Trump Accidentally Admits He Hasn’t Made Any Trade Deals

President Donald Trump claimed Tuesday that the U.S. doesn’t “have to sign” any trade deals, inadvertently admitting that his administration hasn’t made any progress during the 90-day pause on his disastrous tariffs.

During a tense meeting to discuss tariffs with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, the president attempted to move the goal posts on actually completing any agreements with foreign countries.

“Everyone says, ‘When, when, when, are you going to sign deals?’ We don’t have to sign deals!” Trump said.

“We don’t have to sign deals. They have to sign deals with us. They want a piece of our market, we don’t want a piece of their market. We don’t care about their market. They want a piece of our market,” Trump rambled.

The president’s unwieldy statements downplaying the importance of the trade deals seemed to be cushioning the likelihood that negotiations would ultimately fail. Trump’s remarks also revealed that his administration has yet to complete a single trade deal.

Last month, Trump claimed to have already struck 200 trade agreements with foreign countries, a remark so outlandish it sent members of his administration scrambling to make it make sense. (There are also only 195 countries in the world.)

Instead of pledging to sign deals, Trump presented his own plan Tuesday. The president claimed that “at some point over the next two weeks,” he intended to sit down with members of his Cabinet and offer individualized deals to each country seeking tariff relief.

“We’re gonna say, ‘Here’s what this country—what we want, and congratulations we have a deal!’ And they’ll either say ‘Great,’ and they’ll start shopping, or they’ll say, ‘Not good, we’re not gonna do it,’” Trump said.

Trump claimed that the offers would include “very fair numbers,” but that they might also include other requests. He also said that his administration would be open to adjusting the deals based on how the countries responded.

“And then you people will say, ‘Oh it’s so chaotic,’ no, we’re flexible,” Trump said, referring to the press.

In any case, Trump continued to emphasize that his goal wasn’t actually to make deals, just to put out offers. “In some cases we’ll sign some deals, it’s much less important than what I’m talking about,” he said. He warned that in one day, he could present 100 offers, but “they don’t have to sign.”

Still, Trump said he wanted countries to “pay for the privilege of being able to shop in the United States of America.”

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney declared in the White House Tuesday that Canada would not submit to U.S. ownership. Donald Trump, however, wouldn’t back down.

“As you know from real estate, there are some places that are never for sale,” Carney said. “Having met with the owners of Canada over the course of the campaign, it’s not for sale. It won’t be for sale ever.”

“Never say never,” Trump said, telling reporters that only time would tell, while seated inches away from the Canadian leader. “I had many things that people said were not doable but ended up being doable.”

Carney won Canada’s top leadership post in April in large part due to his staunch position against Trump’s growing threats to annex the country.

In the months leading up to the election, Canada’s Liberal Party was believed to be on its deathbed. But that all changed with Trump’s tariff talk, which radically ramped up anti-American sentiment amongst Canadian voters, alongside Trump’s bizarre and public ambitions to occupy Canada.

Trump has actively aggressed U.S. relations with Canada since his first term. Recent rhetoric about annexing Canada to become America’s “fifty-first state” has not played well with the Canadian people or its leaders, causing some residents of the country to candidly dub Trump an “asshole.”

Responding to reporters Tuesday, Trump said there was nothing that Carney could say or do to lift his tariffs on Canada. “It’s just the way it is,” Trump said, when asked why he wouldn’t budge.

Carney appeared disturbed by the admission, interjecting to respond to several of Trump’s prior points.

“Respectfully, Canadians’ view on this is not going to change, on the fifty-first state,” Carney said as Trump grimaced beside him. “Secondly, we are the largest client of the United States. In the totality of all the goods, we are the largest state. We have a tremendous auto sector between the two of us.

“You know, 50 percent of the cars that come from Canada is American, that’s unlike anywhere else in the world,” the prime minister continued, gesturing to the reporter who inquired about tariffs. “This will take some time and some discussions, and that’s why we’re here, to have those discussions, and that’s represented by who’s sitting around the table.”

Trump was quick to respond. “See, the conflict this—and this is very friendly; this is not going to be like, ‘We had another little blow up with somebody else,’ that was a much different—this is a very friendly conversation,” he said. “We want to make our own cars, we don’t really want cars from Canada.

