GOP Senator Slams Howard Lutnick’s Bonkers Tariff Logic

Senator John Kennedy tore into Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick Thursday over his nonsensical answer on the logic of Donald Trump’s sweeping reciprocal tariff policy.

During an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, the Louisiana Republican described his experience questioning Lutnick during a hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee the day before.

“Well, it’s clear that President Trump listens to Secretary Lutnick, so I spent the time I had trying to figure out where he’s coming from. And I don’t understand,” Kennedy said.

“I mean my vision of reciprocity, which I think is a good thing, is to lower tariffs if you can to zero on both sides. And let there be a free exchange of services on both sides, and let there be a free exchange of goods and services, and let the best product and the best service win. And I thought that’s where Secretary Lutnick was going,” Kennedy explained.

But that was in fact not what Lutnick had in mind at all. When asked if he would take a hypothetical deal with Vietnam where the tariffs on both sides went down to zero, Lutnick replied that accepting such a deal would be “the silliest thing we could do.” Lutnick’s baffling answer exposed that the goal of the ongoing tariff talks was not to ensure reciprocity, or even to reduce foreign tariffs on U.S. goods.

“So the obvious question is who’s on first, what’s on second, why are we having these trade talks? And I don’t understand based on his answers,” Kennedy explained.

Lutnick’s poor response Wednesday undermined the ultimate purpose of the tariff-induced trade talks, and the tariffs themselves.

“Can you get a sense, what is the point of these tariffs?” MSNBC co-host Jonathan Lemire asked.

“Well, I know what the point is for me. It’s reciprocity. But clearly the markets haven’t figured that out yet,” Kennedy replied.

“What I was trying to do with Mr. Lutnick was sort of flesh out, where are we going here? Where are we going here? And I don’t know whether he doesn’t know, I’m going to assume he was being purposefully evasive, but the uncertainty is hurting us,” he added.

The Trump administration has come a long way from its pledge to complete 90 deals during the 90-day pause on Trump’s sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs. So far, Trump has only announced one deal with the U.K.—and that deal wasn’t even finished. Earlier this week, the U.S. sent out a friendly reminder to other countries urging them to formulate their best offers by Wednesday, but with Trump’s ever-vacillating tariff policies, it’s unclear why any country would take that request seriously.

Trump finally got his call with China.

After Trump repeatedly told Americans that it was China that was so desperate to get him on the phone to discuss a trade deal, a recent post from the Chinese Embassy all but confirms the opposite. It is Trump, not President Xi Jinping, who was sitting by the phone waiting day and night for a call that didn’t come for months.

“Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday held phone talks with U.S. President Donald Trump at the latter’s request,” China’s U.S. Embassy posted from its X account on Thursday.

The “at the latter’s request” is certainly intentional. Since “Liberation Day,” Trump has insisted that he has the leverage, that countries far and wide will be lining up, eager to kiss the ring and make a deal with us. But still, China, the Asian powerhouse that faced the most aggressive tariffs from Trump, has shirked a potential deal-making phone call with the president, halting his visions of a sweeping agreement on trade, TikTok, and fentanyl export. The administration has nudged China to initiate the call since April, but to no avail until today. If you have to call someone just to tell them to call you, who really has the leverage?

“I just concluded a very good phone call with President Xi, of China, discussing some of the intricacies of our recently made, and agreed to, Trade Deal. The call lasted approximately one and a half hours, and resulted in a very positive conclusion for both Countries.... Our respective teams will be meeting shortly at a location to be determined,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Thursday. “During the conversation, President Xi graciously invited the First Lady and me to visit China, and I reciprocated. As Presidents of two Great Nations, this is something that we both look forward to doing. The conversation was focused almost entirely on TRADE. Nothing was discussed concerning Russia/Ukraine, or Iran. We will inform the Media as to scheduling and location of the soon to be meeting. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

Trump’s own summary of the conversation made no mention of who requested it.

President Trump is spending $2.1 million on an investigation into whether diversity, equity, and inclusion policies played a role in the January plane crash at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and other recent aviation accidents, according to The Atlantic. This comes after he blamed the January plane crash—which killed 67 people—on diversity hiring.

