Trump Announces Tariffs on European Cars as Punishment

President Trump announced new tariffs against European car imports Friday, threatening to mess with the economy further.

In a Truth Social post, Trump announced that he is “pleased to announce that, based on the fact the European Union is not complying with our fully agreed to Trade Deal, next week I will be increasing Tariffs charged to the European Union for Cars and Trucks coming into the United States.”

“The Tariff will be increased to 25%. It is fully understood and agreed that, if they produce Cars and Trucks in U.S.A. Plants, there will be NO TARIFF,” Trump posted. “Many Automobile and Truck Plants are currently under construction, with over 100 Billion Dollars being invested, A RECORD in the History of Car and Truck Manufacturing. These Plants, staffed with American Workers, will be opening soon — There has never been anything like what is happening in America today! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Why Trump would be “pleased” with the move is one thing, but his claim that several auto plants are currently under construction is misleading at best. Industry experts say that most automakers are not building new plants, but are instead planning to shift their investments years from now. While some car manufacturers have pledged to spend more money in the U.S., they haven’t announced new facilities or manufacturing plants, and their plans may not even happen.

“They will be looking at models that will be coming to the end of their natural cycle, something that occurs at five or so year intervals, and getting ready to announce ‘investments’ to continue the new version of the model at those plants,” Greig Mordue, a manufacturing policy professor at McMaster University, told Al Jazeera.

On top of that, Trump’s decision to roll back much of President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act killed projects to build domestic auto plants, including a $200 million hydrogen fuel cell factory in South Carolina and a $2.5 billion battery factory in Georgia.

It also forced American car companies to eat investments they made in electric vehicles. Ford canceled a $1.5 billion investment in electric vehicles while General Motors had to absorb a $6 billion hit. Meanwhile, Chinese electric vehicles are the most popular in the world, and are beginning to dominate the market.

All these tariffs will do is drive up prices in the U.S., and consumers will have to resort to buying more used cars, or hold off on purchases altogether. Fuel prices are still high thanks to the war in Iran, which Trump is trying to wish away without any real action. This move, at best, is a long-term plan, and at worst, won’t bring any relief or benefits to the average American.

This story has been updated.

The Trump administration massively restructured the FBI in order to accommodate its deportation goals.

More than 6,000 FBI agents were diverted to handling “immigration-related matters” during the first nine months of Donald Trump’s second term, reported The Intercept Friday. The seismic shift has practically redefined the agency and its work.

Prior to January 2025, just 279 agents were assigned to immigration cases. By September, that number was above 6,500, growing the task force by a factor of 23. In total, 9,161 people at the FBI—nearly a quarter of the bureau’s 38,000 staffers—worked on immigration during Trump’s first nine months in office.

The change is larger than previously understood. In October, The Washington Post reported that some 3,000 agents had been reassigned to cover immigration, based on FBI data obtained and circulated by Senator Mark R. Warner.  

“That is a huge, huge number of people,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, told The Intercept of the 6,500-plus figure. “This is just a somewhat shocking scale that we’re looking at.”

The structural shift toward immigration cases is monumental: As the nation’s premiere law enforcement agency, the FBI has historically focused the bulk of its resources on crime. The bureau expanded to include counterterrorism and national security in its purview after 9/11. It has never dedicated this much time and attention to civil matters, sparking concern that the new modus operandi could hinder its criminal investigative work.

“That’s a striking diversion of resources away from public safety,” David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian thinktank the Cato Institute, told The Intercept. “We’re talking about the FBI diverting people away from criminal investigations and ongoing criminal activity and into civil immigration enforcement. 

“This is showing the extent to which the resources of the FBI were put at the disposal of Immigration and Customs Enforcement contrary to the intent of Congress, and the abuse of the funds that Congress grants the FBI to accomplish its mission,” Bier noted.

The FBI is not the only federal agency to massively reorient itself toward immigration since Trump’s inauguration. The Justice Department dropped thousands of criminal cases last year in an attempt to funnel its efforts—almost singularly—toward convicting immigration cases. Altogether, the chief law enforcement agency closed some 23,000 criminal cases in the first six months of Trump’s term, including investigations into terrorism, white-collar crimes, and drugs, while prosecuting 32,000 new immigration cases.

The shift in priorities is an indication that “making America safe again” is not necessarily as much of a goal for the current administration as Trump has promised. At the president’s direction, federal authorities have arrested thousands of noncriminal immigrants across the country, despite repeated pledges that the deportation purge is focused on the “worst of the worst”—such as “murderers, pedophiles, rapists, gang members, and terrorists.”

The majority of U.S. military positions in the Middle East have been damaged by Iranian strikes, according to a CNN investigation released Friday.

At least 16 American installations across eight countries have been struck as part of Iran’s retaliatory strikes against the U.S. and Israeli military onslaught. A U.S. source familiar with the situation told CNN that the scale of the damage was unprecedented.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before.… These are rapid, targeted strikes, with [advanced] technology,” the source said.

