Trump Team Freaks Out After He’s Caught in Blatant Lie About Walmart

President Donald Trump tried to take credit for Walmart’s summer sale, but it seems he didn’t have anything to do with lowering prices.

White House senior deputy press secretary Kush Desai crashed out Thursday when faced with a report that Trump didn’t deserve any credit for Walmart’s recent price reduction on beef, which has seen an average national price increase of 13 percent in the last year.

“The President and Walmart’s announcement was that the sale is extending all summer long,” he wrote on X. “This is a big win for Americans. The media’s obsessive need to try to undermine any good news when it affects President Trump is pathological.”

Trump announced Monday that he’d directed the country’s largest grocer to initiate massive price cuts—but the company’s standard seasonal sale was already underway.

“I have just been informed that one of the biggest, best, and smartest Retailers in America, Walmart, will be lowering prices, by a lot, at my Administration’s request to celebrate our great Country’s 250th birthday,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Walmart will, in particular, be dropping the price for a pound of ground beef by almost 15%, among many other products.”

But a spokesperson for Walmart told The Bulwark Thursday that the retailer had begun one of its price “rollback” events last week—before Trump declared he’d won a discount for millions of Americans.

In a press release Monday, Walmart announced that it would lower prices for barbecue essentials like ground beef, potato chips, and soda. Nowhere in the press release did the company mention the Trump administration, or the country’s 250th anniversary.

Trump’s Department of Agriculture has begun a pressure campaign on grocers to lower beef prices, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. But when the USDA called up Walmart, the retailer said it already had plans to reduce prices for the summer, including for beef, two people familiar with the matter told the Journal.

Walmart ran a Walmart Deals campaign between June 22 and June 28. It appears that the company already had plans to extend the sale after that date without any urging from Trump at all.

Nine months after delivering his widely mocked “beardo” speech, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is still fuming about the military’s (according to him) lax attitude toward grooming standards.

Hegseth has recently complained in private about seeing service members with facial hair, going so far as to suggest that the military’s senior leadership has not fully embraced his new appearance and hygiene requirements, according to U.S. officials that spoke with CBS News Friday.

One unidentified official told the network that Hegseth was frustrated that his speech last year did not produce immediate results.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell attributed Hegseth’s anger to his high expectations.

“Secretary Hegseth maintains the highest expectations for our service members to uphold the professional standards of appearance, fitness, and discipline that define our warfighting force, and he continues to emphasize consistent enforcement of hair, weight, and grooming standards across all ranks,” Parnell said in a statement to CBS News.

“Commanders at every level are expected to lead by example by meeting these standards, implementing these requirements, and they will be held accountable for delivering results as the Department works to restore a culture of excellence and readiness,” Parnell continued. “Our Armed Forces are stronger when every service member meets and exceeds these expectations.”

Last September, Hegseth ordered hundreds of America’s top military commanders to leave their international posts to attend a mandatory in-person assembly in Quantico, Virginia, during which the hairphobic ex–Fox News host unveiled his agenda to de-woke the country’s armed forces.

The plan involved snipping away shaving waivers, despite the disproportionate impact that the requirement would have on Black service members, who are more frequently diagnosed with pseudofolliculitis barbae—or chronic razor bumps—due to the curl pattern of the hair and the subsequent injurious effects of frequently shaving their faces. The painful inflammatory condition has been estimated to affect somewhere between 45 percent to 83 percent of the Black male population in the U.S.

“No more beardos,” Hegseth said during his address. “Calling someone to shave, or work hard, is exactly the kind of workforce we want.”

“The era of rampant and ridiculous shaving profiles is done,” Hegseth noted at the time, adding that anyone unwilling to comply should look for a “new position or a new profession.”

Branches of the military have distributed their own internal guidance per the new grooming mandate, revealing that even those with medical exemptions will not be allowed to receive accommodations past 12 consecutive months.

The Trump administration wants to fence off parts of Pennsylvania Avenue outside of the White House, shutting down a historic space for political protests.

The Washington Post reports that the administration and Secret Service plan to put fences where Pennsylvania Avenue crosses 15th and 17th Streets NW, allowing them to close pedestrian access if they decide there are security risks.

Multiple presidential administrations have used temporary barriers on Pennsylvania Avenue, but the Secret Service’s suggestion to erect permanent fences there has faced pushback as a clear attempt to restrict public access to the White House. The Trump administration is also planning to put up permanent fencing around Lafayette Square, a public park across from the White House and another historic protest space.