The investigation, which began in March, is being led by Alex Spiro, a high-profile celebrity lawyer who has represented Jay-Z, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, and most notably billionaire Elon Musk. The investigation is expected to end soon and yield nothing, all while potentially costing even more than the $2.1 million Trump initially budgeted in March.

This investigation is a massive waste of taxpayer funds, especially while federal aviation is in the midst of an employment crisis. Millions will go down the drain based on Trump’s “very strong opinions and ideas,” according to the investigation’s scope of work document.

“The [Federal Aviation Administration] is actively recruiting workers who suffer severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems, and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency’s website. Can you imagine?” Trump said back in January. “Hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism, all qualify for the position of a controller of airplanes pouring into our country.”

When Trump was pressed about how he could blame women, disabled people, and people of color for a plane crash well before any evidence was found, he doubled down, saying he just had “common sense.” His sense just spent millions of dollars to conclude that white people can cause crash planes too.

Tensions are rising between Donald Trump and his biggest 2024 campaign financier, Elon Musk.

The dynamic duo—who were practically inseparable after November—are driving apart over their differing opinions on Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” an extension to his 2017 tax cuts for multimillionaires and corporations that is projected to add trillions to the national deficit.

The president reportedly “wasn’t happy” and was left “confused” as to why his richest MAGA ally had become more outspoken in his criticism of the bill since exiting his role as a special government employee, according to senior White House officials who spoke with The Wall Street Journal. The whole situation caught senior Trump advisers off guard, the Journal reported.

Last month, Musk confessed in an interview with CBS that he believed Trump’s spending package was actually a bad idea. But the tech billionaire has become more brazen in his read of the bill in the weeks since he’s left the White House.

“I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore,” Musk wrote Tuesday afternoon on X, the social media platform he owns. “This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.”

In a separate post, the world’s richest man—who had promised to bankroll Republican primaries mere months ago—made clear what he now planned to do with his cash.

“In November next year, we fire all politicians who betrayed the American people,” wrote Musk.

The bill passed the House by a vote of 215–214, with two Republicans joining all Democrats in voting against it.

By Wednesday, Musk’s directive for more than 200 million of his social media followers was clear: “KILL the BILL.” That same day, Trump posted an image of Musk’s exit message from the previous week without further comment.

Media commentators picked up on the signal, with CNN host Erin Burnett laughing off Trump’s response to Musk’s online tirade against his “entire domestic agenda” as “thinly veiled.”

Republicans plan to offset the expensive tax cut by slashing some $880 billion from Medicaid. But Musk’s issue with Trump’s plan has little to do with slashing programs aimed at supporting and uplifting the most vulnerable Americans—instead, he’s condemned the bill on the basis that it would effectively undo his work atop the Department of Government Efficiency, which was tasked with paring down government spending.

Musk was Trump’s top financial backer in the 2024 election, spending at least $250 million in the final months of the president’s campaign after Trump was shot in July. Musk had also promised to funnel funds toward other Republicans, declaring in the wake of the November election that his super PACs would “play a significant role in primaries.” In the following months, Musk threatened to use his money to fund primary challengers to Trump’s agenda and go after Democrats, and that he would be preparing “for the midterms and any intermediate elections, as well as looking at elections at the district attorney level.”

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul threw shade at his South Carolinian colleague Lindsey Graham while excoriating Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” on Fox Business.

In an appearance Wednesday night, Paul argued that Graham had his own reasons for rubber-stamping Republicans’ gargantuan budget bill, which will add $2.4 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years, according to an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office. The bill is expected to cut $1.3 trillion in spending but also cut $3.7 trillion in total revenue, leading to the massive deficit.

“This bill is really a vehicle for Lindsey Graham to secretly explode beyond on the military budget,” Paul said. “They want to explode the military budget beyond the caps. That’s really what the bill is about. So there is a lot of new spending in this bill. If the new spending weren’t in there, it truly would be a bill that would be saving money.”

