Trump Gets Terrible News as His Economic Failures Compound

It’s been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad morning for Donald Trump.

At the start of Friday, a new gross domestic product report revealed that the economy had cooled in the last quarter of 2025, showing a general deceleration in growth due to large cuts to federal spending, reported Axios.

Trump and his associates have ripped through the executive branch over the past year, hacking and slashing at government expenditures on the authority of what they claim is a “mandate from the people.” The result has shuttered several core agencies, including the Department of Education, USAID, and Voice of America, while others, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, have been hollowed out through enormous staff reductions.

Following the Project 2025 blueprint, the president and his congressional allies also took aim at Medicaid, cutting hundreds of billions of dollars from the public health insurance program.

The savings, however, will not be felt by voters. Republicans opted to spend that money elsewhere, such as on a massive budget bump for ICE and enormous tax cuts for the ultrawealthy. This will result in a near-identical level of discretionary spending for 2026 compared to the previous fiscal year, according to a preliminary analysis of federal budget records by the Penn Wharton Budget Model, as reported by The New York Times.

Trump was already publicly venting about the economic revelation nearly an hour prior to the GDP report’s release, blaming the unattractive digits on Democrats.

“The Democrat Shutdown cost the U.S.A. at least two points in GDP,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “That’s why they are doing it, in mini form, again. No Shutdowns! Also, LOWER INTEREST RATES.”

Trump then mocked Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, writing to his followers that “two late” Powell is “the WORST!!!”

The news is the second-worst thing that Trump heard about his economic agenda just this morning. A couple of hours after the report came out, the Supreme Court knocked down the president’s tariff plan, deciding 6–3 that the Oval Office’s sweeping trade reform was an erroneous overreach that breached Congress’s authority.

Trump learned of the judicial rebuke while attending a White House breakfast with governors. The president had ordered cameras out of the room mere moments before the ruling was made public, though he told those gathered at the assembly that he had a “backup plan” in mind, reported CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.

If Donald Trump’s administration really wants to find evidence of foreign interference in Georgia’s elections, then they need look no further than the president’s old friend Elon Musk and his shady super PAC.

Members of the Georgia State Elections Board voted Wednesday to issue a formal letter of reprimand to Musk’s America PAC over the billionaire technocrat’s illegal scheme to get Trump elected. Georgia, a key battleground state in 2024, was the target of aggressive campaigning by Trump’s team.

In October 2024, the Georgia secretary of state’s office launched an investigation after receiving numerous reports from residents across several counties saying they’d received partially prefilled absentee ballot applications from Musk’s America PAC, according to John Fervier, the State Elections Board’s chairman.

There was evidence to suggest America PAC had violated a state law that prohibits any person or entity, other than an authorized relative, to send an elector an absentee ballot application prefilled with the elector’s required information, according to Janice Johnston, the SEB’s vice chairman.

America PAC had also failed to display in a conspicuous location that this was not an official government publication, was not provided by the government, and was not a ballot, Johnston added.

The board swiftly voted to issue a letter of reprimand to America PAC.

This letter comes weeks after Trump suggested that his Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was spotted lurking around a federal raid at the election office in Fulton County, Georgia, because she was investigating foreign interference in elections.

It should come as no surprise that the only evidence of meddling with people’s votes came from Trump’s own camp—the same thing happened in the 2020 election too.

Fox News doesn’t want a war with Iran and is trying to persuade its most famous viewer, Donald Trump, that it’s a bad idea.

On Fox & Friends Friday morning, host Rachel Campos-Duffy urged Trump to “make a better case” for “potentially going into another war.” Campos-Duffy is the wife of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and was filling in for Ainsley Earhardt.

“I don’t think the case has been made sufficiently for me,” Campos-Duffy said. “You read The New York Times. There’s a lot of people who also feel that way. If you’re going to get us potentially into a war, you have to explain why it matters to us.”

Campos-Duffy added that she didn’t think that military action would aid protesters within Iran against the ruling clerical regime.

“I just want to mention, you know, I do feel sorry for the protesters. Again, it’s not clear to me that doing this move, potentially going to war is necessarily going to help the protesters,” Campos-Duffy said. “I’d like to think that was true. Explain to me why. Explain to me why I should risk my military-aged boys potentially going into another war in the Middle East. I thought we were done with that.”

