Trump Goes on Weird Rant About Using Tariff Money to Bail Out Farmers

The White House is planning to give its “tariff money” to U.S. farmers, though the exact figure could vary by billions of dollars, according to the president.

Speaking beside Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at the White House Thursday, Donald Trump claimed that his staffers had discovered an inordinate amount of uncounted cash in the budget for U.S. farmers, though he recklessly mixed up “billions” and “millions” when describing the amount of aid that could be available.

“The other day, it was very interesting, they found $31 billion,” Trump said. “They said, ‘Sir, we’ve found 31.’ I said, ‘You mean positively, right?’ They said, ‘Yeah, $31 million more than we knew.’ And they said, ‘We don’t know where it came from.’”

Trump then claimed he instructed his staff to “check the tariff shelf,” and that staffers later confirmed the money came from Trump’s tariffs.

“So what we’re going to be doing is we’re going to be taking some money from all of the tariff money we’ve taken and we’re going to distribute it to our farmers, until the tariffs kick in to their benefit,” Trump said, promising that American farmers would eventually “be making a fortune” from his plan.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said Wednesday that there was “potential” to leverage tariff assets to aid the country’s agricultural industry. In focus were the country’s soybean, corn, wheat, sorghum, and cotton farmers, all of whom Rollins said were facing “difficult times.”

“We should have an announcement very soon, perhaps in the next couple of weeks,” Rollins told reporters.

That plan could be completely upended, however, if the Supreme Court decides that Trump’s tariffs are illegal.

Of course, farmers may have avoided these difficult times altogether if Trump had never instituted his aggressive tariff plan to begin with. Tensions between the Trump administration and Beijing have practically halted trade with China, nixing a crucial market for American farmers. The end result, according to insiders, is a mandatory bailout—which will weigh heavily on the American taxpayer’s dime.

“The pitch being made to the administration is, ‘Look, if you don’t have some kind of ace up your sleeve here, like an imminent deal with China and/or a string of other trade deals that are about to be announced that also happen to lighten the load on soybeans, then there’s going to have to be a bailout,’” an anonymous agriculture industry representative told Politico.

The Trump administration on Thursday announced an agreement with Elon Musk’s company xAI, making his questionable chatbot, Grok, available to every federal agency over the next year and a half for a nominal fee of 42 cents.

“We value xAI for partnering with [the U.S. General Services Administration]—and dedicating engineers—to accelerate the adoption of Grok to transform government operations,” said Josh Gruenbaum, commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service, which handles government purchasing. Musk, who publicly feuded with President Donald Trump just a few months ago, expressed excitement about working with his administration “to rapidly deploy AI throughout the government for the benefit of the country.”

Grok’s potential integration within federal agencies is certainly a high point for a chatbot that, in its time as a feature on Musk’s social media platform X, has had some notorious low ones.

There was the period when it began producing antisemitic screeds and calling itself “MechaHitler.” Or when it randomly came to share its South African creator’s obsession with alleged “white genocide” in South Africa—so much so that it would bring it up in unrelated inquiries. Or when it made disturbing sexual comments about then-CEO of X Linda Yaccarino, or similarly harassed prominent liberal X user Will Stancil, providing users instructions to break into his house, and reminding them to bring “lockpicks, gloves, flashlight, and lube—just in case.”

Musk, for his part, has made comments raising concerns about his possible tinkering with Grok such that it shares his right-wing beliefs. When Grok told a user that “right-wing political violence has been more frequent and deadly” than left-wing violence since 2016, while providing evidence, Musk called it a “major fail,” accusing the chatbot of “parroting legacy media.”

Days later, he announced Grok 4, the model available to federal agencies under the new xAI-GSA agreement. He promised to train Grok 4 by having the previous version of the chatbot “rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors. Then retrain on that.” He also asked X users to provide “divisive facts” on which to train the model—“things that are politically incorrect, but nonetheless factually true”—which elicited replies such as “Covid-19 Vaccines did not save a single life” and “Nonbinary isn’t a real thing.”

Ryan Walters, responsible for a yearslong campaign to suffuse Oklahoma public schools with Christian nationalist and right-wing messages, is out as the state’s education superintendent and headed for the private sector.

Speaking on Fox News late Wednesday, Walters announced that he plans to join the Teacher Freedom Alliance as its chief executive officer. “We’re gonna destroy the teachers’ unions,” Walters said, promising to “build an army of teachers” and take the fight national.

