Trump Is About to Chicken Out on His Signature Policy

It took eight months, but it seems that the Trump administration has finally figured out that you can’t really grow bananas in the United States.

After his party suffered sweeping losses in a series of elections earlier this month that hinged on the issue of affordability, and then publicly spiraled when pressed on the rising price of groceries, President Donald Trump is reportedly gearing up to undermine his own key economic policy, three sources told The New York Times Thursday.

The Trump administration was preparing broad exemptions for certain tariffs—including on products from countries that have yet to strike a deal with the U.S. government—stalling a key negotiation lever in Trump’s economic policy that has been sparking financial strain for consumers.

While the decisions about what to exempt have yet to be finalized, the sources told the Times that they expect it will include citrus and beef—a concerning sign for U.S. cattle ranchers, who have already pushed back on the president’s offer to buy beef from Argentina. Trump has claimed that ranchers who felt betrayed just didn’t “understand” his brilliant economic machinations.

But Trump’s sweeping tariffs on U.S. beef suppliers, such as Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, and Uruguay, as well as tariffs on feed and farming equipment, have only driven the consumer price of beef higher and higher, according to NBC News.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent teased Wednesday that the president would make “substantial” tariff exemptions on products such as coffee, bananas, and other fruit—namely products whose domestic production couldn’t possibly be boosted through tariffs on foreign imports.

The Trump administration announced Thursday that it had struck new trade deal frameworks with Argentina, Ecuador, El Salvador, and Guatemala, with senior officials suggesting that could help alleviate rising prices on agricultural products from Latin America, such as coffee and bananas.

The British Broadcasting Corporation has apologized to President Donald Trump for editing his speech on an episode of Panorama, but will not fork over the $1 billion he threatened to sue for.

Earlier this week, the president’s legal team sent a letter to the BBC claiming that the British news outlet attempted to “interfere in the presidential election” by editing one of his January 6, 2021, speeches in a broadcast one day before the 2024 vote.

Panorama edited together two sections of Trump’s 2021 speech, including his line calling on supporters to “fight like hell,” while leaving out a section in which he told them to peacefully protest. Controversy ensued, causing Director General Tim Davie and news CEO Deborah Turness both to resign on Sunday, which Trump celebrated on Truth Social.

He also sent a letter to the BBC threatening a $1 billion defamation lawsuit unless the BBC did a “full and fair” retraction of the Panorama episode and “appropriately compensated” him for harm done. The deadline for the BBC to respond was Friday.

“We accept that our edit unintentionally created the impression that we were showing a single continuous section of the speech, rather than excerpts from different points in the speech, and that this gave the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action,” the BBC wrote in its Corrections and Clarifications section on Thursday.

While the BBC “sincerely regrets the manner in which the video clip was edited,” it still “strongly disagree[s] there is a basis for a defamation claim,” a spokesperson said. The letter to Trump’s team notes that the news agency did not distribute the Panorama episode in the United States, the clip was only edited for the sake of time, and the episode did not cause Trump any harm given that he won the election.

Trump has already made other large media corporations fold financially, getting a $16 million settlement from CBS News over edits to an interview with Kamala Harris prior to the 2024 election, and another $16 million settlement with ABC News after host George Stephanopolous used the phrase “liable for rape” to describe Trump’s E. Jean Carroll case verdict.

Right-wing commentator Megyn Kelly is trying to downplay the latest Jeffrey Epstein emails by questioning if the billionaire child sex offender was really a pedophile. 

On her Sirius XM radio show Wednesday, Kelly highlighted the ages of Epstein’s victims, declaring that there is a “difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old.”

“Yeah, so I don’t know what’s true about him, but we have yet to see anybody come forward and say I was under 10, I was under 14 when I first came within his purview. You can say that’s a distinction without a difference. I think there is a difference,” Kelly said to her guest Batya Ungar-Sargon.  

It’s a roundabout and indirect way of trying to soften the allegations against President Trump by downplaying Epstein’s offenses, and even casting a little doubt. It’s one of many attempts by Trump allies and people on the right to try and protect the president, who has been heavily implicated in this week’s email releases.

