Treasury Secretary Admits He’s Never Seen Trade Deal Trump Is Hyping

The status of the U.S.-Vietnam trade deal allegedly reached four weeks ago remains uncertain, after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent admitted Tuesday that he hasn’t even seen it.

Trump announced a supposed agreement between the two countries in a July 2 post on Truth Social, claiming that Vietnam’s exports would be subject to a 20 percent tariff and its “transshipped” goods to a 40 percent tariff. In return, Trump said, the United States was getting “TOTAL ACCESS to [Vietnamese] Markets for Trade.”

The announcement, Politico would report days later, shocked Vietnamese negotiators, who thought they’d agreed to a rate of about 11 percent—which Trump reportedly scrapped and nearly doubled during a later phone call with Vietnam’s general secretary, who’d not been involved with initial negotiations.

Complicating the matter was the absence of “any paperwork indicating a final agreement that includes those tariff rates” and the fact that neither country “formally signed off on a deal.”

Accordingly, the day after the alleged agreement, CNBC asked Bessent about its status. He replied: “I haven’t spoken to [Trump trade representative] Jamieson Greer, who’s heading the team. My understanding is that it’s finalized in principle.”

To date, it remains unclear if it’s been finalized in any more meaningful way. Vietnam has yet to confirm the rates about which Trump boasted, leading CNBC to, once again, ask Bessent whether there is an agreement on paper.

Bessent’s answer on Tuesday was similar to the one he gave 26 days ago. “I didn’t work on that deal,” he said. “But I assume that we do.”

“You haven’t seen that paperwork?” CNBC’s Eamon Javers pressed.

“Ambassador Greer, who is a seasoned veteran with an encyclopedic memory and knowledge of all this, keeps all that,” Bessent replied, stumbling slightly over his words.

Bessent based his assumption that there’s a written and signed agreement on the trade deals reached with Indonesia and the Philippines. Notably, Indonesia contests some of Trump’s claims about its deal, and details about the Philippines deal remain scant beyond Trump’s Truth Social posts.

The trade-deal gray area is not just confined to Southeast Asia, as Trump’s approach to his negotiations and announcements has sown widespread confusion.

For instance, the Financial Times reported last week that officials in the U.S. and Japan have significant disagreements over the terms of their deal—which, despite being the “largest deal in history,” according to Trump, is not recorded on paper. In fact, no legally binding one is to be drawn up, the FT reports.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee was forced to clarify that it had not actually un-endorsed Florida Representative Randy Fine for his grotesque statements wishing starvation on Palestinians.

AIPAC responded Tuesday to a Times of Israel report claiming that the group appeared to have “dropped” its endorsement of Fine, after he went missing from the group’s database of pro-Israel candidates.

“This reporting is based on an unsourced speculative piece,” AIPAC wrote in a statement on X. “We will be endorsing candidates for the 2026 election throughout the cycle. Current endorsees for 2026 so far are listed on the AIPAC-PAC website.

“As Rep. Fine was elected only in April, consideration of his endorsement will take place later in the cycle, as is the case with many other freshmen members of Congress,” the statement continued.

It turns out that it was simply wishful thinking to believe that the pro-Israel action group would ever draw the line at cheerleading famine—or advocating for violence against protesters.

But AIPAC’s response doesn’t quite add up. It’s not clear why the group would choose only to list endorsees for 2026, and why Fine wouldn’t be grandfathered in after earning the group’s endorsement just four months ago. After all, the group did pour more than $126,000 into Fine’s campaign, according to FEC filings. Now they say they need more time to decide?

Fine’s absence on AIPAC’s list was first observed by Usamah Andrabi, the communications director for Justice Democrats, a political action group working to see progressive Democrats elected to office.

Donald Trump claims that his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein ended after the pedophilic sex trafficker “stole” several of the president’s underage employees.

