Trump’s Trade Deal With Japan Has One Awfully Unusual Requirement

President Trump has closed a very one-sided trade deal with Japan that just happens to give him an immense amount of power. 

Under the terms of the trade deal, Japan is expected to invest $550 billion in the United States in order to avoid the lofty retaliatory tariffs that Trump has set for it. Additionally, Japan has also agreed to let Trump decide where those billions go. The unpublished memo was signed by both countries on Wednesday, according to The Financial Times.

Trump initially levied 25 percent tariffs against Japan. He’ll now lower them to 15 percent, as long as Japan invests that $550 billion in his preferred projects before the 45-day deadline he’s imposed. If it doesn’t, the tariffs go back up to 25 percent. 

Assuming the deal is made, the U.S. and Japan would split whatever profit is generated from the deal until Japan pays off the investment. Then the U.S. will take 90 percent of the profit from that point.

This aligns with the recent trend of cash investments from some of our oldest allies in exchange for tariff protection deals. South Korea and the European Union have promised to invest massive amounts of funds, and U.S. chipmakers Nvidia and AMD plan to give the government a portion of the profit generated by their sales in China.  

The Japan trade deal comes as a federal appeals court this week dealt Trump a serious blow, ruling that the vast majority of his tariffs were illegal. 

CBS News has once again caved to President Donald Trump’s administration by offering up the journalistic integrity of Face the Nation, one of the longest-running television news broadcasts.

Freshly merged Paramount Skydance announced Friday that it would no longer air edited interviews on Face the Nation, after Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem attacked the program for editing out her smears about Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

“This extra measure means the television audience will see the full, unedited interview on CBS and we will continue our practice of posting full transcripts and the unedited video online,” the company said in a statement.

Earlier this week, Noem complained that the show had removed a phrase referring to Abrego Garcia as a “known human smuggler, MS-13 gang member” and claiming that he’d solicited nude photographs from minors.

But Noem’s claims weren’t fit to air. The government has repeatedly failed to provide any evidence that Abrego Garcia was a member of a foreign gang. And a Tennessee magistrate judge ruled in June that the government’s other claims were an “impossibility” and that its evidence included “double hearsay.”

Paramount Skydance’s new policy transforms the Face the Nation newsroom into nothing more than a microphone for the Trump administration, stripping its own journalists of their editorial independence to report the facts.

The decision will likely allow guests’ grandstanding to go unchallenged and reduce host Margaret Brennan’s ability to push back against her interviewees or add essential context to their talking points. An official such as Noem has a tendency to present allegations as fact, and the Trump administration doesn’t seem to care about the difference.

This is just the latest in a long series of moves that demonstrate the rightward shift of Paramount Skydance and, by extension, CBS News. Earlier this week, it was reported that Paramount Skydance had nearly closed a deal to bring in a new news head: Bari Weiss, a bastion of the anti-woke movement.

And last month, the company canceled The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, whose titular host had called out the company for agreeing to pay a “big fat bribe” of $16 million to the Trump administration to settle a lawsuit over an edited 60 Minutes interview of failed Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Many speculated that by winning the favor of the Trump administration, it had ensured the long-awaited merger between Paramount and Skydance would be allowed to proceed.

During and after his Thursday train-wreck Senate hearing, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has faced growing calls to resign. Now his own family is joining that chorus.

On Thursday, Kennedy flailed as he was grilled on his actions at the Department of Health and Human Services, such as his anti-vaccine agenda and mismanagement of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Democratic lawmakers, top American medical groups, and more than 1,000 current and former HHS personnel have called for Kennedy’s termination.

Joining them, former Representative Joe Kennedy III of Massachusetts, the health secretary’s nephew, took to X Friday, calling his uncle “a threat to the health and wellbeing of every American,” who has chosen to “dismiss science, mislead the public, sideline experts and sow confusion.”