Among the many revelations are that Epstein bragged about “giving” his 20-year-old girlfriend to Trump and that he may have spent Thanksgiving with him in 2017, during his first term as president. House Republicans and the White House attempted to claim that one of the victims Epstein said Trump spent a lot of time with, per one email, was Virginia Giuffre, who died earlier this year and claimed she never witnessed Trump commit any wrongdoing. 

In doing so, however, Republicans confirmed that the emails are real, taking away the ability of Trump or any of his allies to deny their substance and forcing them into pathetic defenses like Kelly’s. To her credit, Kelly still expressed contempt for Epstein in the exchange, saying, “Every time we start talking about Epstein, it makes your skin crawl.” Well, so do the many defenses for Trump’s behavior. 

The man President Trump wanted to be attorney general was allegedly paying for sex with a 17-year old girl who was working at a McDonald’s, saving up for braces, and partly living at a homeless shelter.

Last year, a House Ethics Committee report found “substantial evidence” that former representative and former attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz “regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity with him,” and that he “engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl” in 2017. The report also mentioned that Gaetz possessed and used cocaine and ecstasy while in office. Last month, newly unsealed court documents further detailed just how dire a situation the girl was living in before she was connected with Gaetz.

As The New York Times reported, the girl was in and out of homeless shelters, where one of her parents lived after a divorce. In an attempt to save up for braces, she joined a sugar dating website, saying she was 18 instead of 17 to join.

The girl met Gaetz’s friend Joel Greenberg through the website in April 2017. He invited her on his boat and paid her $400 without having sex with her. They then had sex seven times for money after that. In July, she went to a party thrown by Republican lobbyist Chris Dorworth and had sex with then-Representative Gaetz twice.

“The vulnerable circumstances most crime victims face are rarely known to the public,” the victim’s lawyer Laura B. Wolf told The New York Times. “Although my client’s circumstances were revealed outside of her control, I hope it helps for the public to see a fuller and more human picture of her than the press has reported on to date.… Power imbalances can be age, but they can also be financial. My client had little economic security, which allowed for financial leverage over her.”

Gaetz has denied everything.

“I never had sex with this person.… This person threatened me with a lawsuit if I didn’t pay her $2.3 million,” he said in a text to the Times. “She never sued me because her story is fiction.”

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain: Donald Trump would rather Americans focus on his glorious new ballroom than ask another question about his connection to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Speaking with reporters Thursday on the advent of a House vote to release the Epstein files, Trump took a pause to celebrate his $300 million project, claiming that his pricey renovation had become “very popular.”

“And right behind me by the way, in about two years from now, we’ll use a much bigger room because we had to turn away a lot of people,” Trump said during an executive order–signing ceremony, waving at the wall behind him. “And it’ll be right here. This will be the entrance. That’s a knockout panel. It’s called a knockout.”

“It looks pretty nice right now but it’ll look a lot better in a little while, and we’re going to go from this room into a room that seats a few more people, and it’s going to be beautiful,” Trump continued. “But uh, I just noticed I happened to be standing here and I thought I might as well get your shot right now, a nice beautiful shot, at the future entrance to something that’s really become very popular, the ballroom.

“They’ve wanted it for 150 years, and they’re getting it, and they’re getting the best—it’ll be the best anywhere in the world,” he added.

After promising Americans in July that his ballroom proposal would “be near but not touching” the White House East Wing, Trump completely razed the FDR-era extension, plowing forward without prerequisite approval from the National Capital Planning Commission (which was closed due to the government shutdown) and without the express permission of Congress.

The Trump administration said in July that the forthcoming 90,000-square-foot event space will be capable of hosting 650 people, a 200-person bump from maximum seatage at the White House East Wing. But real estate experts have since pointed out that the possibilities of that square footage should be much broader, considering the event space will be roughly equivalent to two football fields.

The project’s price tag also inexplicably grew by 50 percent after Trump began demolition. What Trump had originally pitched as a $200 million project was instead referred to in late October as a $300 million development plan. The White House suggested that the project would be funded, in part, by some of the country’s wealthiest families and biggest corporations, including the likes of Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta.

Some major players in the defense industry with massive federal contracts have also forked over significant cash to develop the ballroom, including Lockheed Martin and Palantir, though it’s unclear what they might get out of a venue meant for dancing.

The real estate mogul has reportedly become so fixated on his renovation project that he has literally wandered away from his presidential duties in order to admire the progress.

