Trump Has Sent America’s GDP Into a Downward Spiral

So much for Donald Trump’s “Golden Age.” It looks like America’s economic growth is officially in free fall.

Between October and December, America’s real gross domestic product fell from 4.4 percent to just 0.5 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis reported Thursday.

That figure is significantly less than the agency’s second estimate of 0.7 percent growth, reported last month.

The government reported that the economy grew 2.1 percent last year, compared to 2.8 percent in 2024 and 2.9 percent in 2023. If GDP growth is beneath 2 percent annually, that can typically be considered a recession.

The surprising economic slow-down in the fourth quarter can be attributed to the government shutdown, which cut federal spending and investment by 16.6 percent and trimmed 1.16 percent points off of growth in Q4. Consumer spending expanded at a pace of 1.89 percent, down from the previous estimate of 3.5 percent in the second quarter.

This weakened economy has set the stage for Trump’s increasingly expensive war in Iran. The president’s reckless military campaign in the Middle East has triggered significant disruptions in global commerce and sent energy prices surging.

Iran is not happy that Israel is continuing to bomb Lebanon and is warning Donald Trump to enforce what it says is “an inseparable part of the ceasefire.”  

In a post on X Thursday morning, Iran’s speaker of parliament Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf posted three points emphasizing Lebanon’s importance to the ceasefire deal, noting that it was part of the first point in Iran’s 10-point plan, that mediator Pakistan “publicly and clearly stressed the Lebanon issue,” and that ceasefire violations “carry explicit costs and STRONG responses.” 

“Extinguish the fire immediately,” Ghalibaf warned. 

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi posted on X Wednesday that “the Iran-U.S. Ceasefire terms are clear and explicit: the U.S. must choose—ceasefire or continued war via Israel. It cannot have both.” 

“The world sees the massacres in Lebanon. The ball is in the U.S. court, and the world is watching whether it will act on its commitments,” Araghchi said. 

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian echoed Araghchi.

“Renewed aggression by the Zionist regime against Lebanon blatantly violates the initial ceasefire. Such actions signal deception and non-compliance, rendering negotiations meaningless. Our hands remain on the trigger. Iran will never forsake its Lebanese brothers and sisters,” Pezeshkian posted on X Thursday. 

At least 203 people were killed in Lebanon in Israeli strikes on Wednesday, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry, with over 1,000 wounded. Strikes continued Thursday, with at least seven people killed in the southern Lebanese town of Abbassiyeh.  

Meanwhile, the status of the Strait of Hormuz was unclear Thursday morning. Few ships were traversing it despite the supposed ceasefire, and Iranian officials said Wednesday that traffic was once again blocked due to the strikes on Lebanon. But U.S. and Israeli officials are claiming, contrary to Pakistan, that Lebanon wasn’t part of the ceasefire.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted on X in Hebrew Thursday morning that “we will continue to strike Hezbollah wherever required, until we restore full security to the residents of the north.” 

Vice President JD Vance said Wednesday that “if Iran wants to let this negotiation fall apart—in a conflict where they were getting hammered—over Lebanon, which has nothing to do with them and which the United States never once said was part of the ceasefire, that’s ultimately their choice. We think that would be dumb, but that’s their choice.”

So, is the ceasefire all but dead? Will the White House do anything about Israel’s continued bombing of Lebanon? If this two-week peace deal is meant to hold up, then these questions have to be answered, otherwise more civilians will die and things will only get worse. 

President Trump plans to automatically sign up military draft-eligible men for a potential draft, an ominous decision to make in the midst of a war on Iran.

While registration into Selective Service—the massive database that tells the United States how many men it can force into war in the event of a national emergency—has historically been required for every U.S. male upon turning 18, the sign-up process was manual.

“On December 18, 2025, the President signed the FY 2026 [National Defense Authorization Act] into law, mandating automatic Selective Service registration. The Agency engaged with Congress throughout the NDAA process regarding the automated legislative proposal,” the Selective Service System said in a public statement. “This statutory change transfers responsibility for registration from individual men to SSS through integration with federal data sources. SSS will implement the change by December 2026, resulting in a streamlined registration process and corresponding workforce realignment.”

Multiple Democrats were quick to call out the administration’s misplaced priorities.

“If they can automatically register you for WAR, they can automatically register you to VOTE,” Democratic House of Representatives candidate Sarah McGee wrote on X. Others posted old tweets from White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller about how young men should vote for Trump lest they be “drafted to fight in Kamala’s and Cheney’s 3rd World War.”