A Fox host openly questioning Trump’s rationale for military action, let alone one who happens to be the wife of a Cabinet secretary, suggests that there is dissension among MAGA and right-wing media over the prospect of attacking Iran. Trump told reporters Friday morning that he was considering a limited military strike to pressure Iran into a deal, and Reuters reports that the United States is in the advanced stages of planning such an attack, looking into targeting individuals and even regime change.

Will Trump listen to his supporters who have doubts or even outright oppose military action? Right now, the military buildup around Iran is almost unprecedented, and a bombing campaign could start a dangerous and deadly war for all sides.

President Trump said that he had a backup plan after the Supreme Court struck down his tariffs on Friday morning.

“President Trump commented on the Supreme Court ruling striking down his tariffs while inside the White House breakfast with governors this morning, calling it a ‘disgrace,’ I’m told,” CNN’s Kaitlan Collins wrote on X. “He told those gathered that he has a backup plan.”

The Supreme Court ruled 6–3 Friday that Trump could not use a law meant for national emergencies to invoke global, sweeping tariffs.

CNN’s Kristen Holmes reported that Trump became enraged when he learned about the decision, at one point ranting about “these f—king courts.”

“Trump was speaking to a room full of U.S. governors at the White House when he was handed a note from an aide informing him of the Supreme Court decision, a source tells me,” wrote Reuters’s Jarrett Renshaw. “Trump was visibly frustrated and told the crowd that he had to do something about the courts, the source said.”

“There is no exception to the major questions doctrine for emergency statutes. Nor does the fact that tariffs implicate foreign affairs render the doctrine inapplicable. The Framers gave ‘Congress alone’ the power to impose tariffs during peacetime,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote. “And the foreign affairs implications of tariffs do not make it any more likely that Congress would relinquish its tariff power through vague language, or without careful limits.”

There really isn’t any legal “backup plan” to a Supreme Court ruling, as that’s the entire point of the highest court in the land. We can only speculate as to what kind of extrajudicial last-ditch efforts Trump might take here.

This story has been updated.

This is how the Trump administration treats its veterans: Raid them, detain them, and leave them without any way to legally defend themselves.

That’s what happened to George Retes, a 26-year-old Army veteran who was arrested by ICE officials while commuting to his job in July, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday.

Retes, a U.S. citizen and father of two, was driving to a farm in Ventura County, California, where he was supposed to work as a security guard on July 10. As he approached the farm, droves of protesters and federal agents were blocking the road. He tried to explain that he needed to get through for work, but the message—and his legal residency—did not matter.

ICE agents followed him back to his vehicle, where they proceeded to bang on his doors and give him conflicting information. One agent told him to “reverse,” while another agent told him to “​​pull over to the side,” according to an op-ed Retes penned for the San Francisco Chronicle in September.

As the situation escalated, officers lobbed tear gas at nearby protesters. The chemical irritant filled Retes’s car, causing him to choke.

“Suddenly, an agent smashed my window and pepper-sprayed me,” Retes wrote. “I was pulled from the car, and one agent knelt on my neck while another knelt on my back.”

The veteran was zip-tied and left in the dirt for several hours before the agency sent him to Los Angeles’s Metropolitan Detention Center. They never bothered to check his identification.

Retes was detained for three days, during which he was deprived of basic rights that are granted to suspected criminals, according to his attorneys. “He was not allowed a phone call, access to counsel, or a hearing. He was also subjected to inhumane treatment, not being allowed a shower to wash chemical irritants off his body,” the lawsuit reads.

In addition, the unwarranted and violent fiasco caused Retes to miss his daughter’s third birthday, and “exacerbated injuries he had sustained during his military service.”

To make matters worse, Retes never received an explanation for his arrest or for his continued detention at MDC, according to the lawsuit.

“The officers, for their part, showed no interest in confirming George’s story,” the lawsuit reads. “No officer suggested he had broken any law, either. And no officer perceived him as a threat.”

The lawsuit was filed against the U.S. government, specifying unnamed individuals with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Navy, the FBI, and Customs and Border Protection.

“George’s rights were violated, and he is filing this lawsuit, not only to protect his own rights, but to have the rights of others be protected too,” Andrew Wimer, director of media relations at the Institute for Justice, told The Guardian. “What happened to George is clearly wrong. No one can be held for three days without being told what they’ve done wrong, without being charged with a crime. Americans deserve justice when their rights have been violated.”