity to speak with the mother about what was best for the child before an ICE officer hung up the phone as he tried to give her the number for an attorney,” said Grace Willis, an attorney with the National Immigration Project.

The Trump administration’s “border czar” Tom Homan has said that the deportations of these young children all took place at their mothers’ request. Secretary of State Marco Rubio concurs, saying that the kids weren’t deported but “went back with their mothers,” and can return to the U.S. if there’s someone who “wants to assume them.”

All of this is more proof of the White House’s cruel and haphazard approach to immigration. It wants quick, mass deportations so badly that it ignores the law and even basic allowances for family contact and phone calls. To these officials, basic human rights, let alone those guaranteed under the Constitution, do not apply to anyone slated for deportation, lest anything get slowed down or overturned.