Trump’s Tariffs Are Good for One Thing: Saving Us From Podcast Bros

Donald Trump’s appearances on several podcasts last summer helped him cinch important voting blocs, such as young male voters—but now the president’s economic plan could damage the audio industry.

All items on the consumer price index rose by at least 0.2 percent in April, according to data released Tuesday by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But some industries were hit even harder. Prices for audio equipment, for instance, rose by 8.8 percent, according to market columnist Sam Ro, who has a Substack called TKer.

“Podcasters are getting crushed,” Ro posted on X.

The president’s tariff rollout has been remarkably bad for business, sending investors on a roller-coaster ride since he first announced the plan in early April. As a result, working- and middle-class Americans have lost thousands of dollars in retirement savings, businesses have stalled on critical long-term decisions, and America has lost some of its most important international allies.

It was only the reversal of Trump’s corrosive tariffs on China—which on Monday dropped to 30 percent from 145 percent for the next 90 days—that rallied the markets.

The news also made the dollar flourish, surging 1.1 percent against several other currencies in the wake of the tariff pause to hit a one-month high. The dollar was still down 2.3 percent, however, since Trump first announced his sweeping plan.

“Now the conditions are falling into place for a deeper adjustment and a bigger recovery of the dollar to catch up with U.S. equities and bond yields,” Kenneth Broux, senior strategist at Societe Generale in London, told Reuters.

Still, market columnists have been quick to note that the 90-day truce between the two countries is “not a deal.” The Trump administration has promised sector-specific tariffs—something that could fundamentally undermine the fragile $600 billion trade agreement set in place over the weekend.

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.”

Donald Trump announced a weapons deal with Saudi Arabia worth $142 billion Tuesday, bragging that it is the “largest” arms deal in history.

According to a fact sheet released by the White House, the deal, which was signed on the first day of Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia, will provide “state-of-the-art warfighting equipment and services from over a dozen U.S. defense firms.” The U.S. will also help train the Saudi armed forces, including Saudi service academies and military medical services. The White House says the arms deal is part of a “historic $600 billion investment commitment” from the country.

The announcement comes after Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman pledged a $600 billion investment in the U.S. in January during Trump’s first phone call to a foreign leader as president. The White House is floating the idea of renaming the body of water to the “Arabian Gulf,” a move that will please Saudi and the U.S.’s other Arab allies.

Trump has extensive business ties with Saudi Arabia, with his company announcing the multimillion dollar Trump Tower Jeddah in December. Trump has also hosted Saudi-backed LIV Golf tournaments and events at his clubs, and an investment fund belonging to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has taken $2 billion from Saudi’s sovereign wealth fund.

Kushner has been advising White House officials about negotiations with Arab leaders in advance of Trump’s trip to the Middle East, specifically about normalizing ties with Israel. He reportedly speaks with bin Salman every week, and is trying to convince Gulf states, and particularly Saudi Arabia, to normalize ties with Israel.

The weapons deal could be part of a larger deal in which Saudi Arabia announces normalization with Israel, which has long been sought by the U.S. Right now, though, Trump and his associates are more concerned with deals that make money, regardless of whatever human rights concerns come from the Saudi regime.

This story has been updated.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is placing a hold on all political appointments at the Department of Justice until Attorney General Pam Bondi provides answers over Qatar’s $400 million luxury plane gift to Donald Trump.

Schumer plans to announce the move on Tuesday morning on the Senate floor, and it will be the first time that he will be placing a blanket hold on presidential nominees. The New York senator will also ask the DOJ’s Foreign Agents Registration Act unit to come clean on any Qatari foreign agents inside the United States who could benefit Trump or his businesses, which seems like an allusion to Bondi’s past job as a lobbyist for Qatar.

Punchbowl News reports that Schumer wants to know the specifics of the deal, including how it affects an existing contract with Boeing to provide the planes for Air Force One.

“Until the American people learn the truth about this deal, I will do my part to block the galling and truly breathtaking politicization at the Department of Justice,” Schumer will say, according to Punchbowl.

Trump has tried to explain away the jet gift as something other presidents, such as Ronald Reagan, have also done, even though that isn’t true. In addition to Democrats, some of Trump’s biggest fans on the right have come out against the deal. Even though Trump claims the gift is “free,” it will likely cost taxpayers millions of dollars in modifications to meet Air Force One standards.

