Brazil’s President Says He Won’t Cave to Trump Like Everyone Else

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva demanded “respect” from President Trump in a New York Times interview published just hours before Trump hit Brazil with sanctions and the whopping 50 percent tariffs he’d been threatening.

“Be sure that we are treating this with the utmost seriousness. But seriousness does not require subservience,” Lula told the Times. “I treat everyone with great respect. But I want to be treated with respect.”

These tariffs are based on politics and personal sensitivities, not economics. Lula has long made his disdain for Trump’s strong-arming known, and Trump’s recent tariff move is absolutely retribution for that. Trump is also attempting to stick it to Brazilian Judge Alexandre de Moraes for his prosecution (or as Trump calls it, “witch hunt”) of disgraced former President Jair Bolsonaro, who attempted a January 6–like coup in 2023 to remain in power.

“Maybe [President Trump] doesn’t know that here in Brazil, the judiciary is independent,” Lula said. “At no point will Brazil negotiate as if it were a small country up against a big country.... We know the economic power of the United States, we recognize the military power of the United States, we recognize the technological size of the United States.... But that doesn’t make us afraid. It makes us concerned.”

Trump’s 50 percent tariff is certain to make goods like coffee, beef, and other imports from Brazil much more expensive for the average American.

Lula also mentioned that he found Trump’s use of Truth Social as a platform for actual policy decisions “disgraceful.”

“President Trump’s behavior strayed from all standards of negotiations and diplomacy,” he said. “When you have a commercial disagreement, a political disagreement, you pick up the phone, you schedule a meeting, you talk and you try to solve the problem. What you don’t do is tax and give an ultimatum.”

In the past 24 hours, far-right internet personality Laura Loomer has majorly flexed the influence she wields over the Trump administration’s staffing decisions, claiming not one but two heads.

On Tuesday evening, Loomer publicly cast aspersions on Jen Easterly, a former Biden cybersecurity official who was recently named to a distinguished chair position in West Point’s social sciences department.

Responding to the West Point dean’s since-deleted announcement of Easterly’s appointment, Loomer wrote on X: “Wow [Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth]! Looks like some of your underlings are trying to screw you. There are clearly a lot of Biden holdovers at DOD undermining the Trump admin.” (Easterly, who—Loomer failed to mention—also worked in George W. Bush’s administration, has publicly disputed Trump’s baseless claims about recent elections being rigged.)

The right-wing provocateur urged a “massive” reduction in force at the Defense Department so as to weed out “moles” and tagged the accounts of West Point, the Department of Defense, and Hegseth in the post.

By Wednesday morning, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll publicly shared a memo stating that Easterly was dismissed,and that West Point will “immediately pause non-governmental and outside groups from selecting employees.” Driscoll also requested a “top-down review” of the academy’s hiring practices.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell lauded the decision, and Loomer also celebrated the outcome.

The shake-up at West Point, ostensibly the result of Loomer’s single-handed effort, comes on the heels of another victory for the self-described “pro-white nationalist,” who on Tuesday succeeded in taking down Vinay Prasad, a top official at Trump’s Food and Drug Administration.

Prasad was the FDA’s top vaccine official and an adherent of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement. But even RFK Jr.’s support wasn’t enough to shield him from Loomer’s wrath for supposed lèse-majesté against Trump.

Loomer launched a campaign against Prasad in recent days, claiming that he was a “progressive leftist saboteur undermining President Trump’s FDA.” Prasad stepped down Tuesday, with a Health Department spokesman saying he “did not want to be a distraction to the great work of the FDA in the Trump administration.”

These two back-to-back Loomerings are just the latest.

In April, Trump reportedly fired a number of national security council officials for disloyalty the day after Loomer flagged them to the president as “people who have played a role in sabotaging” him. She also reportedly sowed doubts about Mike Waltz before he was ousted from his national security adviser post.

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.

Conservative lawmakers are fighting tooth and nail to retain their right to trade stocks while in office.

The caucus turned out in staunch opposition Wednesday to Republican Senator Josh Hawley’s proposed stock trading ban, causing a significant stir in the upper chamber after the White House flagged the bill as a bad idea.

In order to gain Democratic support and advance the motion through the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Hawley agreed to include text within the bill that would additionally subject Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance to the parameters of the ban, just as members of Congress would be. But the White House’s Office of Legislative Affairs, and the executive branch’s Senate allies, were not in favor.