Speaking with reporters on Air Force One Tuesday, Trump said that he had confronted Epstein about hiring away underage girls on his payroll at Mar-a-Lago.

“Epstein has a certain reputation obviously. I’m just curious, were some of the workers that were taken from you, were some of them young women?” asked one reporter.

“Well, I don’t want to say, but everyone knows the people that were taken, and the concept of taking people that work for me is bad. But that story has been pretty well out there, and the answer is yes, they were,” Trump said. “People were taken out of the spa.

“Hired, by him, in other words—gone,” Trump continued, referring to Epstein. “Other people would come and complain, ‘This guy is taking people from the spa.’ I didn’t know that. And then when I heard about it, I told him, I said, ‘Listen, we don’t want you taking our people.’ Whether it was spa or not spa, I don’t want him taking people.

“And he was fine, and then not too long after that he did it again and I said, ‘Out of here,’” he added.

“Did one of the stolen persons—did that include Virginia Giuffre?” asked another reporter, referring to one of Epstein’s earliest and most prominent accusers.

“Um, I don’t know. I think she worked at the spa,” Trump said. “I think so. I think that was one of the people. He stole her. And by the way, she had no complaints about us, as you know. None whatsoever.”

The anecdote partially corroborates Giuffre’s account of being abducted in 2000 by Ghislaine Maxwell at Mar-a-Lago, where she worked at the time as a pool attendant. But Trump continued to maintain ties to Epstein for years after the alleged confrontation.

In a 2002 New York magazine profile of Epstein, Trump said he had known Epstein for 15 years and referred to him as a “terrific guy.”

“It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” Trump said at the time.

It wasn’t until 2004 that the longtime friends would fall out over a Palm Beach real estate deal.

Giuffre committed suicide in April.

Trump has previously claimed he cut off contact with Epstein after the financier was convicted in 2009 for soliciting underage prostitutes, referring to Epstein as a “creep.” But the pair of Manhattan socialites shared a long and apparently cozy history together.

Prior to his death, Epstein described himself as one of Trump’s “closest friends.” The duo were named and photographed together on several occassions—including at Trump’s second wedding. Trump reportedly flew on Epstein’s jets between Palm Beach and New York at least seven times, and the first time that Trump slept with his now-wife Melania was reportedly aboard Epstein’s plane, nicknamed the “Lolita Express.”

Earlier this month, the former president and chief operating officer of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, Jack O’Donnell, revealed that he had caught Trump and Epstein in the late 1980s shepherding underage girls into the establishment.

“They were pretty good buddies,” O’Donnell told CNN, recalling that he warned Trump against spending more time with Epstein.

This story has been updated.

Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted co-conspirator of notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, explicitly appealed to President Donald Trump for clemency on Tuesday.

In a response to the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena to force Maxwell to testify on August 11, her attorney David Oscar Markus enumerated certain conditions for her deposition. Or, he wrote, Maxwell could be given clemency.

Markus’s letter, posted to X, says, “if Ms. Maxwell were to receive clemency, she would be willing—and eager—to testify openly and honestly, in public, before Congress in Washington, D.C.” Markus said Maxwell would welcome the opportunity to “share the truth” and address purported “misconceptions and misstatements that have plagued this case from the beginning.”

In other words, Maxwell has offered to give our TV president the televised spectacle of his dreams, testifying in public if he simply waves away at least part of her sentence.

The suggestion comes as Trump’s allies increasingly regard Maxwell, currently serving a 20-year sentence for helping Epstein sexually abuse underage girls, as a potential means for the administration to escape the persistent scandal surrounding his past ties to, and lack of transparency about, Epstein’s case.

Trump, for his part, has conspicuously avoided answering whether he’s considered granting Maxwell a pardon or clemency, while asserting that he’s “allowed” to do so.

Meanwhile, Trump’s deputy attorney general last week met behind closed doors with Maxwell twice, leading many critics and Democratic lawmakers to observe the plain potential for corruption in such sit-downs.