The nonprofit, which is an offshoot of the far-right Freedom Foundation, seeks to lure educators to opt out of their unions. According to the website, the TFA seeks to assist teachers in producing “free, moral, and upright” American citizens. As of Thursday, the organization boasted a small membership of more than 2,700 teachers, compared to the 1.8 million represented by the American Federation of Teachers union.

In March, Walters landed in hot water after he issued multiple news releases about the TFA, potentially violating ethics rules that prohibit state officers from using state resources to promote private interests. State Representative Ellen Pogemiller requested that Oklahoma’s attorney general “clarify the legality” of Walters’s promotions and “investigate the financial ties and contacts” between the public official and the TFA.

Now it appears that Walters has dropped the pretense and decided to make a buck as Donald Trump’s administration attempts a massive overhaul of the Department of Education.

“Walters fearlessly fights the woke liberal union mob,” the TFA website said. “TFA will take the fight straight to the unions and we will not stop.”

Walters has made outlandish criticisms of the teachers’ unions, referring to them as “terrorist organizations” and even attempting to tie them to actual terror attacks.

His hatred of teachers can be tied directly to his Christian nationalist ideology, which puts him at odds with educators, parents, and the U.S. Constitution. Walters previously pushed teaching the Bible in Oklahoma public schools, and was sued by parents. The Trump fanboy made clear that the only version of the good book that suited his guidelines was Trump’s God Bless the USA Bible, and he later attempted to shove his prayers for President Trump down his students’ throats.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has urgently called on hundreds of U.S. military officials around the globe for a spontaneous meeting at a Marine Corps base in Virginia next week, though the reason for the gathering remains top secret.

The unusual directive was received by top military commanders stationed around the world, ordering them to meet in Quantico on Tuesday, reported The Washington Post. There are approximately 800 U.S. generals and admirals in total. Hegseth’s order applies to “all senior officers with the rank of brigadier general or above, or their Navy equivalent, serving in command positions and their top enlisted advisers,” insiders told the Post. It does not apply to military officers who hold staff positions.

In a statement Thursday, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell told the Post that Hegseth “will be addressing his senior military leaders early next week,” but did not clarify further.

The message shocked members of the U.S. military, who could not recall another instance in which a defense secretary summoned so many commanders for a sudden in-person meeting—especially without a clear rationale. Some warned that having so many integral military leaders in one place could pose a national security risk.

“People are very concerned. They have no idea what it means,” one source told the Post.

Another military source expressed frustration that commanders stationed overseas would also be required to attend: It’s “not how this is done,” they said. “You don’t call [general and flag officers] leading their people and the global force into an auditorium outside D.C. and not tell them why/what the topic or agenda is.”

“Are we taking every general and flag officer out of the Pacific right now?” a third U.S. official told the Post. “All of it is weird.”

Hegseth’s directive comes months after he announced a massive overhaul of America’s defense systems, promising to massively slash staffing. That includes firing about 100 generals and admirals, instituting a “minimum” 20 percent reduction in the number of four-star officers across the military and the National Guard, and a 10 percent reduction to the number of generals and admirals.

President Trump’s upcoming ballroom will be bigger than the White House.

Recent renderings obtained by CBS News show that the ballroom—which Trump has been obsessing over for some time now—shows a gaudy, gold-tinged, 90,000-square foot building that looks like it came straight from the Gilded Age. The White House is only 50,000 square feet.

“For 150 years, Presidents, Administrations, and White House Staff have longed for a large event space on the White House complex that can hold substantially more guests than currently allowed,” the White House’s July announcement read. “President Donald J. Trump has expressed his commitment to solving this problem on behalf of future Administrations and the American people.”

The construction project, which began earlier this month, is estimated to cost $200 million, and at this point has been funded by Google, tobacco company R.J. Reynolds, Booz Allen Hamilton, Palantir, and Lockheed Martin.

“They’ve wanted a ballroom at the White House for more than 150 years, but there’s never been a president that’s good at ballrooms,” Trump said in July.

In September, when asked about conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Trump immediately pivoted to the ballroom.

“And by the way, right there you see all the trucks; they just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House,” he said. “Which is something they’ve been trying to get as you know for about 150 years, and it’s gonna be a beauty, it’ll be an absolutely magnificent structure.”

As many have pointed out, this kind of project is what Trump actually cares about. He’s more concerned with projecting opulence and pomp than he is about governing. The White House is traditionally considered “the people’s house.” Now, there will be a massive ballroom next to it that “the people” will likely never step foot in, unless they have a couple hundred million dollars to throw at it. Above all, this ballroom shows that Trump really wants the White House to be just another Mar-a-Lago.