“None of us will be spared the pain he is inflicting. It doesn’t matter how rich or powerful you are or what state you live in—the heartbreak of watching a loved one fall ill knows no borders,” Kennedy wrote. “The challenges before us—from disease outbreaks to mental health crises—demand moral clarity, scientific expertise, and leadership rooted in fact. Those values are not present in the Secretary’s office. He must resign.”

This is not the first time members of the Kennedy family have condemned RFK Jr.—with his long-shot presidential campaign and, later, his endorsement of Trump both drawing public objections from his family. During his confirmation process, his cousin Caroline Kennedy urged the Senate to reject his nomination, writing that the American public “deserve[s] better than Bobby Kennedy.” During Thursday’s hearing, John F. Kennedy’s grandson Jack Schlossberg (RFK Jr.’s first cousin once removed) posted on X, “RFK LOSER is choking so badly LIVE.”

Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, seems to be taking orders from notorious far-right hate account “Libs of TikTok.”

On Thursday afternoon, Libs of TikTok tagged Hegseth in a post targeting a military doctor whose LinkedIn page listed her title as the “EMF-Bravo Navy Deputy Medical Director for Transgender Healthcare.”

“Yikes. This she/her Navy Commander is apparently a medical director for ‘transgender healthcare’ at a Naval center in California. Can you please look into this?” the post read.

Hours later, Hegseth tweeted back, writing, “Pronouns UPDATED: She/Her/Fired.”

It’s so wonderful that the man running our military can make a grammatically unsound joke after potentially ruining a Navy doctor’s life.

It’s unknown whether Janelle Marra, the doctor in question, was actually fired by Hegseth, but the speed with which she went from anonymously serving her country to being the target of social media hate, to possibly even being fired for her beliefs by a federal official, is staggering.

Libs of TikTok is run by Chaya Raichik, who has been designated an extremist by the Southern Poverty Law Center for her rabid anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda. On Bluesky, lawyer Alejandra Caraballo called Libs of TikTok “the digital stasi,” comparing the account to the East German secret police. “It’s all a spectacle packaged as content. Destroying people’s lives for profitable ideological bloodsport.”

She continued, “Anything as innocuous as a pride flag can cause a federal investigation now or people to lose their jobs.… The spectacle is there to create fear in everyone else that they need to comply or they are next.”

Gun rights groups are, well, up in arms over reports that the Trump administration is considering banning transgender Americans from possessing firearms.

As conservatives use the deadly mass shooting in Minneapolis last week to vilify the transgender community—the shooter was transgender—CNN and The New York Post reported Thursday that Donald Trump’s Justice Department is in preliminary talks about implementing a gun ban for transgender people.

While Republican presidents are typically the darlings of Second Amendment advocates, this idea was denounced swiftly and roundly by every major gun rights organization.

The National Rifle Association condemned “any policy proposals that implement sweeping gun bans that arbitrarily strip law-abiding citizens of their Second Amendment rights without due process.”

Gun Owners of America said the organization “opposes any & all gun bans. Full stop.” In another post, GOA deplored the addition of “any new category of persons to the unconstitutionally broad ‘mental defective’ category,” which would “not only block them from purchasing firearms but could result in door-to-door gun confiscation from that new category of individuals.”

On X, the president of the National Association for Gun Rights wrote, “As history proves, any new rules the government invents today will be abused against ill-favored communities, including conservatives and law-abiding gun owners, tomorrow.” The proposal is “just insanity,” an NAGR spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal.

The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms issued a statement saying, “We needn’t make scapegoats of others who had nothing to do with that outrage, just to create the impression something is being done.”

The Firearms Policy Coalition warned: “If the Trump Administration—or any administration—unwisely and immorally chooses to wield the force of government in conflict with the Constitution, federal law, or our values, FPC will take aggressive action to defend the rights of peaceable people, just as we have many times before.”

Kostas Moros, director of legal research and education at the Second Amendment Foundation, called the idea “blatantly unconstitutional” and lacking “any legal basis.” Considering the outpouring of criticism from gun groups, Moros wrote on X: “To the extent [the proposed ban] was a trial balloon, we all hit it like a clay pigeon.”