Markus’s letter mentioned clemency as an alternative to a set of three conditions he asked the Oversight Committee to grant, lest Maxwell invoke the Fifth Amendment and decline to testify: first, granting her immunity; second, sharing its questions in advance; and third, having her appear only after the resolution of two pending attempts at post-conviction relief (these being a Supreme Court petition and a forthcoming writ of habeas corpus).

Hovering over all of this are obvious concerns about Maxwell’s credibility. While House Speaker Mike Johnson said he supported the committee’s decision to subpoena, he also, of all people, sensibly observed: “Could she be counted on to tell the truth? Is she a credible witness? I mean, this is a person who’s been sentenced to many, many years in prison for terrible, unspeakable, conspiratorial acts, and acts against innocent young people. I mean, can we trust what she’s going to say?”

America’s business class is openly admitting to using the president’s tariffs as “great cover” for its rising prices.

A report published Tuesday by the Groundwork Collaborative found that executives were, in their own words, taking advantage of Donald Trump’s unstable tariff policies to jack up the price tags on consumer goods. Analyzing earnings calls from major corporations in the first half of 2025, Groundwork found executives admitted that they intended to raise costs even if they were not affected by the administration’s economic agenda.

The CEO of auto parts manufacturer Holley, Matthew Stevenson, reportedly said that the marketplace had showcased “price increases well in excess of what we put out into the market.” He noted that “we’ve seen increases as high as 30 percent or more on some categories from some competitors.”

Aaron Jagdfeld, the CEO of generator manufacturer Generac Power Systems, claimed on an earnings call that “even if we have metals that weren’t impacted directly by tariffs, the indirect effect of tariffs is that it gives steel producers and the mills and other fabricators ... great cover for increased pricing in some cases.”

In their first quarter, the world’s largest wholesale distributor of pool supplies, POOLCORP, reported to their shareholders that they “expect that currently announced tariffs will positively impact net sales by approximately 1 [percent] based on vendor price increases to-date.”

Thomas Robertson, the CFO of footwear company Rocky Brands, said that “regardless” of whether Trump relaxed his tariffs on China, his company intended to keep its high prices.

“We certainly welcome a reduction in the Chinese tariffs, but we’ll be announcing a price increase here regardless of any changes of the Chinese tariffs over the next week or two to go into effect in June,” Robertson said, according to the Groundwork Collaborative.

In the end, it will be America that pays the price for Trump’s chaotic trade blitz. Earlier this month, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said that the central bank likely would have lowered its key interest rate if Trump hadn’t announced his tariff plan. Trump’s tariffs are slated to go into effect for more than 80 countries on August 1.

But at least 71 percent of consumer goods in the U.S. are already grappling with the new trade policy, according to a report published Monday by the Tax Foundation that suggested that everything from manufacturing to food imports could be squeezed by Trump’s agenda.

Public perception of Israel has plummeted to a new low in the United States, particularly among Democrats. And yet the party continues to cut the country a blank check to carry out its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, lagging sorely behind its voter base on the issue.

A new poll from Gallup, conducted in July, shows that only 32 percent of Americans approve of Israel’s “military action taken in Gaza,” down 10 percentage points since last September. Among Democrats, only 8 percent support Israel’s actions, the lowest approval rating to date. Compare that to 25 percent of independents and a robust 71 percent of Republicans.

The poll also saw Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu receive a negative rating from the majority of Americans for the first time since 1997, with only 29 percent of the country viewing him positively.

These numbers reflect a new reality in U.S.-Israel relations, and the Democratic Party must act accordingly if it wants to be successful. As New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani showed, mindless capitulation to Israel is no longer a prerequisite for Democratic voters. If party leadership was actually in touch with its base, it’d be baking aid to Gaza and funding cuts to the Israeli military into the foundation of its campaigns. Only time will tell if they’ll wake up and capitalize.

