Trump Press Secretary Flubs Basic Trade Detail on Russia Tariffs

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was caught in a blatant lie Thursday over Donald Trump’s nonsensical threat to place 100 percent “secondary” tariffs on Russian exports, if Moscow failed to resolve its issues with Ukraine in 50 days.

During a press briefing, Leavitt stumbled when asked to account for the president’s paltry plan to impose tariffs on Russia. She’d previously claimed that U.S. sanctions “preclude any meaningful trade” between the two countries, as a means of explaining why Russia was exempt from the president’s sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs.

“Why now? And why do you think that that would make them cave, and come to some sort of peace agreement as it relates to Ukraine?” asked one reporter, pointing out that there was just $3 billion worth of trade between the U.S. and Russia in 2024.

“Three billion dollars is still a lot of money,” Leavitt replied. “And it’s not just tariffs, it’s the secondary sanctions that will be implemented in 50 days.”

But that is the complete opposite of what Leavitt had argued just three months ago. Similarly, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had told Fox News that it wasn’t necessary to place tariffs on Russia because, after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, trade between the U.S. and Russia had effectively dried up.

But that excuse was always bad. While the nearly $3 billion worth of goods from Russia was smaller than other key U.S. trading partners, it was still more than the trade with several countries Trump levied tariffs against, including several uninhabited islands that each received a 10 percent tariff rate.

In the weeks since Leavitt offered her limp excuses, Trump’s impotence in facilitating peace talks between Russia and Ukraine has become increasingly clear, and his promises to end the fighting have disappeared beyond the horizon.

The Trump administration is attempting to square up Donald Trump’s stray attacks on his Epstein-concerned supporters, arguing that the president doesn’t deserve criticism after he insulted his supporters for expecting updates on the Jeffrey Epstein case.

At a White House press briefing Thursday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted that the Epstein “hoax” that Trump keeps referring to is strictly the idea that Democrats “ever wanted transparency when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein,” deriding it as an “asinine suggestion” that Democrats sought answers about the prolific child sex trafficker.

But if Trump and his party want transparency, they have a funny way of showing it. On Tuesday, Republicans unquestioningly fell in line to support their leader’s narrative that there’s nothing to see here, blocking a Democratic-led effort to release the Epstein files. The final vote was 211 to 210—just one dissenting Republican would have tipped the scales.

“The president has been transparent, he has followed through on his promises to the American people, but he doesn’t like to see Democrats and the mainstream media covering this like it’s the biggest story that the American people care about,” Leavitt told reporters, referring to Trump’s alleged connections to a man that orchestrated an international network to abduct children to his island in the Caribbean for the sexual gratification of his upper-class clients.

Instead of focusing on the despicable alleged ties, Leavitt told the room full of reporters that she wanted them to take pity on Trump.

“The president has been working so hard this week,” she said.

The botched rollout of the Epstein files has continued to plague the Trump administration. A Morning Consult poll conducted earlier this month found that Trump’s popularity had tanked by six points since the Justice Department contradicted Attorney General Pam Bondi on the existence of Epstein’s so-called “client list.” A YouGov/Economist poll conducted earlier this week found that the majority of Americans—67 percent, including 59 percent of self-identified Trump voters—believed that the Trump administration is “covering up evidence relating to the Epstein case.”

In the wake of the scandal, Trump has repeatedly offended key portions of his base who believed his repeat campaign promises to make the details of Epstein’s case public, referring to them as “stupid” and accusing “naive Republicans” of being “duped” by the Democrats.

High-profile conservatives, including Elon Musk, have speculated that the administration’s continued delay in releasing the Epstein case files is due to the fact that Trump himself might be implicated in the documents, a suggestion that was buttressed Wednesday by one of Trump’s former employees, who claimed to have witnessed the socialite duo partying with young women in the late 1980s and referred to Epstein and Trump as “pretty good buddies.”