“At some point, it won’t make economic sense for Canada to make those cars,” Trump continued, claiming that the U.S. would make its own steel. “We really don’t want Canadian steel, and we don’t want Canadian aluminium and various other things because we want to be able to do it ourself.”

Trump then continued to lie about the two country’s trade situation, equating Canada’s trade deficits with the U.S. with “subsidies.” Trade deficits are indicators that America’s neighbors are purchasing more of its goods than they sell in return. In 2023, that differential—or deficit—was nearly $41 billion with Canada, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Shortly afterward, Trump abruptly ended the meeting, refusing to allow Carney another opportunity to respond to the American press.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump made a wild post Tuesday slamming Canada, just moments before Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney arrived at the White House for a tense meeting to discuss tariffs.

“I look forward to meeting the new Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney. I very much want to work with him, but cannot understand one simple TRUTH—Why is America subsidizing Canada by $200 Billion Dollars [sic] a year, in addition to giving them FREE Military Protection, and many other things?” Trump wrote in a post at 11:23 a.m. on Truth Social.

“We don’t need their Cars, we don’t need their Energy, we don’t need their Lumber, we don’t need ANYTHING they have, other than their friendship, which hopefully we will always maintain. They, on the other hand, need EVERYTHING from us! The Prime Minister will be arriving shortly and that will be, most likely, my only question of consequence.”

Carney arrived at the White House at noon, according to NBC News.

Trump’s meeting with Carney will be their first in-person interaction since Trump announced he would impose 25 percent tariffs on U.S. exports to Canada. The U.S. president has facilitated a rapid breakdown in relations between the neighboring countries, continually criticizing Canada’s dependence on the U.S. and repeatedly joking that it should become the fifty-first state.

Carney responded to Trump’s aggression in April, proclaiming that Canada’s old relationship with the U.S. was “over” and that the country would begin seeking new trading partners.

After Carney’s Liberal Party won Canada’s national election late last month, he started out his new term by dissing Trump.

“As I have been warning for months, America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country. But these are not idle threats. President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us,” Carney said. “That will never ever happen.”

President Donald Trump may have thought he was getting a legal war chest by threatening several major law firms—but it seems the famed dealmaker didn’t know exactly what he was signing on to.

In a series of letters to Representative Jamie Raskin and Senator Richard Blumenthal obtained by The Bulwark, several major law firms that cut deals with the Trump administration provided details on the terms of their agreements—and it’s looking like the president may have gotten the short end of the stick.

While the firms had reportedly agreed to provide millions of dollars of pro bono work for specific causes, many asserted that they had total authority over the selection of their clients.

Allen Ovary Shearman Sterling LLP wrote that its agreement to provide $125 million in pro bono work “does not call for, or permit, the administration or any other person or entity to determine what clients and matters the Firm takes on, whether they be pro bono matters or otherwise.” The firm said it had simply agreed to provide free legal services across “three specified areas,” including assisting veterans, ensuring fairness in the justice system, and combating antisemitism.

The Bulwark reported that other firms’ deals had similar stakes. Latham & Watkins wrote that it “maintains its complete independence as to the clients and matters the firm takes on,” while Simpson Thacher & Bartlett wrote that their agreement with the government did not “dictate or restrict what pro bono matters we will take on moving forward.” Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft wrote that they “have not and will not restrict our pro bono activities or the positions we take on behalf of those clients.”

Nine law firms have signed deals with the president, promising nearly $1 billion in pro bono work.

Meanwhile, Trump has projected a far grander view of what he could call on firms to do for him. The president claimed that the major law firms who struck deals stood at the ready to help him make deals with foreign countries to alleviate the weight of his sweeping reciprocal tariffs. He also floated the idea of using his battalion of attorneys to help the coal industry. In the White House, discussions had begun about deploying lawyers at DOGE and the DOJ, The New York Times reported last month.

Other firms seem to be using a different legalese to prevent themselves from being strong-armed by Trump. Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP executive partner Jeremy London said that the firm had agreed to provide $100 million in pro bono work that “the president and Skadden both support,” which could potentially provide an out should the firm be remanded to work on a specific cause.

Last month, Raskin and Blumenthal penned letters to five major law firms they accused of being “complicit in efforts to undermine the rule of law” and demanded information on the deals.