The main targets appeared to be multimillion-dollar aircraft. At the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, a Boeing E-3 Sentry aircraft, which provides surveillance, command, control, and communications to the U.S. military, was destroyed. That aircraft is worth nearly half a billion dollars, and is currently out of production.

Other targets of Iranian strikes include critical communications systems. At Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, satellite photographs showed that Iran had destroyed all but one ray dome, a structure designed to protect satellite dishes.

Radar systems will also prove the most difficult to replace. “Our radar systems are our most expensive and our most limited resource in the region,” a congressional aide familiar with damage assessments told CNN.

It was previously reported that 13 U.S. bases in the Middle East had been rendered all but uninhabitable, forcing U.S. military service members to work remotely from hotels and office spaces. Within the first two weeks of the war, Iran’s attacks on U.S. military bases caused an estimated $800 million in damage, according to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a BBC analysis.

During a House Armed Services Committee hearing on Wednesday, Undersecretary of Defense Jules Hurst finally produced a price tag for Donald Trump’s military campaign: $25 billion. But that number does not include the cost of repairing the damage to bases, CNN reported Thursday.

At the same time, Trump has continued to claim that the U.S. has nearly obliterated all of Iran’s military assets—though reports indicate that’s just not true.

The Trump administration exposed the private Social Security numbers of dozens of health care providers while setting up a new Medicare portal.

The Washington Post reports that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, which is run by Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, made the error while creating a directory last year to help senior citizens find doctors and medical providers that accept certain insurance plans. In the process, the agency ended up using a publicly accessible database that contained some of the providers’ Social Security information, linked to their names and other personal data.

The numbers were publicly exposed for weeks until the Post flagged it for the agency on Tuesday. CMS did not respond to the paper’s inquiries on whether it had notified any of the providers, or exactly how many numbers were exposed (the Post identified at least dozens).

A CMS spokesperson did tell the Post that the agency was working to fix the problem, blaming it on the providers for entering their information in the wrong fields.

The problem “stems from incorrect entries of provider or provider-representative-supplied information in the wrong places,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “The agency has taken steps to address it promptly and reinforce safeguards around data submission and validation.”

“I don’t even know how [Medicare officials] would get my Social Security number,” one doctor told the Post anonymously out of fear of identity theft.

The issue may have been created thanks to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which laid off hundreds of CMS employees last year, including those who assisted the elderly. On top of that, the directory was full of errors when it was introduced last October, displaying contradictory and incorrect information.

All of this is a recipe for disaster for the disabled and elderly Americans who rely on Medicare, not to mention those whose personal information was leaked to the public. It’s another black mark on the record of Oz, the snake-oil salesman and daytime TV host tapped by President Trump to head the agency.

Alex Jones’s final meltdown on InfoWars was a defiant rejection of the company’s new ownership.

Satirical outlet The Onion bought the far-right conspiracy network, ending what was arguably Jones’s most successful endeavor and marking the beginning of his descent into irrelevancy. But as the minutes ticked down to dead air, Jones vowed to return to the limelight—even if he doesn’t make a dime.

“They’re turning the power off at midnight,” Jones said, surrounded by people toasting the network. “Private detectives are coming in to close the doors. And they’re gonna act like they’ve got their big ass victory.”

Jones pledged that he already had a new venture in the works where he would continue to air his controversial and baseless beliefs.

“And I will sit there and live in a modest house with a modest car, which I love. And they think, ‘Oh, we’ll take your money,’ Joe, shut up. I’m ready to die for this,” Jones said. “You think taking money from me does something? It makes me want to strangle you spiritually. It’s a joke. It, like, empowers me.”

As Jones rose from his seat to exit, he declared: “The next phase starts, the real war begins now. It’s the nuclear age.”

Jones, of “they’re turning the friggin’ frogs gay” fame, was forced out of his studio as The Onion proceeded with its purchase. The parody company had hoped to obtain legal approval to license the network’s name and brand to turn it into a mockery of itself by Thursday, but instead, the legal case passed to the Texas Supreme Court in what The Onion CEO Ben Collins described as an “insane, unprecedented legal stalling.”

Proceeds from the sale of the network were intended to go to families of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, whom Jones still owes some $1.3 billion in damages after he repeatedly branded the tragedy a “hoax.”

The Onion tapped veteran Adult Swim comedian Tim Heidecker to reinvent the conspiracy network. So far, Heidecker has floated a multi-stage redesign, which would first see InfoWars become a parody of itself, mocking Jones’s various money-making schemes in which he aggressively advertised “hacky supplements” or bilked “grandparents out of their life savings.”

“Then we just think that that’s going to get old, but we’ll have built this little brand, or sort of re-established a brand and turn it into a destination for good comedy—a new streaming site, a new comedy platform,” Heidecker told Time.