Remember that up until Trump assumed his grip on the Republican Party, it wasn’t uncommon for politicians and their dynasties to be unrooted by the mere suggestion of impropriety.

A hacker has revealed that the Trump administration illegally deported dozens more people to El Salvador than they reported, and those additional people have not been seen or heard from since, according to 404 Media.

President Trump’s decision to deport more than 200 men on three planes to El Salvador’s CECOT megaprison in March was met with public uproar and a block from a federal judge, but to no avail. Many of those men had no criminal record whatsoever, and none of them received due process. Now, thanks to a hacker who infiltrated the flight manifests of GlobalX, the airline carrying out the deportation flights, we know that the Trump administration lied about the number of people on those planes, and we have no idea where they are. 404 Media has begun to publish the names.  

“We have this list of people that the U.S. government has not formally acknowledged in any real way and we pretty much have no idea if they are in CECOT or someplace else, or whether they received due process,” said Together and Free executive director Michelle Brané, whose organization works with families of people detained by ICE and the Department of Homeland Security. “I think this further demonstrates the callousness and lack of due process involved and is further evidence that the U.S. government is disappearing people. These people were detained and no one knows where they are, and we don’t know the circumstances [… ] For almost all of these people, there’s no records whatsoever. No court records, nothing.” 

She also added that the government’s secrecy has made it difficult to confirm if the hidden names on the flight registry actually made it on to the flight, and if they did, where they were taken after they landed.  

“[The government is] not disclosing it and they’ve presumably been sent to a prison or sent somewhere by the U.S. government on a plane and have never been heard from since,” she said. “We have not heard from these people’s families, so I think perhaps even they don’t know.”

This revelation only underscores the disappearings and the lies that have come to define the Trump administration’s extrajudicial immigration crackdown. We went from looking for “the worst of the worst” to openly admitting to indiscriminate detainments and deportations based on racial profiling. 

The Trump administration has yet to comment.

“It is critical that we know who was on these March 15 flights,” ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt told 404 Media. “These individuals were sent to a gulag-type prison without any due process, possibly for the remainder of their lives, yet the government has provided no meaningful information about them, much less the evidence against them. Transparency at a time like this is essential.”

Here are the names 404 Media uncovered of people who were on those deportation fights, who were not on the government’s own list of deportees, and who have been unheard from since: 

Manuel Quijada-Leon

Irvin Quintanilla-Garcia

Jose Ramirez-Iraheta

Josue Rivera-Portillo

Jorge Rodriguez Gomez

Mario Jeavanni Rojas

Edgar Leonel Sanchez Rosales

Brandon Sigaran-Cruz

Miguel Enriquez Saravia

Abraham Hernandez-Mania

Jean Morales-Loaiza

Nelson Alfaro-Orellana

Jhonnarty Pachecho-Chirinos

Cristian Alpe-Tepas

Jordyn Alexander Alvarez

Jose Alvarez Gonzalez

Wilfredo Avendano Carrizalez

Jose Gregorio Buenano Cantillo

Istmar Campos Mejia

Jose Chanta-Ochoa

Keider Alexander Flores Navas

Noe Florez-Valladares

Miguel Fuentes-Lopez

Roberto Interiano Uceda

Jose Lopez Cruz

Diego Maldonado-Fuentes

William Martinez-Ruano

Osmer Mejias-Ruiz

Iran Ochoa Suescun

David Orantez Gonzalez

Ariadny Araque-Cerrada

Elena Cuenca Palma

Maria Franco Pina

Mayerkis Guariman Gonzalez

Wilmary Linares-Marcano

Scarlet Mendoza Perez

Ofreilimar Peña Boraure

Edilianny Stephany Rivero Sierralta

Dioneli Sanz Aljorna

Anyeli Sequera Ramirez

Yanny Suarez Rodriguez

Karla Villasmil-Castellano

While Donald Trump tries to completely dismiss Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex ring scandal as a Democratic “scam,” his administration has quietly axed a key office related to investigating human trafficking.