The last time the U.S. had a draft was in 1973, for the Vietnam War, which caused institutional and ideological damage that this country is still dealing with today. A draft in this era would be even more catastrophic.

Relations between the United States and the Catholic Church have not been the same since January, when senior U.S. defense officials shared an abrasive message with a Vatican official.

Days after Pope Leo XIV delivered his State of the World speech, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s U.S. representative, to a closed-door Pentagon meeting for a bitter lecture.

“The United States,” Colby said, according to a blistering new report by The Free Press, “has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.”

One U.S. official present at the meeting brought up the Avignon papacy, a period in the fourteenth century in which the French monarchy bent the Catholic Church into submission, ordering an attack on Pope Boniface VIII that led to his downfall and subsequent death and forcing the papacy to relocate from Rome to Avignon, a region inside France.

The Trump administration had taken issue with the pope’s critique of its militaristic proclivities. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other top Pentagon officials were particularly aggrieved by portions of Leo’s January 9 speech in which the pope argued that “a diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force,” and that “war is back in vogue, and a zeal for war is spreading.”

The pope’s address was dissected line by line and interpreted as a hostile message toward the administration, reported Letters from Leo Substack writer Christopher Hale.

It was difficult not to interpret Leo’s comments as an immediate commentary on Donald Trump’s second administration, which had at that point bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, kidnapped Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, fiercely advocated for the dissolution of NATO, and threatened America’s allies, including claiming that the U.S. would seize control of Canada and Greenland.

But the blatant intimidation tactic is the first of its kind ever made by American officials to the Catholic Church. There are no public records of any previous meetings between Vatican and U.S. officials at the Pentagon, let alone an instance in which the world power suggested that it could force the Bishop of Rome into captivity.

The Vatican was so alarmed by the Pentagon’s warning that Pope Leo canceled his plans to visit the U.S. later in the year, reported Hale, who noted that “many in the Vatican saw the Pentagon’s reference to an Avignon papacy as a threat to use military force against the Holy See.”

Tensions had not been mended by February, when the Holy See rejected the White House’s invitation to host Pope Leo—the religious order’s first U.S.-born pontiff—for America’s 250th anniversary in July. Instead, the Catholic leader has arranged to visit a very different locale on July 4: Lampedusa, a tiny island between Tunisia and Sicily where North African immigrants wash ashore by the thousands.

“Robert Francis Prevost is too deliberate a man to have chosen that date by accident,” commented Hale.

The White House has dismissed the entire account, writing in a statement to reporter Barbara Starr that “the Free Press’s characterization of the meeting is highly exaggerated and distorted.”

“The meeting between Pentagon and Vatican officials was a respectful and reasonable discussion,” the Defense Department official continued. “We have nothing but the highest regard and welcome continued dialogue with the Holy See.”

This story has been updated.

As bombs rain down on innocents in the Middle East, gas prices skyrocket, and data centers displace poor communities across the land, at least Americans can take solace in the fact that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is starting a podcast.

The Health and Human Services secretary, best known for having a brain worm and allegedly contributing to 83 Samoan deaths by spreading anti-vaccine propaganda there, announced his new podcast Wednesday with a 90-second video on his government X account.

“Many of us have come to the conclusion that the government actually lies to us,” Kennedy says in the video, presumably forgetting the fact that he works for the government. “This podcast is about telling the truth, especially when it’s uncomfortable.”

Kennedy goes on to say his podcast will involve him speaking to medical experts and innovators in order to tell said truth. He also gets slightly spiritual with things: “I’m going to ask the questions, and lift the taboos, and expose the hypocrisy and the conflicts and the corruption. We’re going to follow the evidence wherever it leads, and we’re going to name the names of the forces that obstruct the paths to public health. This isn’t going to be about politics. It’s about our families, it’s about our children, and it’s about confronting the spiritual malaise and embracing the truth.”

RFK Jr. has spasmodic dysphonia, which makes his voice difficult to listen to at the best of times. But honestly, the podcast idea isn’t a bad one. Our wackjob health secretary debating actual medical experts about Americans’ health problems? It’s like The Joe Rogan Experience meets House!

Unfortunately, it’s hard to believe RFK when he says the podcast won’t be political. More likely, his guests will take the shape of “alternative” medical gurus looking to profit off of listeners and sow distrust in an American medical system that Donald Trump is already trying to defund.