The legislation would dramatically increase military and border spending, bringing $150 billion to the Pentagon over the next 10 years. Graham, a longtime war hawk, has urged the Trump administration to take a tougher stance on Iran.

Paul also said he didn’t think Congress was mature enough to raise the debt ceiling.

“If you have teenage children and you gave them a credit card and they maxed out $2,000 on booze and gambling, would you give them a bigger credit line or a smaller credit line?” the Kentucky Republican said. “Congress is worse than a bunch of drunken teenagers. They have a history of not being fiscally responsible. You should give them a very short debt ceiling increase and say, ‘Show me and prove to me you’ll act responsibly, and I’ll give you more money.’”

Paul told CNN Wednesday that he could understand Elon Musk’s frustration with the gargantuan spending bill. “The new spending in this bill actually exceeds all the work he did to try to find savings, so I can understand his disappointment,” he said. Earlier that day, Paul had quote-tweeted Musk, arguing that Congress knows adding another $5 trillion to the national debt would be a “huge mistake.”

Donald Trump’s new travel ban is hard to make sense of.

In a sweeping order Wednesday night, Trump fully banned travel from 12 countries: Afghanistan, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen.

The order, which is set to go into effect on June 9, targets mostly African and Muslim-majority countries, and many of the banned countries were also on Trump’s original travel ban in his first term. The new ban also partially restricts travel by nationals from an additional seven countries: Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela.

The order includes exceptions for lawful permanent residents, existing visa holders, and certain visa holders such as Special Immigrant Visas (which many Afghans received after helping U.S. forces).

Trump framed the ban as necessary to combat terrorism and strengthen national security in a video announcement posted to social media. But if that’s the case, the order is full of contradictions.

In his video, Trump specifically cited Sunday’s attack in Colorado as why the ban is needed. “The recent attack in Boulder, Colorado, has underscored the extreme dangers posed to our country by the entry of foreign nationals who are not properly vetted, as well as those who come here as temporary visitors and overstay their visas,” he said.

But the man charged in that attack was an Egyptian national who initially arrived on a tourist visa, and Egypt isn’t even on Trump’s list of banned countries.

Trump’s order also cites visa oversays as a reason why multiple countries were targeted. But as The Washington Post reported, it’s not clear why some countries were added to the list while others with higher visa overstay rates weren’t. In some cases, the visa overstay rate was high but the total number of overstays was relatively low.

The justification listed for specific countries was a mess. The order cited the establishment of “criminal networks” and “national security threats” as justification for the ban on nationals from Haiti. But there is little evidence that Haitian gangs are taking over the U.S., nor is there much evidence that Haitian gang members are among the small number of Haitians entering the country.

“Haitians as a group have not exerted any kind of violence,” Renata Segura, director of the Latin America and Caribbean program at the International Crisis Group, told the Post. “The idea that Haitian gangs could be traveling to the U.S. by legal means is completely out of the realm of the possible.”

And in the case of Venezuela, which is facing partial restrictions, Trump’s order claims the country has “historically refused to accept back its removable nationals.” But in the past few months of Trump’s second term, Venezuela has repeatedly accepted Trump’s deportation flights, even sending Venezuelan planes to pick up immigrant deportees from the U.S.

For those trying to make sense of Trump’s logic with this order, don’t even bother.

President Trump is still trying to turn President Joe Biden’s autopen use into a real scandal, announcing an investigation Wednesday into the pen and its role in an alleged coverup of Biden’s cognitive decline. The former president immediately slammed the move.

“Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations,” Biden said in a statement. “Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false.... This is nothing more than a distraction by Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans who are working to push disastrous legislation that would cut essential programs like Medicaid and raise costs on American families, all to pay for tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy and big corporations.”

Trump has been accusing Biden of using an autopen—essentially a signature machine to aid presidents in signing multiple bills in one sitting—for months now, in an attempt to create both a corruption scandal and a cognitive decline scandal around the former president. At one point, Trump even suggested that Senator Elizabeth Warren was using the autopen in place of Biden.