Senator Ron Johnson torched the effort as “legislative demagoguery,” claiming Wednesday that banning lawmakers and their spouses from trading stocks would “make it very unattractive for people to run for office.”

“I have no idea what we’re voting for,” said Senator Bernie Moreno. “I have not read the mountains of paper that are sitting in front of me.”

At one point, Senator Rick Scott condemned the effort as “disgusting,” accusing Hawley of denigrating billionaires. But Hawley, seated next to Scott, had a firm response.

“I don’t mind anyone being rich, I mind people getting rich while they’re here and trading stocks,” the Missouri senator said.

Committee Chair Rand Paul similarly opposed the bill, positing that any such ban would have made it impossible for Trump to be president. The Kentucky lawmaker admitted that he had scheduled a vote on the bill in a quiet quid pro quo: “To get two bills that I want passed through without being beleaguered by amendments,” he said in an interview with Axios.

The White House, meanwhile, argued that its opposition to Hawley’s bill had little to do with its contents.

“This was a last-minute deal struck to include the Executive Branch equities without touching base with the White House to discuss potential Article II concerns,” a White House official told Axios. “Any pause comes purely from potential Article II infringement, not the Congressional ban.”

The president, however, attacked Hawley personally hours later, claiming that the senator’s decision to “block” a review of Representative Nancy Pelosi’s stock trading was “sabotage.”

Hawley had introduced the original bill in 2023 after Pelosi’s husband came under increased scrutiny for his extensive trading practices, though the accusations festered without any evidence of insider trading. By the end of the day, the committee had voted 8-7 to advance the bill, with all Republicans except Hawley voting against it.

“The Democrats, because of our tremendous ACHIEVEMENTS and SUCCESS, have been trying to ‘Target’ me for a long period of time, and they’re using Josh Hawley, who I got elected TWICE, as a pawn to help them,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I wonder why Hawley would pass a Bill that Nancy Pelosi is in absolute love with—He is playing right into the dirty hands of the Democrats. It’s a great Bill for her, and her ‘husband,’ but so bad for our Country!”

“I don’t think real Republicans want to see their President, who has had unprecedented success, TARGETED, because of the ‘whims’ of a second-tier Senator named Josh Hawley!” Trump added.

This story has been updated.

Since Donald Trump entered the White House, the supposedly hardline fiscal conservatives of the House Freedom Caucus appear to have softened that line to a malleable putty—and everyone on Capitol Hill knows it.

The Bulwark reported Wednesday that as members of the HFC left for summer break, they were “all over the place” following a series of toothless concessions to the president’s sweeping spending agenda. Now, the House Freedom Caucus has even earned a new nickname among reporters and lawmakers: the House Folding Caucus.

Although they had initially criticized the Senate’s version of Trump’s behemoth budget bill at the beginning of July, HFC members ultimately fell in line to support the president’s bill that would explode the national deficit by trillions of dollars. A few weeks later, they momentarily stalled Trump’s GENIUS Act, arguing that the cryptobill went against an executive order banning central bank currency. But once again, they conceded to the president’s demands after the GOP leadership promised to tie the ban into the Pentagon’s policy bill later this year.

HFC Chairman Andy Harris said that the group should start working on a one-year continuing resolution that would allow them to freeze federal funding, but the group’s position remains unclear. Four members are currently staging their exits from Congress, with Representatives Ralph Norman, Byron Donalds, and Andy Biggs all preparing gubernatorial campaigns in their respective states, and Representative Mike Collins launching a Senate bid in his state.

With a president who just does whatever he wants regardless of what Congress thinks, a far-right attack dog is no longer required—and has been left neutered and freezing in the doghouse.

Texas Republicans are moving forward with their gerrymandering plan that will essentially create new pro-Trump districts in a state that already has an overwhelming GOP majority.

The new map, revealed Wednesday, will create five new GOP-skewed districts, which could very well help Republicans grow their majority in the House in 2026. The map puts districts currently held by Democratic Representatives Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez at risk of becoming more red, while isolating blue districts to create even more Republican-leaning ones.

The map’s new districts will contain three regions that Trump carried by 10 to 15 percentage points last election, shamelessly rigging the game to seize power in a thinly divided Congress. It will also create six districts without incumbents—making 2026 an even more critical race.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is reportedly headed to Texas on Wednesday for a sit-down with Democratic leaders, while the map is set for final approval in a committee hearing on Friday.