Trump’s Supposed U.K. Trade Deal Gets Trashed by Surprising Person

Not even people on Donald Trump’s side think that his trade negotiations with the United Kingdom have gone well.

Conservative radio show host and far-right influencer Erick Erickson blasted the Trump administration’s deal with one its longest and strongest international allies Thursday, likening the minimum rate tariff to permanent taxes on the American people.

“It’s actually a pretty shitty deal with the UK,” wrote Erickson on X. “First, they told us the 10 [percent] tariff was just a baseline for negotiations to get to free trade deals. Now we’re being told the 10 [percent] tariff is for keeps.

“That’s just a tax on the American people,” he noted.

The U.K. deal—announced Thursday—was the first handshake that Trump had secured since announcing his sweeping tariff plans last month. But even the two countries’ “special relationship” (per deceased British Prime Minister Winston Churchill) could not spare the U.K. from a seemingly permanent 10 percent baseline tariff.

“Under the deal, the U.K. can export 100,000 vehicles each year at a 10 percent rate, with any additional vehicles facing 25 percent duties. British steelmakers and the aluminum industry will be able to export tariff-free, down from the 25 percent rate that the U.S. imposed in February,” reported NBC News.

The 10 percent hike is just the tip of the iceberg, according to Trump, who called it a “low number” for future deals.

“They made a good deal,” he continued. “Some will be much higher because they have massive trade surpluses.”

Trump has argued that tariffs are the best solution to closing the country’s trade deficits, which he has incorrectly likened to taxpayer-backed “subsidies” for other nations. He has claimed that without tariffs, the U.S. is transferring wealth to other countries while receiving nothing in exchange. He has also pitched that hiking tariffs on other nations would bring jobs and manufacturing opportunities back to American shores, but economists don’t agree with either point.

Instead, droves of financial and economic experts have insisted that tariffs on other nations will only serve to harm America and its markets, making products more expensive stateside and making American consumers less likely to spend their money (something that Trump doesn’t seem to have any problem with, actually). The Harvard Kennedy Business School even floated in April that America’s trade deficit basically doesn’t matter, writing that “Americans earn more from, or earn just about as much from, their total investments abroad as foreigners earn in the United States.”

“So if you look historically, we have felt no additional pressure about sustainability of our position,” the school wrote in an early stage tariff explainer. “As long as we borrow the money and use it productively to increase investment in the United States, it is eminently sustainable, as with any investment.”

The president’s tariff shenanigans have not boded well for his popularity. The Cook Political Report observed Wednesday that Trump’s net job approval rating had plummeted since just April 15, dropping by seven points from -3.9 percent to -10.7 percent.

An ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll published last month found that Trump’s approval rating had sunk to 39 percent—a 6 percent drop from February—marking the lowest first-100-day rating of a president since modern polling began roughly 80 years ago.

And an April report by the Conference Board found that its consumer confidence index had fallen by 7.9 points, bringing overall U.S. consumer confidence to 86 points. Consumer futures were brought to a 13-year low, with outlooks on the economy dropping by 12.5 points to 54.5 points—well below the threshold of 80 that “usually signals a recession ahead,” according to the Conference Board.

The root cause of the instability was “high financial market volatility in April” that hit American consumers’ stock portfolios and retirement savings hard and fast, per the Conference Board’s report. That was almost singularly due to Trump’s machinations in the White House, which included releasing (and stalling) a sweeping and vindictive tariff proposal plan that economists observed (and the White House eventually confirmed) was founded on bad math.

The Trump administration is treating Afrikaners, white descendants of mainly Dutch colonizers in South Africa, as “refugees” and plans to bring them to the United States next week, according to The New York Times.

Trump is even planning on a welcome delegation of government officials to greet the first 54 people as they arrive at Dulles Airport near Washington, D.C., on Monday.

The 54 Afrikaners were given priority status, meaning they waited no more than three months for their resettlement. Many refugees from other countries are forced to wait 18 to 24 months, and sometimes even years, for their resettlement assignment. This comes as Trump banned virtually all other refugees on his first day in office.

“We are profoundly disturbed that the administration has slammed the door in the face of thousands of other refugees approved by D.H.S. months ago, notwithstanding courts ordering the White House to let many of them in,” Mark Hetfield, president of a Jewish resettlement organization, told the Times. “That’s just not right.”

Afrikaners in South Africa claim that they are being racially discriminated against, that they can’t get jobs and don’t feel safe with the current government and its progressive, redistributive policies. The South African government currently has a program that allows it to seize land from Afrikaners without providing compensation—the very same thing white colonizers did when they arrived, forcing Black South Africans from their land for nothing and relegating them to second- and even third-class citizenship.

Some feel as if the Afrikaners are simply using the reversal of the apartheid-era systems that they’ve benefited from for generations as justification for their resettlement in the U.S., casting themselves as victims in a situation where they’ve historically been the victimizers.

“Historically, in fact, farmers have been quite oppressed in South Africa, but those are Black farmers. Those are the people whose land was alienated over centuries of colonization and who, in many cases, worked as really poorly remunerated menial laborers in horrific conditions on white-owned farms,” said Yale professor Daniel Magaziner. “And so in many ways, what [Trump is] doing is he is implicitly, not explicitly, but implicitly downplaying the reality of South African history.”