“With the exception of the RIGGED PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2020, THE AUTOPEN IS THE BIGGEST POLITICAL SCANDAL IN AMERICAN HISTORY!!!” Trump posted on Truth Social Wednesday.

The autopen is nowhere near as big of a deal as Trump is making it out to be, if at all. Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, John F. Kennedy, Barack Obama, and Trump himself have all used it, although Trump swears it’s “only for very important papers.”

For this to be at the top of Trump’s mind while his One Big Beautiful Bill Act is in the midst of Senate gridlock shows how much of a nothingburger this issue is—especially compared to the myriad of scandalous events surrounding Trump’s own tenure as president.

Despite kowtowing and bowing its head, Columbia University is now the victim of more attacks from the Trump administration.

The Department of Education challenged the Ivy League school’s accreditation Wednesday, writing to the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, which accredits Columbia, that the university had violated civil rights law in its handling of on-campus protests supporting Palestine.

“After Hamas’ October 7, 2023, terror attack on Israel, Columbia University’s leadership acted with deliberate indifference towards the harassment of Jewish students on its campus,” said Education Secretary Linda McMahon in a statement. “This is not only immoral, but also unlawful.”

“Just as the Department of Education has an obligation to uphold federal antidiscrimination law, university accreditors have an obligation to ensure member institutions abide by their standards,” McMahon noted.

The request itself does not revoke Columbia’s accreditation. However, the government urged the Middle States Commission to “take appropriate action” if Columbia failed to come into compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The university would be unable to operate without its accreditation.

The challenge comes as Columbia continues its fight to recoup hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding canceled by the White House in March on claims that university leadership had promulgated antisemitism.

But Columbia University has proven to be just one of many targets that the Trump administration has singled out in its quest to subdue criticism of America’s involvement in Palestinian genocide. Individually, the administration went after Mohsen Mahdawi and Mahmoud Khalil, Palestinian student leaders at Columbia University who participated in the protests.

In April, a federal judge handed Mahdawi his freedom after he was arrested at what he thought was his citizenship interview, claiming that the uncharged scholar’s two-week detention was unfounded.

Last week, a district judge denied Khalil—a Columbia graduate student and green card holder—his request for a preliminary injunction to temporarily halt his deportation proceedings.

In March, the Trump administration raided what they called a Tren de Arauga gang gathering in Texas, arresting dozens of people at five in the morning.

Two months later, The Texas Tribune reports that none of the people they arrested had any gang ties or even criminal records, and that the “Tren de Aragua gathering” they busted was in fact a birthday party. Forty-seven people were arrested in total, including nine children, although it’s unclear if every person taken in was at the birthday party.

The ICE agents and Texas police who raided the birthday party even went so far as to attack the families with flash grenades, scaring them and their children.

“We all started shouting that there were babies—‘Babies, there’s babies,’” said one of the arrested men, who said he was celebrating the fifth birthday of his son and the 28th birthday of his best friend at a house they rented for the weekend. “They were like bombs, like boom.”

ICE also profiled one of the party attendees for his tattoos, based on a thoroughly debunked theory that Tren de Aragua members have specific ink.

“They told me to my face: ‘You know what those stars mean? Those stars are styled by gangsters in your country,’” he told the Tribune. “I said, no. I got these stars when—no kidding—I was starting to leave adolescence, started working. I got them because I liked them and I wanted to get them.”

While ICE has refused to name the detained Venezuelans, the Tribune identified 35 of them. Some were in ICE detention for weeks and were released with ankle monitors. One of the children was even kicked out of school due to missing too many days in detainment. Again, none were charged criminally.

“This is about something much bigger. If it happens to a person who is accused of being a (gang member) today, tomorrow it could happen to you and me,” said Migration Policy Institute director Muzaffar Chishti. “And if the alleged member of this gang does not have the right to contest [charges against them], how can you know I’ll have it? The next person will have it?”

ICE has been putting innocent people through hellish, traumatic arrest events for months now, as Trump, border czar Tom Homan, and deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller march blindly ahead with trying to deport as many people as they possibly can, truth be damned.