Republicans across the country are working hard to pass bills banning something that the fringe corners of the internet told them to be afraid of: weather modification.

Weather modification refers to geoengineering processes such as solar radiation modification and cloud-seeding that are used to counter the effects of global warming and drought, respectively. These processes have been woven into right-wing conspiracy theories that the government is able to control the weather, and MAGA lawmakers—fearful that the Democrats could rule the heavens and summon a deluge to wipe them out—have started to take action.

Republican lawmakers in nearly 20 states have introduced legislation to prevent weather modification. Some of the laws allude to “chemtrails,” a conspiracy theory that planes aren’t leaving “contrails” of condensation in the atmosphere but are spreading chemicals on an unsuspecting public. In two states, Florida and Tennessee, those bills have passed and been signed into law.

In July, right-wing concerns about weather modification reached a new fever pitch.

Earlier this month, Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin announced an effort to “compile everything we know about contrails and geoengineering” and release it to the public.

Days later, Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tim Burchett introduced the Clear Skies Act, a bill that would levy steep penalties for anyone who “knowingly conducts weather modification,” including geoengineering, cloud seeding, solar radiation modification, and the release of aerosol to “influence temperature, precipitation, or the intensity of sunlight.”

After Hurricane Helene struck the southeast United States in October, Greene boosted the right-wing conspiracy theory that the Biden administration had used weather manipulation to target Republican areas ahead of the U.S. general election. “Yes they can control the weather,” Greene wrote in a post on X at the time. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”

The theory of weather control is not only outrageously anti-science but based on an explicitly antisemitic conspiracy theory—though that’s something Greene has never shied away from in the past. In fact, she added to the conspiracy theory with her now-infamous “Jewish space lasers” comment.

Greene isn’t actually worried about manmade impact on the environment; after all, she’s got no problems with fossil fuels. Rather, she’s latched onto conspiracy theories about how weather can be controlled by those in power. Meanwhile, Greene said she saw a kind of “funny hypocrisy” from the environmentalists who oppose pollution but not weather manipulation.

In interviews, Greene and Burchett said that the impetus for their legislation was concerns of constituents. Burchett admitted that the issue “was in the realm of the conspiracy theorists” but had “taken on a little bit more mainstream.”

“You have one group that says it’s real, and the other group says, ‘You’re a lunatic,’ that it doesn’t exist,” he said.

“If it doesn’t exist,” Burchett added, “then you don’t have anything to worry about.”

While weather modification does exist, it can’t be weaponized as Greene has implied. Several states have programs for cloud seeding—a decades-old technology that helps to induce rain—including California, Nevada, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, and North Dakota.

As the horrors induced by Israel in Gaza elicit increasing international outcry, French President Emmanual Macron announced last week that France will recognize the state of Palestine. The U.K. on Tuesday decided it will also recognize Palestinian statehood, unless Israel takes certain steps to improve conditions in Gaza.

France’s decision has been criticized by U.S. officials. But it’s what international law demands, said United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Monday: “Statehood for the Palestinians is a right, not a reward.”

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has a more hysterical take.

Huckabee told Fox News Tuesday that the “very foolish” move would embolden Hamas (an extremely arguable assumption) and therefore “be like letting the Nazis have a victory after World War II.”

The former Arkansas governor and Fox News host is a frequent purveyor of outrageous Nazi analogies.

Recently, he’s trotted out such comparisons most often in relation to Hamas. In May, he made the mind-boggling suggestion that Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack was in ways worse than the Holocaust, telling NPR that “Israel had people murdered in the most vicious, horrible way that we’ve seen, and—I wanted to say, since the Holocaust, but, in all candor, as awful as the crimes were in the Holocaust, they weren’t worse, and, in some cases, they weren’t as malicious.”

Huckabee’s penchant for frivolous Nazi comparisons goes back years. In 2015, he likened Obama’s Iran nuclear deal to “marching the Israelis to the door of the oven.” Search earlier still, and you’ll find out that plenty more has brought Nazism to Huckabee’s mind—be it abortions, gay marriage, or gun control.