Meanwhile, conservative lawmakers are turning on Trump. Senior Republicans privately expect dozens of their party members—“possibly 100 or more”—to vote in favor of a bill that would make the federal government’s trove of Epstein files publicly available, reported Politico. A handful have already voiced their intention to back the forthcoming bill, including Representatives Eli Crane, Don Bacon, and Warren Davidson.

It seems that Attorney General Pam Bondi’s kind offer to personally “ratify” interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan’s actions did not impress the federal judge charged with determining whether her appointment was lawful in the first place.

During a hearing Thursday, U.S. District Judge Cameron Currie, who is based in South Carolina, pushed back on the government’s claim that after reviewing the grand jury materials in the case against former FBI Director James Comey, Bondi had agreed to retroactively “ratify” Halligan’s actions, even if Halligan’s initial appointment was deemed invalid.

Currie greeted Bondi’s offer with some skepticism, according to Lawfare’s Roger Parloff. “The implication was: Why do you need that if the original appointment was proper,” Parloff wrote on X.

Currie also pointed out that there was still a missing component of the grand jury transcript, Politico reported. Halligan had previously failed to turn over documents that recorded her own remarks before and after the sole witness’s testimony. Halligan had not provided records of her presentation of the three-count indictment, either.

“It became obvious to me that the attorney general could not have reviewed those portions of the transcript presented by Ms. Halligan,” Currie said, adding that they “did not exist.”

Justice Department attorney Henry Whitaker claimed that Bondi had reviewed the “material facts” of Halligan’s jury presentation, which showed “the grand jury made a decision based on the facts and the law.”

These missing documents could include jury instructions that are crucial to the Comey case. In order to secure the indictment against the ex-FBI director, Halligan needed to clearly explain the criteria for finding a defendant guilty of making a false statement. But there appears to be no record of Halligan, a first-time prosecutor who acted alone in making a presentation to the grand jury, giving these instructions. Should there be an issue with Halligan’s jury instructions, the entire case could be dismissed.

Donald Trump appears to be targeting his next political adversary: Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell.

Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has referred Swalwell to the Department of Justice for a criminal probe, alleging mortgage and tax fraud on his Washington, D.C. home, NBC News reports. It’s the fourth time the administration has tried to use mortgage fraud against Democratic opponents, with New York Attorney General Letita James, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, and Senator Adam Schiff also facing similar allegations.

Pulte wrote in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi Wednesday that Swalwell may have made false or misleading statements in loan applications, claiming that the congressman took out several million dollars in loans and refinancing based on the Washington home being his primary residence. The letter calls for an investigation into insurance fraud, mortgage fraud, and tax fraud allegations, and any other related crimes.

Swalwell, who was involved in both of Trump’s impeachments, didn’t seem surprised by the attack.

“As the most vocal critic of Donald Trump over the last decade and as the only person who still has a surviving lawsuit against him, the only thing I am surprised about is that it took him this long to come after me,” Swalwell said in a statement.

In September, Swalwell said he fully expected to be prosecuted by the Trump administration, based on the fact that he was named on FBI Director Kash Patel’s enemies list in his 2022 book Government Gangsters.

“Adam Schiff is under investigation now, so I’m ready for it. I expect it, but I’m not going to flinch. I’m not hiding under the bed. I’m not going to shrink because that’s the aim. That’s why they do this, is they hope that dissent and oversight goes away,” Swalwell said at the time.

Senator John Fetterman was hospitalized Thursday “out of an abundance of caution” after taking a fall near his home in Braddock, Pennsylvania. 

“Upon evaluation, it was established he had a ventricular fibrillation flare-up that led to Senator Fetterman feeling light-headed, falling to the ground and hitting his face with minor injuries,” the spokesperson said in a statement.  

Ventricular fibrillation is an irregular heart rhythm that can prevent blood flow to other parts of the body. Doctors consider it a form of cardiac arrest. This condition can be caused by a previous heart injury or issue, drug misuse, or a severe imbalance of potassium or magnesium. 

In the statement, the spokesperson said Fetterman was doing well but opted to remain in hospital while doctors fine-tuned his medication. 

“If you thought my face looked bad before, wait until you see it now!” Fetterman joked in the statement.