The White House hacked 1,353 positions from the State Department on Friday, gutting parts of the agency that don’t align with MAGA values, reported Mother Jones. Those include offices focused on promoting democracy, ending genocide, quelling political extremism, and combating human trafficking.

Employees at the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, known as the TIP Office, believed that they would be spared from State Secretary Marco Rubio’s cuts, which were permitted by the Supreme Court last week after months-long delays. They were under the impression that their office would be folded into the Office for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. They were wrong: half of the office’s full-time civil and foreign service employees were effectively terminated by reduction-in-force notices Friday.

The cuts reduced the office to about 35 people—a third of its staffing levels from seven months ago, thanks to Rubio’s plan and Elon Musk’s deferred resignation program. Those who were not laid off were informed that they would be reassigned and given a pay cut, according to Mother Jones.

“Everyone was caught off guard,” one source familiar with the cuts told the magazine.

“The sheer number of cuts has really decimated the office,” they continued, underscoring the enormous brain drain and loss of expertise and international connections that the cuts will induce. “That takes years to build up. It’s not like you can just reassign a few people in the office and somehow it’s going to work.”

But the Trump administration has defended the cuts. A State Department representative justified dismissing federal employees en masse on the basis that “the world has changed.”

“As we looked comprehensively across the Department, we saw that many of these offices had served an outdated purpose, had strayed from their original purpose, or were simply duplicative,” the spokesperson told Mother Jones.

Trump and his associates have ideated paring down the federal workforce since he was on the campaign trail, with details of diminishing the executive branch explicitly laid out in Project 2025. Trump appealed to fiscal conservatives to advance the cuts, claiming that his administration was focused on driving down the federal budget in order to reduce the deficit.

But that has not been the case. Instead, Trump pushed several exorbitantly expensive policies in his “big, beautiful bill,” including a whopping tax cut for the wealthiest individuals in America at cost to the middle and lower classes that is estimated to add trillions to the budget.

By and large, Americans are dumping Donald Trump’s policies.

Within the first seven months of his second term, Trump has managed to add trillions to the deficit, eviscerate agencies like the Education Department, rattle the economy, shake America’s strongest alliances, develop concentration camps for his sweeping deportation program, and strip popular social programs such as Medicaid from millions of Americans.

But despite following through on his campaign promises, Trump has failed to earn majority support for any major issue, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research published Thursday.

Approximately half of U.S. adults—49 percent—believe that Trump’s policies have “done more to hurt” them than help them since he returned to the White House, according to the survey. Twenty-two percent of that group reported that Trump’s policies have not made much of a difference in their lives, while just 27 percent—little more than a quarter—of the polled population responded that Trump had actually helped them.

“As it sits today, I don’t know his policies have made much of a difference in my day-to-day life,” Landon Lindemer, a 29-year-old logistics manager from suburban Atlanta who voted for Trump three times, told The Associated Press.

Public polling on Trump’s handling of several key issues produced similar results to his overall job performance rating, which sits at around 40 percent. Trump failed to accrue more than 50 percent support on any topic, including immigration, which has historically been one of his strongest polling issues. Just 43 percent of Americans said they approved of Trump’s immigration policies, compared to 49 percent who said as much in March.

Support also waned for the president’s federal spending habits: weeks after Trump forced through his “big, beautiful bill,” just 40 percent of Americans said they approved of Trump’s government spending, a six percent drop compared to those who felt that way four months ago.

Trump’s approval ratings on the economy, however, have remained relatively stagnant, with four in 10 Americans approving of Trump’s performance on the key factor.

Timothy Dwyer, a 26-year-old self-described independent with conservative leanings based in Dyersburg, Tennessee, told the AP that Trump’s plan tariffs have “really sucked.”

“He’s turned us into a toilet and has absolutely made us the laughing stock of the world,” Dwyer told the newswire.