Trump’s New Tariff Threat Derails Major Trade Deal With EU

The European Parliament is pausing the ratification of a trade agreement with the U.S. over Donald Trump’s tariff temper tantrum.

The legislative body’s international trade committee was supposed to vote Tuesday on a trade deal capping tariffs on imports from the EU at 15 percent, but after the Supreme Court’s ruling Friday that Trump’s tariffs are illegal, the fuming president responded by threatening a global tariff of the same rate.

Trump’s global tariff uses a different authority from those the court struck down, meaning that it’s an import duty that stacks upon existing tariffs. In effect, European companies will now be paying higher tariffs than they would under the negotiated deal.

A “whole range of products … are now much higher than the 15 percent in the old agreement,” said Bernd Lange, a German member of the European Parliament, who chairs the committee.

As a result, the committee on Monday held an emergency meeting in Brussels and decided to hold off on its vote for now.

“This is so uncertain,” Lange said. “It’s unclear if there will be additional measures.”

This is the second time the European Parliament has suspended ratifying the trade deal. Last month, the legislative body froze the deal after Trump threatened eight European countries with additional tariffs if they didn’t acquiesce to a U.S. takeover of Greenland.

EU officials, such as Maroš Šefčovič, the trade commissioner, want to keep the 15 percent tariff deal they negotiated, even though it’s unpopular in Europe because it requires the EU to drop most of its own tariffs. But Trump’s anger over the Supreme Court means that he is going to try different methods to use tariffs punitively to get his way over other countries.

“Any Country that wants to ‘play games’ with the ridiculous supreme court decision, especially those that have ‘Ripped Off’ the U.S.A. for years, and even decades, will be met with a much higher Tariff, and worse, than that which they just recently agreed to. BUYER BEWARE!!! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP,” the president wrote on Truth Social Monday morning. That’s not going to be reassuring to America’s international partners, even those who want to make a deal in good faith.

The U.S. women’s hockey team has declined an invitation to Donald Trump’s State of the Union address after the president was caught on video whining about having to invite them in the first place.

A spokesperson for the U.S. women’s hockey team—which earned a Gold Medal Thursday during overtime at the Winter Olympics finals in Milan—said that the players were unable to attend “due to the timing and previously scheduled academic and professional commitments.”

“We are sincerely grateful for the invitation extended to our gold medal–winning U.S. Women’s Hockey Team and deeply appreciate the recognition of their extraordinary achievement,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “They were honored to be included and are grateful for the acknowledgment.”

In a video of Trump’s phone call to the men’s team in the afterglow of their own victory Sunday, the president could be heard warning the players that he would be forced to extend an invitation to the women’s team to Tuesday’s State of the Union.

“I must tell you, we’re gonna have to bring the women’s team, you do know that,” Trump said as the entire men’s team laughed with the president. “I do believe I probably would be impeached.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is bringing in Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei into the Pentagon on Tuesday in an attempt to strong-arm him into lifting restrictions on the Pentagon using its Claude AI program for mass surveillance and unmanned weapons systems.

Claude has been the target of a federal push to make its AI tools available within classified networks—as it’s currently the only AI model available in that capacity. But this partnership is reportedly on life support, as the Pentagon is threatening to void Anthropic’s contract and deem it a “supply chain risk” for not complying.

“Just the DoD persecuting an up-and-coming tech company because they won’t want their product to be used to kill people,” one X user mused.

“Anthropic knows this is not a get-to-know-you meeting,” an anonymous senior Defense official told Axios. “This is not a friendly meeting. This is a shit-or-get-off-the-pot meeting.... The problem with Dario is, with him, it’s ideological. We know who we’re dealing with.”

Amodei has often cited his own qualms about the risks of his technology ending up in the wrong hands, even as he gifts it to Hegseth. But this upcoming meeting will reportedly be an ultimatum that either sees restrictions lifted or business taken elsewhere—a behemoth of a task given how deeply entrenched Anthropic’s AI system already is in the Department of Defense.

Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on July 6, 2019. Five days later, federal authorities told New York detectives to “stand down” in their investigations into the child sex trafficker.

Recently released documents from the Justice Department’s Epstein files reveal a new chronology of the events surrounding Epstein’s final arrest, Just Security reported Monday.

Email exchanges that took place between July 10 and 11, 2019, indicate that the FBI “directed” New York law enforcement to cease their Epstein investigations, including the New York District Attorney’s Office, or DANY, and the NYPD’s Special Victims Unit, or SVU.

“FBI reached out to NYPD leadership already and they were told that SVU has been directed to stand down and that all Epstein stuff needs to go to and through us. DANY could still try to go forward with their own investigators, so I think it is worth a call over,” reads one message obtained by Just Security.

Epstein died in prison in August that year.

The “stand down” directive circulated internally among several FBI agents in January 2020 with regard to investigating Epstein’s longtime criminal associate Ghislaine Maxwell and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former British prince.

“After our arrest was public some phone calls were made amongst NYPD brass and I’m pretty sure there [sic] investigation was closed and differed [sic] to us. I’m not totally sure of DANY’s involvement into that investigation or if they ever stopped. Our assumption was obviously that they closed anything they had after his death,” the FBI email reads.

“It may be an issue though if DANY somehow was continuing an investigation into Pri[n]ce Andrew or his best friend Maxwell. This is something we may want to figure out I’m hoping they are continuing to differ [sic] this case to us but we may not know without making a few inquiries.”

The concern was apparently over the potential for “competing cases” and internal anxieties that the public—and the FBI’s international partners in the U.K.—would be mixed up by news reports of multiple investigations from different agencies.

The Democratic National Committee’s secret report on why Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election has reportedly found that the Biden administration’s approach to Israel’s massacre in Gaza cost her key votes.

DNC personnel who worked on the report met with the pro-Palestinian IMEU Policy Project in a closed-door meeting, Axios reports, and the group told them that Biden’s and Harris’s support for Israel dampened support from progressives and young voters.

During the meeting, “the DNC shared with us that their own data also found that policy was, in their words, a ‘net-negative’ in the 2024 election,” Hamid Bendass, a spokesperson for the IMEU Policy Project, told Axios.

The report was deliberately buried last year, and now we can see one of the reasons why. The war in Gaza has divided Democrats, as well as the country as a whole, with many Americans agreeing with the conclusions of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and a United Nations commission that Israel committed a genocide of Palestinians in the territory.

While Harris called for a ceasefire during the campaign, she avoided criticizing Israel or calling for any kind of decisive action to end the war, such as an arms embargo on Israel, putting conditions on the billions of dollars of U.S. aid to Israel, or withdrawing support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who now has an International Criminal Court warrant out for his arrest over Gaza.

The 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago was noticeably absent of any Palestinian American representation and barely acknowledged the massive death toll in Gaza, seeming to purposefully sideline pro-Palestinian Democratic voices. Ahead of the 2026 election, pro-Israel groups are already spending millions in Democratic primaries. Keeping this report secret, and refusing to address the issue of unconditional support for Israel, would mean that the Democratic Party has learned nothing from 2024.