In effect, this plane isn’t really a gift, but a bribe, especially considering that earlier this month, Trump’s businesses cut a deal to build a luxury golf resort in Qatar. It’s good that Schumer is taking action, but it’s coming after many other ethical issues in the Trump administration that apparently didn’t warrant a hold on nominees.

Joe Biden’s decline was obvious in the final months of his presidential campaign, but new and intimate accounts by his staffers reveal that the president’s inner circle conducted a cover-up of his faltering mental acuity as early as 2023.

Axios’s national political correspondent Alex Thompson and CNN host Jake Tapper’s book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, doesn’t hit shelves until May 20. But some early glimpses at the book, published Tuesday by The Guardian, provide a more detailed picture of the chaos endemic to the end of Biden’s tenure.

“We attempted to shield him from his own staff so many people didn’t realize the extent of the decline beginning in 2023,” one unidentified senior aide, who quit the White House in protest of Biden’s campaign, told Thompson and Tapper.

“I love Joe Biden. When it comes to decency, there are few in politics like him,” the aide continued. “Still, it was a disservice to the country and to the party for his family and advisers to allow him to run again.”

A Democratic strategist who spoke to the reporting duo was more blunt.

“It was an abomination,” the strategist said. “He stole an election from the Democratic Party; he stole it from the American people.”

“Since at least 2022,” Biden struggled to maintain his trains of thought. He wavered on his top aides’ names. His speeches dragged.

“When he proved incapable of delivering a two-minute video address without stumbling, aides filmed him with two cameras so the edit would be less obvious,” The Guardian reported.

His regression summoned prominent Democrats to issue stern warnings. In a 2023 visit to the White House, former President Barack Obama reportedly cautioned Biden: “Just make sure you can win the race.” Days before Biden dropped out, then–Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told him that, should he usher in another Trump era due to his own hubris, he would “go down in American history as one of the darkest figures.”

“You have bigger balls than anyone I’ve ever met,” Biden reportedly told Schumer as the senator left.

Power players on Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign team had searing reviews of the president’s performance.

“He totally fucked us,” David Plouffe told Thompson and Tapper. Plouffe was Obama’s 2008 campaign manager and had been tapped to help Harris’s 107-day-sprint to the White House, which he described as a “fucking nightmare.”

“It’s all Biden,” Plouffe said, remarking that Harris’s campaign had begun in a “deep hole,” thanks to Biden’s insistence on staying in the race.

Tapper and Thompson interviewed some 200 individuals for the book, but none of their perspectives swayed Biden—then or now. Last week, while speaking with The View, the 82-year-old continued to deny allegations that he had and was experiencing symptoms of mental decline.

“They are wrong,” Biden said. “There is nothing to sustain that.”

There’s no such thing as a free plane.

Donald Trump has claimed that he is receiving a “free, very expensive plane” from the Qatari royal family—but while it may be free to him, it will be very expensive to the American taxpayer, according to Politico.

The Qatari Defense Ministry is currently considering transferring a luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet to replace Air Force One, which would be one of the largest gifts from a foreign government to a U.S. president ever. While the plane has the same base model as others used to transport the president, this plane wouldn’t be ready to fly day one; it would require costly modifications.

“This isn’t really a gift,” Connecticut Representative Joe Courtney, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, told Politico. He warned that the jumbo jet would have to be completely rebuilt by the Department of Defense.

“You’d basically have to tear the plane down to the studs and rebuild it to meet all the survivability, security and communications requirements of Air Force One. It’s a massive undertaking—and an unfunded one at that.”

The plane would need to be outfitted with self-defense technology and electromagnetic shielding.

Former Air Force acquisitions chief Andrew Hunter told Politico that this massive, unfunded undertaking could end up costing a pretty penny. “The cost of a retrofit like this would likely be on the order of a heavy maintenance cycle for a VC-25A, which is in the tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars,” he said.

Hunter noted that there would also need to be a complete security sweep of the plane’s software that could end up costing tens of millions. “That’s not a trivial thing to do,” he said.

Maintaining the plane could also prove expensive. According to a 2021 estimate from the Pentagon, each VC-25B plane costs more than $2.5 billion and will cost a projected $7.7 billion for long-term operations and support costs over the next 30 years.

Trump has claimed that the plane will be “decommissioned” into his Presidential Library Foundation at the end of his term.

The gargantuan gift has summoned criticism from Democrats and Trump’s usual critics, but even his far-right allies are infuriated by the blatant show of corruption. Receiving a luxury plane from Qatar looks like a bribe, especially considering the Trump family business’s recent deal to build a luxury golf resort in the Gulf nation.