“You do have the reality that a lot of Black South Africans are still without any wealth, are still in very deep poverty and saying, hey, since the end of apartheid, those scales have not been equaled,” said John Eligon, The New York Times’ Johannesburg bureau chief.

Some on the Black South African left have a sharper view of the situation.

“Due to global and local economic processes, the rich continue to get richer, and the poor get poorer. Most of the white—of the farmland, more than 70 percent of it is owned by white farmers. So, basically, they are sitting pretty,” said activist Trevor Nganwe. “You know, there’s a saying, ‘The guilty are afraid.’ Perhaps they know that this unjust situation, where a tiny minority enjoys most of the country’s wealth and resources, is not tenable, and sooner or later, it will have to end.”

The influence of Elon Musk, who grew up under the benefits of apartheid in South Africa, cannot be understated. In March, he replied “absolutely!” to a post that incorrectly claimed that white Afrikaners are facing genocide—a deeply ironic statement given the historical context of the country.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is lying about the qualifications of his pick for surgeon general.

During an appearance on Fox News Thursday night, Kennedy attempted to defend his choice of Casey Means, a wellness influencer and author who has no active medical license and never completed her physician residency. But, as is typical for the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, in lieu of evidence, Kennedy just made stuff up.

“She was the top of her med—the very top of her medical class at Stanford,” Kennedy said.

“She is in every—during her residency, she won every award that she could win. She walked away from traditional medicine because she was not curing patients. She couldn’t get anybody within her profession to look at the nutrition contributions to illness,” Kennedy said.

But it would’ve been impossible for Means to be at the top of her class at the Stanford School of Medicine, because students aren’t actually ranked there. A spokesperson from the school told CNN’s Daniel Dale that medical students are graded on a pass-fail system.

Kennedy’s claim that Means quit her residency to walk away from traditional medicine is also untrue.

Dr. Paul Flint, a former chair of otolaryngology/head and neck surgery at Oregon Health and Science University, who helped oversee Means during her five-year residency program, provided a completely different explanation for why she had walked away from it after four and a half years.

“She wasn’t even sure she wanted to be in medicine. She wanted to do something different. She wanted to resign,” Flint told the Los Angeles Times.

Means was under so much anxiety that she was given three months paid time off. “She did that, came back and decided she wanted to leave the program. She did not like that level of stress,” Flint said.

Flint said there was “a lot of anxiety around” being a surgeon. “You become much more responsible the more senior you get,” he explained. Now Means may become the surgeon general, the highest-ranking doctor in the country. Or in her case, the highest ranking non-practicing “doctor.”

Kennedy argued in a post on X Thursday that Means’s lack of qualifications were exactly what made her such a great fit with his Make America Healthy Again agenda. No, seriously.

“The attacks that Casey is unqualified because she left the medical system completely miss the point of what we are trying to accomplish with MAHA. Casey is the perfect choice for Surgeon General precisely because she left the traditional medical system—not in spite of it,” he wrote.

Donald Trump has decided to appoint one of his favorite Fox News hosts, Jeanine Pirro, as interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., and she has quite a history.

Pirro has spent the last two decades with the conservative TV network as a legal analyst and host of the weekend show Justice With Judge Jeanine, and later co-host of The Five. During that time, she has shared some outrageous statements and views, including election denialism.

During Trump’s first term, Pirro said that the FBI and Justice Department were full “of individuals who should not just be fired but who need to be taken out in handcuffs.” She has not held back in sycophantic praise of the president, calling Trump “a nonstop, never-give-up, no-holds-barred human version of the speed of light.” Pirro also spoke onstage at a campaign rally for Trump, seemingly violating network policy (without getting punished).

On MSNBC Thursday night, Chris Hayes aired a montage of some of Pirro’s craziest takes, including how she’d make a deal with the devil to get opposition research on an opponent.

Pirro is only getting the job because Trump’s previous pick, Ed Martin, faced too much Republican opposition in the Senate over his connections to the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot, as well as his own election denialism. Martin also used his brief time as acting U.S. attorney to make legal threats against everyone from Georgetown University to Democratic members of Congress.

What will Pirro do as the top federal prosecutor in the nation’s Capitol? Her rhetoric as a TV host rivals Martin’s insane background, and it remains to be seen how she’ll handle the position—or even if the Senate decides to confirm her at all.

Trump is lowering his tariffs on China before he even sits down at the negotiating table.

“CHINA SHOULD OPEN UP ITS MARKET TO USA — WOULD BE SO GOOD FOR THEM!!!” he posted on Truth Social Friday morning. “CLOSED MARKETS DON’T WORK ANYMORE!!!”

“80% Tariff on China seems right! Up to Scott B.,” he posted just minutes later, referring to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Eighty percent tariffs is still a humongous number for taxes on imports, but it is a significant decrease from Trump’s current 145 percent tariffs on the country.

The unprompted concession suggests that Trump does not have as much leverage with China—which accounts for $143.5 billion in U.S. exports and $438.9 billion in U.S. imports—as he thinks he does. Or at least he doesn’t have as much leverage as he wants us to think he does.

Bessent and U.S. trade representative Jameson Greer are set to meet with Chinese officials in Switzerland this weekend to discuss a potential trade deal.