Old Man Trump Massively Fumbles Basic Question About His Own Tariffs

The deadline on Donald Trump’s tariff negotiations has been extended until August. Was anyone going to tell him?

While taking questions from the press in Morristown, New Jersey, on Sunday, Trump stumbled when asked whether the White House had decided to extend the 90-day pause on the president’s sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs.

“Mr. President, do the tariff rates change at all on July 9, or do they change on August 1?” asked one reporter.

“What are you talking about?” Trump replied.

“Tariff rates, do they change on July 9 or August 1?” the reporter repeated.

“They’re gonna be tariffs. Tariffs are gonna be the tariffs. I think we’ll have most countries done by July 9. Either a letter or a deal,” Trump said.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick swooped in to actually answer the question.

“But they go into effect on August 1,” said Lutnick. “Tariffs go into effect August 1. But the president is setting the rates and the deals right now!”

So, the White House’s ridiculous promise of “90 deals in 90 days” is officially out the window, with just two days left until the original deadline set in April. Last week, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt described the hard stop as “not critical.”

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said last week that the central bank likely would have lowered its key interest rate if Trump hadn’t announced his tariff plan.

On Thursday the Environmental Protection Agency placed at least 139 employees on administrative leave after they signed and publicized a “declaration of dissent” against Administrator Lee Zeldin and the greater Trump administration.

“Since the Agency’s founding in 1970, EPA has accomplished this mission by leveraging science, funding, and expert staff in service to the American people. Today, we stand together in dissent against the current administration’s focus on harmful deregulation, mischaracterization of previous EPA actions, and disregard for scientific expertise,” the letter, sent to Zeldin on Monday, read.

“Since January 2025, federal workers across the country have been denigrated and dismissed based on false claims of waste, fraud, and abuse. Meanwhile, Americans have witnessed the unraveling of public health and environmental protections in the pursuit of political advantage. Today, we come directly to you, Administrator Zeldin and our elected officials, with the five concerns outlined below. We expect your deliberate consideration of these concerns and look forward to working with you to restore EPA’s credibility as a premier scientific institution. Communities across America are counting on you to lead EPA in carrying out its mission.”

The EPA has been the target of hundreds of grant cuts, which Zeldin has enthusiastically participated in under the thumb of DOGE, and more troubling rollbacks in federal regulations are on the horizon.

The declaration goes on to note five main concerns: undermining public trust, ignoring scientific consensus to benefit polluters, reversing the EPA’s progress in America’s most vulnerable communities, dismantling the office of research and development, and “promoting a culture of fear, forcing staff to choose between their livelihood and well-being.”

The EPA promptly placed each employee who signed the letter on administrative leave, saying that it has a “zero-tolerance policy for career bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging and undercutting the administration’s agenda as voted for by the great people of this country last November.” There is no indication of what further punishment will look like if it happens.

Donald Trump’s budget bill, which was passed by the House of Representatives Thursday and now awaits the president’s signature, will balloon immigration and border enforcement spending astonishingly—so much so that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s budget will overshadow every single federal law enforcement agency, and U.S. spending on immigration enforcement will surpass all but 15 countries’ military budgets.

The bill allocates about $150 billion to immigration enforcement through 2029. ICE will receive about $75 billion from that total sum, more funding than any other law enforcement agency in the federal government, according to the American Immigration Council, or AIC.*

According to AIC senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, each year, ICE will now be flushed with more cash than the FBI; the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the U.S. Marshals Service; and the Bureau of Prisons combined. In fact, with the bill’s passage, Reichlin-Melnick told Democracy Now!, ICE will become the largest federal law enforcement agency “in the history of the nation.”

Further, per a report from Newsweek, Trump’s immigration slush fund will be so expansive as to rival the resources of some of the world’s most well-financed militaries. If the money going to U.S. immigration enforcement each year on average for the next four years were the budget of a country’s military, the report found, that country would have the sixteenth-best-funded military on the planet—just below Canada’s, and above Italy’s and Israel’s.

The far right is already celebrating the bill’s immigration enforcement provisions, which right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk tweeted will give MAGA “a standing army.” Such gloating is, apparently, far less hyperbolic than it sounds. And with newfound billions at its disposal, this “standing army” will only wreak further havoc and trample further upon civil liberties than it already has in communities nationwide.

* This piece has been updated to clarify the amount of money ICE is expected to receive.

Wisconsin Representative Derrick “Little Bitch” Van Orden stooped to a new low Thursday after passing Donald Trump’s behemoth budget bill.

While other Republicans have tried to obfuscate the fact that Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” will serve to enrich the wealthiest and shred the social safety net, apparently Van Orden is not one of them. In fact, he’s more than happy about it.

Van Orden reshared a post on X hitting back at White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt declaring “VICTORY!”

“17 million people just lost health care. 18 million kids just lost school meals. 3 million Americans just lost food assistance. And $3.5 trillion was added to the deficit. All for a tax cut for Trump’s billionaire donors,” read the post, from an account called Logical Luminary.

“YES!” Van Orden wrote, excited about the laundry list of benefits he’d just voted to strip away from his own constituents in Wisconsin.

But within a few hours, the post was deleted. Thank God the internet has screenshots for this kind of thing.

The bill will cut nearly $1.1 trillion in health care spending over the next decade, leaving an estimated 12 million people without Medicaid by 2034, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The bill also directs nearly $300 billion to be cut from SNAP through 2034, putting a greater burden on the states to fund the essential nutrition program—or not. And the CBO projects that the bill will add nearly $4 trillion to the national deficit over the next 10 years.

GOP Representative Robert Bresnahan voted for Trump’s budget on Thursday, conveniently after he dumped his shares of stock in a Medicaid provider.

The Pennsylvania representative sold his Centene stock in May, just one week before he voted “yes” on an early House version of the budget bill that crippled the health care system. By Thursday, when he voted for the final version of the bill, Centene stock had plummeted by 43 percent.

The Pennsylvania representative had a vested interest in seeing health care get slashed. He knew that ripping Medicaid and hospital funding from millions of Americans would help him make a quick buck before his stocks tanked in value. This is yet another classic example of congressional insider trading, a rampant issue on Capitol Hill. Representatives and senators on both sides of the aisle use the specific knowledge they have, due to their positions as legislators, to impact stock prices and make off with as much cash as possible in the process.

“Protecting his stock portfolio while ripping away health care from 17 million Americans. This is Washington at its worst,” Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote on X. “We need to ban Congressional stock trading.”

“Wow. So he votes to gut Medicaid and throw 17 million people off of their healthcare and then dumps his Medicaid related stock to cover his own ass?” Representative Maxwell Frost echoed. “That’s just evil and cruel.”