A group of Democratic lawmakers sent another series of letters to law firms last month, warning that the Trump administration’s scheme to use “coercive and illegal measures” to blackmail firms could potentially violate federal laws against bribery, defrauding the public, and even racketeering.

If the firms have truly maintained authority over selecting which clients they represent, and which matters they take up, then some of these concerns may be moot. However, the lawmakers raised the possibility that by signing a deal with Trump, the firms were opening themselves up to extortion, asking what each 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?”

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stumbled and deflected when asked a simple, direct question about tariffs at a congressional hearing on Tuesday.

“Who pays tariffs, Mr. Secretary?” asked Representative Mark Pocan.

Bessent began to ramble on indirectly, frustrating Pocan. “Who pays tariffs? Mr. Secretary, please, the question is very simply, Who pays tariffs? Mr. Chairman, I’d like him to answer that question; he wants to answer other questions.”

Bessent replied shakily. “Well, Congressman, if the congressman, if the exporters, the … uh, dislike tariffs so much, why wouldn’t they? If, I think what you’re trying to get me to say—”

“Did you remember the question? I’m not sure you did,” Pocan said. “Who pays tariffs?”

“It’s a very complicated question.”

“Reclaiming my time. People pay tariffs, right?”

“No, no, no,” Bessent muttered, while Pocan reclaimed his time.

“You clearly aren’t gonna answer, I’m not gonna waste my time having you go ‘uh uh uh uh.’”

The Trump administration is doing everything in its power to gaslight Americans into thinking that the tariffs will be positive; that we’ll just have some short-term discomfort before everything is cheap and made in America again. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

Donald Trump’s braggadocio just upended one of his executive orders.

U.S. Judge Beryl Howell issued a permanent injunction against the president Friday night, ruling that his executive order targeting the law firm Perkins Coie was not only unconstitutional but amounted to an “unprecedented attack” on the pillars of the judicial system.

“No American President has ever before issued executive orders like the one at issue in this lawsuit targeting a prominent law firm with adverse actions to be executed by all Executive branch agencies but, in purpose and effect, this action draws from a playbook as old as Shakespeare, who penned the phrase: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,’” Howell wrote in a scathing 102-page opinion.

Trump signed an executive order against Perkins Coie in March, revoking the firm’s security clearances and their access to government buildings, and nixing government contracts with the firm, in part because they represented Hillary Clinton during her 2016 campaign.

But Howell dismantled the order, based on Trump’s own claims about forcing other law firms into submission. During an April 8 speech cited in Howell’s ruling, Trump peacocked that “lots of law firms have been signing up with Trump.”

“$100 million, another $100 million, for damages that they’ve done,” Trump said at the time. But they give you $100 million, and then they announce, ‘We have done nothing wrong.’ And I agree, they’ve done nothing wrong. But what the hell, they’ve given me a lot of money considering they’ve done nothing wrong.”

Also at fault was deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller, whose comments about another law firm—Susman Godfrey—included flaunting that the administration had effectively finagled upward of a billion dollars in “free legal work” thanks to the executive branch’s pressure campaign.

Trump’s and Miller’s comments effectively proved that the president had singled firms out for “retribution” based on whether they were willing to cut a deal with the White House.

Perkins Coie said in a statement that the decision “affirms core constitutional freedoms all Americans hold dear, including free speech, due process, and the right to select counsel without the fear of retribution.”

It is unclear if the Trump administration plans to appeal the ruling.

U.S. spy agencies do not believe that the Venezuelan government has authority over the Tren de Aragua gang—a development that directly contradicts Trump’s justification for his illegal, extrajudicial deportations of Venezuelans to a prison in El Salvador.

“While Venezuela’s permissive environment enables TDA to operate, the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States,” a memo from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence read, according to The New York Times.

Trump has been claiming the exact opposite since he invoked the wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798 in March to summarily round up Venezuelan immigrants and deport them without basic due process.

Trump first invoked the wartime powers act in March, asserting that “this is a time of war. Because Biden allowed millions of people, many of them criminals, many of them at the highest level.… Other nations emptied their jails into the United States, it’s an invasion. These are criminals, many many criminals … murderers, drug dealers at the highest level, drug lords. People from mental institutions. That’s an invasion.” He also said Tren de Aragua gang members were committing crimes in the United States “at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.”

The memo directly delegitimizes his argument, further confirming that Trump is operating well outside the bounds of his executive powers.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is still advocating for the creation of a disease registry that tracks people diagnosed with autism.