The current leaders of the FBI have “no idea what they’re doing,” according to outgoing employees.

The federal investigative agency is undergoing a “radical deprofessionalization,” with a growing emphasis on ideological loyalty to the Trump administration over a responsibility to serve the public, reported The Atlantic Tuesday. No longer is competence a key priority for new recruits.

Michael Feinberg, who left the bureau in June after 15 years, claimed he was denied a promotion after he decided to maintain ties with his former colleague Peter Strzok. Strzok was fired from the FBI during Donald Trump’s first term for sending text messages that allegedly disparaged the MAGA leader, landing him on FBI Director Kash Patel’s notorious enemies list.

Moving up in the agency, according to Feinberg, was practically a done deal. Feinberg, who had been serving as the acting assistant special agent in charge at the FBI’s Norfolk field office, was already preparing to move to the FBI’s headquarters in Washington in anticipation of the promotion. But the newly installed Special Agent in Charge Dominique Evans put a pin on that on May 31. Over a series of phone calls, Evans revealed that FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino had left Feinberg with two options: get demoted or resign, he recalled in a personal essay published earlier this month to LawFare. Feinberg chose the latter—five years before he was eligible for retirement and a pension.

“Furthermore, she told me, I would be asked to submit to a polygraph exam probing the nature of my friendship with Pete, and (as I was quietly informed by another, friendlier senior employee) what could only be described as a latter-day struggle session,” Feinberg wrote. “I would be expected to grovel, beg forgiveness, and pledge loyalty as part of the FBI’s cultural revolution brought about by Patel and Bongino’s accession to the highest echelons of American law enforcement and intelligence.”

Feinberg is not the typecast, anti-Trump type so loathed by MAGA circles. He graduated from Northwestern Law School in 2004, where he was the vice president of the school’s Federalist Society chapter. He considers himself a conservative, aligning with the political theory of philosopher Edmund Burke, according to The Atlantic. He joined the FBI in 2009 to help “protect both United States interests in the world and the rule of law on the domestic front,” he told the magazine.

“They get a kick out of playing dress-up and acting tough,” Feinberg told The Atlantic. “But they actually have no idea what they’re doing.”

It looks like the White House official social media is being used as unofficial advertising space for the Trump family’s newest golf course.

To close out his four-day taxpayer-funded trip to Scotland, the president attended the grand opening ceremony of the Trump International Golf Links near Aberdeen, alongside his sons Eric and Don Jr.

The White House’s official X account shared a link Tuesday to live coverage of the event, similarly to how it might share information about a presidential press conference or Cabinet meeting.

“We started with a beautiful piece of land, but we’ve made it much more beautiful,” Donald Trump said of the golf course built on top of dunes on Scotland’s eastern coast.

“We’ll play it very quickly, and then I got back to D.C. and we put out fires all over the world. We stopped a war. But we’ve stopped about five wars, so that’s much more important than playing golf,” Trump said, referring to Monday’s tentative ceasefire agreement between Cambodia and Thailand, made amid pressure from the United States.

The White House X account also shared a post directly from Trump International, Scotland, showing the president arriving Monday with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

“We welcome President Trump and his family as they return to their cherished Trump International Golf Links in Aberdeenshire to open the New Course,” the post read. “The President hosted the Prime Minister and special guests at MacLeod House this evening prior to tomorrow’s grand opening ceremony.”

Trump has sidestepped precedent by refusing to sever ties to companies and other financial assets, instead vesting control of his assets to a family-managed trust. This allows the president’s supporters to pay directly into his family’s coffers by booking their vacations and retreats at any of his family’s many resorts, private clubs, and hotels.

Standing between his two sons Tuesday, Trump cut the red ribbon, though the new course doesn’t actually open for another two weeks, according to the website.