Trump Will Lift Sanctions on Syria After Massive Business Deal Offer

Donald Trump announced Tuesday he will lift all U.S. sanctions on Syria, but the timing of the lifted international penalties was remarkably suspicious.

“I will be ordering the cessation of sanctions against Syria in order to give them a chance at greatness,” Trump told an auditorium in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, describing the apparently unnecessary sanctions as “brutal and crippling.”

“In Syria, which has seen so much misery and death, there is a new government that will hopefully succeed in stabilizing the country and keeping peace. That’s what we want to see,” he continued. “In Syria, they’ve had their share of travesty, war, killing many years. That’s why my administration has already taken the first steps toward restoring normal relations between the United States and Syria for the first time in more than a decade.”

American caution toward Syria has spanned half a dozen administrations. Syria has been designated as a state sponsor of terrorism by the U.S. since 1979, when Syrian forces occupied Lebanon. The Bush administration slammed Syria with more sanctions in 2004, condemning Syria’s “pursuit of weapons of mass destruction” and its support for Hezbollah and Hamas, U.S.-designated terrorist organizations. The Obama administration imposed more sanctions on Syria in 2011, denouncing the country’s dictator, former President Bashar Al Assad, for human rights abuses against its protesting citizens.

“We’re taking them all off,” Trump said Tuesday.

But the decision to strip what had effectively become an embargo of Syrian goods followed another important development for the Trump family: the possibility of building a Trump Tower in Syria’s capital, Damascus.

“[Syrian leader Ahmed Al Sharaa] wants a business deal for the future of his country,” pro-Trump activist Jonathan Bass—who met with Sharaa for hours in late April—told Reuters Monday.

Sharaa is working to meet face-to-face with Trump, but his priorities include economic revival, regional stability, and healed relations with Israel, according to Bass.

“He told me he wants a Trump Tower in Damascus. He wants peace with his neighbors. What he told me is good for the region, good for Israel,” Bass told the newswire.

As a reminder, it’s actually unconstitutional for presidents to profit from or receive compensation from foreign governments—but that hasn’t stopped Trump one bit. The Trump family’s Middle East real estate plans include a Trump-branded golf course in Qatar (as part of a $5.5 billion development project), a $1 billion Trump hotel and residence in Dubai, and a $2 billion cryptocurrency investment by an Abu Dhabi firm into one of Trump’s cryptocurrency projects, the World Liberty Financial coin.

The family also revealed in December that it would be expanding its presence in Saudi Arabia, announcing Trump Tower Jeddah. The price tag for the building has not been made public, but one of the developers on the project, Dar Global, compared it to another $530 million Trump Tower in the city, reported Reuters.

Donald Trump got back into his hobby of sucking up to autocratic dictators Tuesday, when the U.S. president made several effusive comments about Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

During a rambling address at a Saudi investment forum in Riyadh, the president showered the head of the country’s royal family with praise, touting the crown prince as an “incredible man.”

“We have great partners in the world, but we have none stronger, and nobody like the gentleman that’s right before me, he’s your greatest representative, your greatest representative,” Trump said, as MBS beamed up at him from the audience.

“And if I didn’t like him, I would get out of here so fast. You know that don’t you? He knows me well,” Trump said. “I do, I like him a lot. I like him too much, that’s why we give so much, you know? Too much. I like you too much!”

But who exactly does the president like so much? The 39-year-old prince rules over a modern surveillance state, where political dissent is not tolerated, and human rights standards are abysmal. MBS also serves as the chairman of Saudi Arabia’s massive sovereign wealth fund that has both facilitated and benefited from rights violations.

But still, a drowsy-sounding Trump couldn’t help from gushing over the kingdom.

“We are rockin’, the United States is the hottest country—with the exception of your country, I have to say, right?” Trump joked, addressing MBS in the crowd.

“I’m not going to take that on. No, Mohammed, I’m not gonna take that on. Wouldn’t that be a terrible thing if I made that full statement. I will not do it. You’re hotter! At least as long as I’m up here, you’re hotter.”

Trump also announced that he would be lifting sanctions against Syria to “give them a chase at greatness.” After the audience got through cheering, the president sighed, acknowledging that he’d just made a major U.S. policy shift at the behest of a foreign leader.

“Oh, what I do for the crown prince,” he said.

House Republicans’ draft budget bill includes a clause to give Donald Trump the ability to revoke the tax-exempt status of any group the Treasury Department says is a supporter of terrorism. 

The move appears to be a revival of the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, which the House passed in November under President Biden. The Senate had not taken up the measure, which drew criticism for granting dangerous powers to the president. Now those powers have resurfaced deep within the GOP’s “big beautiful bill”: on page 380, to be exact. 

Last year, 15 Democrats joined Republicans in the House to pass the anti–free speech bill, which was originally intended to help clamp down on pro-Palestinian protesters, particularly those on college campuses. Even though the bill has languished since then, Trump has still attempted to target nonprofit institutions that refuse to kowtow to him, including institutions such as Harvard University.

If the clause isn’t excised from the final bill and passes, Trump can target any nonprofit that he and the Republicans don’t like, whether they are focused on reproductive rights, climate change, refugee support, or anything else. The budget bill is going through the reconciliation process, meaning that it only requires a simple majority in the House and Senate to be passed. 

If party lines hold on this bill, the nonprofit clause can pass without a single Democratic vote. Will Democrats hold the line and try to mobilize to remove the anti-nonprofit clause? Or will the caucus once again be divided, with some Democrats supporting the measure? 