During an appearance Monday night on Fox News’s The Ingraham Angle, Kennedy tried to explain why the government would need to collate citizens’ private medical records into a massive database—a plan that was announced last month by the National Institutes of Health, and then reportedly abandoned two days later after severe backlash.

“One in every 31 kids today. In California, which has the best database, it’s one in every 20 children, one in every 12.5 boys,” Kennedy claimed.

“This is an existential disease,” Kennedy continued. “Every other disease like this has a registry so that—and its voluntary—public health officials can monitor the numbers. It’s not private information, it’s not information that is gonna go out to other agencies, it’s a voluntary system where your privacy is protected. Just a system for keeping track of a disease that is now becoming debilitating to the American public.”

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report published last month found that one in 31 children aged 8 years old has been identified with autism spectrum disorder. Days before that report had come out, Donald Trump was already spouting those exact numbers before claiming that autism could potentially be caused by vaccines.

While the CDC has documented an increase in diagnoses from 2000, when only one in 150 children born in 1992 was diagnosed with autism, experts have attributed some of the rise in diagnoses to a widening definition of autism spectrum disorder, which encapsulates a broader range of symptoms, as well as people being more aware of and willing to get diagnostic testing, according to ABC News.

Under Kennedy’s guidance, the CDC has launched a study on connections between vaccines and autism, despite extensive research debunking the conspiracy theory.

Pete Hegseth canceled military aid flights to Ukraine just a week into Trump’s second term without the president even knowing, according to Reuters.

The ignominious defense secretary called off 11 Ukraine-bound planes carrying artillery, shells, and other weapons. Trump was completely unaware that Hegseth had made the call, as the TRANSCOM records simply show a verbal order from “SECDEF”—the secretary of defense—stopping aid flights to Ukraine until February 5.

The order initially sparked mass confusion within the administration, as national security officials in the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department couldn’t figure out who ordered the halt in flights.

This is yet another example of the chaos and lack of cohesion that Hegseth has brought to the Pentagon from day one. But the administration is treating the communication failure like business as usual.

“Negotiating an end to the Russia-Ukraine War has been a complex and fluid situation. We are not going to detail every conversation among top administration officials throughout the process,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Reuters. “The bottom line is the war is much closer to an end today than it was when President Trump took office.”

The move also aligns with the growing anti–European Union, anti-Ukraine, pro-isolationist views that Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance hold, as evident in their infamous Signalgate group chat messages.

“This is consistent with the administration’s policy to move fast, break things, and sort it out later,” said retired Marine and defense expert Mark Cancian. “That is their managing philosophy.”

This is one of multiple reports on the internal disarray at Hegeth’s Defense Department.

“Abundance for me but not for thee” seems to be Donald Trump’s new motto.

The president’s argument that children should just have fewer dolls rattled the nation last week. Trump’s tariffs proposals—which were discovered and confirmed by the White House to be based on bad math—have sent markets tumbling and pushed the U.S. economy closer toward a recession. The boss of the biggest shipping port in the country told AFP News Agency that American consumers can expect “less choice and higher prices” once current inventory runs out, which he predicted would occur within the next five to seven weeks.

In the face of rising costs and a slowing job market, Trump’s solution is just as simple as it is un-American: Buy less.

“I don’t think a young lady, a 10-year-old girl, 9-year-old girl, 15-year-old girl, doesn’t need 37 dolls. She can be very happy with two or three or four or five,” Trump reiterated to reporters aboard Air Force One Sunday.

But Trump—whose net worth is estimated by Forbes to be $5.1 billion—wouldn’t know the first thing about living a modest lifestyle. His own children have been photographed in the lap of luxury, playing with lavish toys backdropped by the ornate interiors of his New York City penthouse, as the internet was quick to point out.

Some of Barron Trump’s childhood toys included a customized mini Mercedes convertible featuring a “BARRON” license plate, several life-size stuffed animals, and famously, a Louis Vuitton “soot-case” that reportedly now retails for nearly $10,000. They resided in an entire floor of Trump’s apartment, which Barron apparently had all to himself, Melania told Entertainment Tonight in 2010.

Other images of Trump’s brood include photos of Melania holding a baby Barron in front of golden doors, marble floors, and an elaborate pram.