Trump Fumbles Key Details of His Own Trade Deals

Despite protestations from America’s trading partners, Donald Trump insisted Wednesday that his tariff scheme would pull in trillions of dollars of investment by some of the world’s largest economies.

“I think we’re going to have the richest economy you’ve ever seen,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We have money coming in that we’ve never even thought about, at numbers nobody has ever seen before.

“We have a deal with Japan where they’re going to pay us $550 billion,” he continued. “We have a deal with Europe where they’re doing $750 billion plus $400 billion, plus $300 billion, and many other countries. It’s likewise, relatively, those are two big ones.”

But those figures are inaccurate, according to Japanese and European leaders.

Ryosei Akazawa, Japan’s top chief negotiator, told public broadcaster NHK on Saturday that he expects just 1 to 2 percent of the $550 billion U.S. fund to be an investment, of which the U.S. and Japan would share the profits at a 90-to-10 ratio. The remainder of the fund would be deployed as a combination of loans and loan guarantees from banks with backing by the Japanese government, reported Bloomberg.

Beyond that, Japan estimates that its new trade deal with the Trump administration would actually save its country money, approximately 10 trillion yen ($68 billion), by way of decreased tariff rates.

“It’s not that $550 billion in cash will be sent to the U.S.,” Akazawa said. “By letting the U.S. have 90 percent of the profits rather than 50 percent, I think Japan’s loss will be at most a couple of tens of billions of yen. People are saying various things, such as, ‘You sold out Japan,’ but they’re wrong.”

Meanwhile, Trump has demanded that Europe reorient its liquefied gas purchases from Russia to the U.S. as a step toward new trading relations. And while European leaders have reiterated the potential of the plan, gas experts are not so convinced that the $750 billion “fantasy” works out.

“We are ready to go for those purchases,” EU trade chief Maroš Šefčovič said Monday, echoing comments from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen made the day before. “We believe these numbers are achievable.”

Actually following through on the arrangement would require Europe to triple its American imports by 2028, forgoing cheaper offerings from its neighbors, such as Norway, which delivers gas to the continent by pipeline. Even divesting from Russian oil would barely make a dent in Trump’s demand—the European Union imported just $23 billion in oil, gas, and nuclear products from Russia in 2024.

Laura Page, a senior analyst at the Kpler commodities firm, told Politico that the figure was “completely unrealistic.”

“The numbers are just beyond wild,” she said.

Donald Trump says that Democrats “love” talking about Epstein—but it’s the president who can’t seem to stop bringing up his old party pal, even when his cronies are desperately trying to buy him some cover.

Sources told Fox News Digital Wednesday that FBI Director Kash Patel had discovered multiple burn bags filled with sensitive documents stashed away in a secret room at the agency. During a press conference later that day, Trump was asked to give a statement about Patel’s far-fetched attempt to distract from the president’s ties to the alleged sex trafficker—but he couldn’t help but bring up Epstein anyway.

“Well, I want everything to be shown. You know, as long as it’s fair and reasonable I think it will be shown and it should be shown, and I think [Patel] feels that way, and I think Pam feels that way,” Trump said. But his comments echoed his previous statements about releasing any “credible” information from the Epstein files. Clearly, the president wasn’t all that interested in talking about Patel’s supposed bombshell.

“But it’s gotta be stuff that really doesn’t hurt people unfairly, because you have so many people involved. And if they can do that in a fair way, I think it’s great. I think it’s really great. The whole thing is a scam,” Trump rambled. “It’s a scam set up by the Democrats and they love talking about it.”

But it seems that Trump is the one who loves talking about Epstein, as he took off on a winding rant that had absolutely nothing to do with what he’d actually been asked about.

“I would like to see people exposed that might be bad, and we’ll see how that all works out, but it’s getting to be very old news. You know, if they had anything they would’ve done it the week before the election, because they were losing by a lot,” Trump continued. “If they had anything they would have done it. They controlled the file. The Democrats controlled it. Comey, and all the sleazebags, every one of them that you read about all the time.”

Trump’s defensiveness aside, one of the documents supposedly contained within the mysterious burn bags was the classified annex to former special counsel John Durham’s 2023 report on the FBI’s investigations into Russian interference with the 2016 presidential campaigns. This all just happens to be the very same subject of the Trump administration’s attempts to draw attention away from its sudden refusal to release more information from the government’s files on Epstein.

Durham’s report already resulted in criminal charges against only three people, and at trial, the special counsel lost two of those cases, with the third defendant pleading guilty to altering an email used to support a surveillance application. So the notion that this mysterious annex will unveil a vast conspiracy is severely unlikely, as the FBI’s conduct has already been litigated. Still, the Trump administration is currently working to declassify the annex and then share it with Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, according to Fox News Digital.