Fetterman’s former chief of staff shared his concerns in May that the Democrat, who suffered a stroke in 2022 one month before being elected to the Senate, had stopped taking his medications, was skipping doctors appointments, and had engaged in reckless behavior. 

Earlier this week, Fetterman voted with Republicans on a reworked funding deal to end the government shutdown, which was then signed into law by President Donald Trump on Wednesday. Fetterman had long broken with the rest of the Democrats over the shutdown, voting more than a dozen times to reopen the government.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche seemed to acknowledge on Thursday that thousands of recently released email exchanges from disgraced sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein contradict the information Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell gave Blanche during their interviews this summer. 

When Blanche first spoke to Maxwell, she told him that she had never seen President Trump at Epstein’s house, and that the two were just casual friends. 

“I think [Trump and Epstein] were friendly like people are in social settings. I don’t—I don’t think they were close friends or I certainly never witnessed the president in any of—I don’t recall ever seeing him in [Epstein’s] house, for instance,” Maxwell said, according to interview transcripts. “I actually never saw the president in any type of massage setting. I never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way. The president was never inappropriate with anybody.”  

The emails she sent in 2011 tell a very different story.

“I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump. [Redacted] spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned. police chief etc.,” Epstein wrote to Maxwell in 2011, allegedly referring to one of his sex-trafficking victims. These emails were released Wednesday by the House Oversight Committee. 

“I have been thinking about that …” Maxwell responded. While Maxwell’s email doesn’t directly contradict her assertion that she never saw the president at Epstein’s house, they certainly suggest she knew that he’d spent time there.

Now the public is turning back to Blanche, scrutinizing his questioning of Maxwell given that there is motivation for her to lie for or about Trump to improve her chances of getting a pardon from him.

“An important side note about today’s Epstein/Trump revelations. They show that Todd Blanche’s questioning of Ghislaine Maxwell was either (a) completely incompetent; or (b) intentionally crafted not to elicit facts incriminating Trump,” George Conway wrote on X. “Either way, he is not fit to serve as Deputy Attorney General of the United States.”

“George, you’ve never been confused for a trial lawyer, and these kinds of posts explain why. When I interviewed Maxwell, law enforcement didn’t have the materials Epstein’s estate hid for years and only just provided to Congress,” Blanche responded, not seeming to deny that these emails suggest Maxwell misled him. “Stop talking. It’s unbecoming.”

Blanche’s excuse was widely deemed insufficient.

“Todd Blanche would have had these emails before interviewing Maxwell. Why didn’t he question her directly about her exchanges? Why did he not follow up when she said things that were obviously a lie??” former FBI lawyer Asha Rangappa mused. “This shows that was a performance intended to dupe the public and benefit her (and Trump).”

Either Blanche was deceived by the sexual predator he moved into a cushier prison or he is being untruthful about when he found out about Maxwell’s emails to Epstein, and what he actually interviewed her about. Either way, this saga is nowhere close to ending.

Donald Trump apparently thinks the time is right to throw a lavish party for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The president has been sending out invitations for a November 18 dinner to business leaders, members of the Trump administration, and some members of Congress. Since MBS, as he’s colloquially known, is not an official head of state, it wouldn’t be an official state dinner, but it will be a “formal dinner with a lot of pomp,” reports Jake Sherman of PunchbowlDC.

The dinner will be part of MBS’s visit to the United States, where the crown prince will be meeting with Trump at the White House earlier in the day, and will host a U.S.-Saudi investment summit at the Kennedy Center the next day. In May, Trump signed a $142 billion weapons deal with Saudi Arabia, following a pledge from MBS to invest $600 billion in the U.S. in January.

The president and his family also have extensive business ties to Saudi Arabia. The Trump Organization is currently working on Trump Tower Jeddah and also has plans for a Trump property in Riyadh. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has received billions from foreign sources including Saudi Arabia for his private equity firm, Affinity Partners, and speaks regularly with MBS.

Earlier this month, Trump was criticized for holding a lavish “Great Gatsby” dinner at his Mar-a-Lago estate while SNAP benefits were expiring. He hosted another fancy meal at the Florida country club last week. Given the Saudis’ close financial ties, Trump’s all-out attempts to impress MBS probably won’t help his administration’s reputation for corruption and excess.