Elon Musk announced Tuesday that Saudi Arabia had approved the use of Starlink, as part of his mounting efforts to use Donald Trump’s trip abroad to boost his many businesses. While speaking with Saudi Minister of Communications and Information Technology Abdullah Alswah on the White House–led trip, the billionaire bureaucrat thanked Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for approving his SpaceX–owned and operated satellite internet service for aviation and maritime use.

But Starlink wasn’t the only one of Musk’s businesses that got a plug to the president’s foreign friends. Musk said that he had shown Trump and MBS several of Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robots, which are still undergoing development. Musk warned last month that China’s suspension of rare earth metals exports, amid Trump’s slowly deescalating trade war, could potentially delay manufacturing.

Musk also discussed his ambitions to bring Tesla’s robotaxis to Saudi Arabia.

“I think it would be very exciting to have autonomous vehicles here in the kingdom, indeed, if you’re amenable,” Musk said. The U.S. National Highway Safety Administration is still probing Tesla on how well these autonomous vehicles will function in poor weather conditions, including sun glare and dust, which could potentially decrease their utility in a city like Riyadh, which experiences frequent sand storms.

But it seems Musk had a solution for this: He pitched that the Saudi government construct tunnels with the help of his Boring Company. “In order to solve traffic, you really need to go 3D with roads,” Musk said, describing tunnels as a novel kind of “wormhole” and not a classic feature of public infrastructure.

Musk began to plug his infrastructure and tunnel service after being prompted by Alswah to discuss yet another one of his companies, xAI. He described the goal of that project as to produce a “maximally truth-seeking” artificial intelligence.

“What questions do we not know to ask? Once you know the question, the answer is the easy part,” Musk said.

Alswah called Musk a “lifetime partner” to the kingdom, and said they were “joining hands” on “XAi, Starlink, robotics, and Tesla.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s first day in Saudi Arabia was off to a sleepy start. The president was filmed falling asleep during a briefing with MBS, shutting his eyes and jerking awake.

The world record holder for oldest person to be sworn in as U.S. president can’t seem to keep up with the Saudis.

Donald Trump was filmed falling asleep during a briefing with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Tuesday. Trump could be seen shutting his eyes and jerking awake.

The meeting consisted of signing more than a dozen agreements between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, focusing on the governments’ economies, militaries, and cultural institutions, according to the Associated Press.

Podcaster Brian Allen torched the caught-on-camera faux pas as “surreal and frankly humiliating.”

“This isn’t jet lag—it’s a walking security risk with a nap schedule,” Allen posted on X.

The 78-year-old’s long-awaited medical report was released in April, describing Trump as being in “excellent health,” including neurological functioning.

“President Trump exhibits excellent cognitive and physical health and is fully fit to execute the duties of the Commander-in-Chief and Head of State,” the report read. Prior to the report’s release, the president said he took a cognitive exam and “got every answer right.”

Trump has an oddball history with reportedly “acing” cognitive exams. During the 2024 presidential election, Trump took several—but his recollections of the tests called into question whether he had actually taken them at all.

While bragging about his results to the press, Trump would invariably tweak the questions he allegedly received on the test, at times boasting that he had correctly recited five words and performed basic multiplication while at other times insisting that he had passed thanks to correctly identifying a whale. That is in spite of the fact that the test’s authors reported that none of the three versions in circulation actually had a whale on them.

And Trump has struggled with staying awake in public before—even when all eyes are on him. In April 2024, Trump was caught shutting his eyes during pretrial hearings for his criminal case involving porn star Stormy Daniels.

Donald Trump is paving the way for white South African “refugees” to come to the United States, but they’re not all that interested in taking him up on his offer, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

The U.S. president falsely claimed Monday that Afrikaners, the white descendants of mainly Dutch colonizers in South Africa, are facing a “genocide” in their home country. So then why don’t they actually want to leave?

Maritz Grobler, a tenth-generation South African on his father’s side who owns a sprawling 1,000-acre farm in Settlers, wasn’t interested in the offer to relocate. “This is my country,” Grobler told the Journal.

“But it’s good to know that [Trump] will back us … if shit happens,” he added.

While white South Africans are the target of horrific crimes, they are killed in significantly lower numbers than Black South Africans, according to the Journal.

White people account for roughly 7 percent of South Africa’s population of 63 million people, and of that number, Afrikaners make up about two-thirds, so roughly three million people in total. Despite having a vastly smaller population, white commercial farmers—the majority of whom are Afrikaners—still possess about half of the country’s land and produce a whopping 90 percent of its agricultural products. In 2024, South Africa’s agricultural exports were worth a record $13.7 billion.

Afrikaners have therefore maintained a hefty chunk of the nation’s wealth. Only 1 percent of white South Africans live in poverty, compared to nearly two-thirds of Black South Africans. This accumulated land and wealth is the direct result of systemic historical racial oppression under South African apartheid.

Despite one Trump official’s claim that white South Africans have been given an exception to Trump’s refugee ban because they would be supposedly easier to assimilate into the majority-white U.S. population than refugees from other countries, Grobler said that the cultural difference was still too great.

“I don’t want to speak English for the rest of my life,” Grobler said. White South Africans typically speak Afrikaans, not English. But it seems that language barrier likely won’t incense Vice President JD Vance the way it did when the hypothetical immigrant children he was mad at were brown.

Grobler told the Journal that politicians “seek power and money and get it through playing the race card and hammering on historic events.

“South Africans on the ground will be able to move forward together if politicians get out of the way and go do their bloody jobs,” he added.

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.”