Earlier this month, Trump was asked by Just the News whether he would be open to declassifying Durham’s annex. “I would declassify it, yeah. Why not?” Trump said. “I would absolutely declassify it.”

Senate Democrats are pulling out a rare stop in hopes of compelling the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation to release all documents related to notorious late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

On Wednesday, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer announced that he and the seven Democratic members of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs are demanding the files, citing “a century-old and little-known” statute known as the “rule of five.”

Under the rule, executive agencies are, upon the request of five members of the Homeland Security Committee, required to submit “any information requested of it relating to any matter within the jurisdiction of the committee.”

“When any five senators on the Homeland Security Committee call on the executive branch, the executive branch must comply,” Schumer explained.

The Senate Democrats’ request includes all DOJ and FBI “documents, files, evidence, and other materials” related to the case United States v. Jeffrey Epstein.

“It’s not a stunt, it’s not symbolic,” Schumer said. “It’s a formal exercise of congressional power under federal law.”

“We are using very unique statutory authority that is granted only to our committee,” said the committee’s ranking member, Gary Peters, who emphasized that the request covers documents that Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel “have publicly already confirmed they have in their possession.”

The Senate Democrats expect an answer by August 15.

The announcement comes as the Trump administration scandalously fails to fulfill a campaign promise to release the files, which reportedly mention Trump repeatedly.

The House is currently on what Schumer has dubbed an “Epstein recess,” as Speaker Mike Johnson called off the legislative session early after Democrats forced the Epstein issue in vote after vote.

Meanwhile, the president’s allies seem to see convicted Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell as presenting a path out of the mire.

Trump’s deputy attorney general has met with Maxwell twice behind closed doors, and the House Oversight Committee plans to depose her on August 11. But Maxwell’s attorney said she will refuse to testify unless she is either granted certain concessions or receives clemency from Trump. The president, for his part, has refused to publicly rule out granting such a request and has insisted repeatedly that he is “allowed” to pardon her.

The Federal Reserve on Wednesday announced it will not lower interest rates, refusing once again to obey President Trump’s persistent demands to do so.

In explaining the decision, Fed Chair Jerome Powell pointed to Trump’s tariffs and their impact on the economy.

“Increased tariffs are pushing up prices in some categories of goods,” he said. “Near-term measures of inflation expectations have moved up on balance over the course of this year on news about tariffs.”

The decision is sure to upset the president, who has long called on the Fed to lower interest rates.

“We have a man who just refuses to lower the Fed rate,” Trump said last month, in one of his many attacks on Powell, a constant nemesis of his. “Maybe I should go to the Fed. Am I allowed to appoint myself? I’d do a much better job than these people.”

Trump has spent five straight meetings demanding interest rates be lowered, which suggests some insecurity about the future state of the economy on his part, especially as economists wait for the full scope of his trade war to reveal itself.

Two Trump-appointed Fed governors, Michelle Bowman and Christopher Waller, dissented from Powell’s decision on Wednesday, likely attempting to remain in the president’s good graces in the chance that he fires Powell, something he has alluded to countless times now.

The Fed lending rate will stay within the 4.25 percent to 4.5 percent range.

This story has been updated.

The Trump administration is working toward privatizing Social Security.

Speaking with Breitbart at the far-right media company’s policy event Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent referred to the “big, beautiful bill’s” “Trump accounts” as a “backdoor” for privatizing the public program.

As a stipulation of Trump’s tax bill, the U.S. government would deposit $1,000 in so-called “Trump accounts” for Americans born between 2025 and 2028. The investment, according to Bessent, would dually serve as a way to prevent young people from getting “disillusioned with the system” and voting for the likes of New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, and a way to slyly privatize Social Security.

“So when you do this, you make everyone a shareholder. You make everyone a stakeholder. People who are part of the system do not want to bring down the system,” Bessent said.

Bessent then shared an anecdote about being asked to help manage a construction worker’s hypothetical lottery winnings, to which he claimed that the “best thing you can do is save that $20.”

“Now, with these accounts, they can be part of the system. What if they had put that money in the S&P? Or in Bitcoin? Or in anything? So, we’re making people part of the system, we’re increasing financial literacy,” Bessent said. “I think that at Treasury, we are going to push, with these accounts, that if you have the account we want you to learn about it and understand it.

“In a way, it is a backdoor for privatizing Social Security,” he continued. “Social Security is a defined benefit plan paid out to the extent that if, all of a sudden, these accounts grow and you have in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for your retirement, then that’s a game changer, too.”

Congressional Republicans pushed through Trump’s tax plan earlier this month without any Democratic support. The law is not expected to save the government any money, as Trump had initially promised. Instead, Trump’s key legislative victory—which will slice taxes on the ultrawealthy and corporations while gutting social programs such as Medicaid—is expected to add upward of $6 trillion to the debt, according to a projection from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.