The fences on Pennsylvania Avenue would affect multiple organizations that are located on the street, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery and the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream. And new fencing could cut off the public’s view of the White House and deter, if not outright bar, pedestrians from getting through.

“This would mean that residents and tourists alike would be unable to see the White House from any reasonable distance, especially if Trump plants more trees in the Park,” said Michael McGill, a former General Services Administration official who also served on the Capitol Planning Commission, in an email to the Post, referring to Trump’s other plan to plant 47 trees in Lafayette Park.

In May, parts of Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and Lafayette Square were painted with yellow lines to allow cars to park during special events over the summer, including President Trump’s “UFC Freedom 250” birthday fight and fan festival at the Ellipse. Trump has gone out of his way to remake the White House (like his ballroom) and the parts of Washington near it without any regard for public opinion.

The men who were in Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s vehicle when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed him on Tuesday say he did not try ram the immigration agents’ unmarked car—directly contradicting ICE’s version of events.

The agents stated that Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant and father of three who was on his way to work, had ignored their verbal commands, “weaponized his vehicle,” and tried to run over one of them. The agent shot him and claimed self-defense.

“That is a lie,” Jose Trinidad Rojas, 51, said in a handwritten statement offered to The Washington Post by his lawyer, Hugo Balderas-Ibarra. “It is impossible for them to say that they were going to get run over.... There were no officers in front of or behind the vehicle. They were on the sides.... Lorenzo thought we had lost them but suddenly they surrounded us.”

Balderas-Ibarra said he spoke to Rojas and the two other passengers—Daniel Tirado Pantoja and Victor Salgado, Salgado Araujo’s brother—separately, and each stated that ICE lied about Salgado Araujo’s violent intent. Victor also said that agents began firing from their vehicle’s passenger side, striking his brother in the abdomen and then mocking him while he bled out, saying, “You wanted to escape, right?”

All four men in the car had been in the United States for at least two decades. They were arrested and taken into custody shortly after the shooting.

Not only do these witnesses say ICE is lying, the footage of the incident suggests they were too. Video obtained by local outlet KHOU 11 shows the agents tried to box Salgado Araujo’s car in with their unmarked black SUV, initiating the conflict. When Salgado Araujo made a U-turn and fled in the other direction, the agents (who could have been anyone to him, as they were in an unmarked vehicle) followed him. Even worse, The New York Times reported that Salgado Araujo wasn’t even the intended target—they were hunting two immigrants from Guatemala. Now Salgado Araujo is dead for no reason. He is the tenth person to be fatally shot by federal immigration agents since President Trump returned to office.

The White House Office of Budget and Management is planning massive changes to the way federal grants are handed out, making it so that government funding can only be spent on programs that are “aligned with administration policies and priorities.”

If passed, the new rules would also allow President Trump’s political appointees to supersede federal agencies’ merit-based decisions in order to ensure the grants “demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.” There is also a portion of the proposal that bans the use of “theories of disparate-impact liability”—a legal concept that helps determine when a policy is disproportionately discriminatory.

Experts argue that the change would give Trump’s political appointees, most of whom are not experts, undue control over what kind of research gets funded. 

“This touches all parts of American life,” Veterans Administration psychiatrist Dr. Eric Rafla-Yuan told the Los Angeles Times in an article published Friday. “Control of how all of the federal grants and programs are funded will fall under a small group of highly partisan individuals who would have very few limits on how they spend these billions of taxpayer dollars.… If there’s a specific age range that is at higher risk for suicide, and we want to figure out, well, what’s going on with people that are aged 14 to 19 … we can’t do that under the wording in this rule.”

A massive group of various experts in fields ranging from cancer research to public housing have come out against the proposal, and there are over 100,000 comments on it. OMB published the proposed rule in the federal register in May, and the comment period ends July 13.

“A significant number of the provisions in this proposal would in fact increase administrative complexity, create uncertainty for grant recipients, reduce transparency in funding decisions, and undermine the merit-based processes that have effectively guided federal research investments,” the American Association for Cancer Research said in a statement. “This OMB proposal is reckless and does not meet the high U.S. standards required for a meritorious, impactful research grant program.”

The Planetary Society wrote in its own statement, “Science is the backbone of the American economy, generating a 3-to-1 return on the taxpayer’s investment. Our nation has always relied on merit-based, independent scientific review to select the best ideas and new technologies for development. The proposed rule changes would all but end the use of scientific merit in the selection of grants and programs across the government.”

Even Republican Senator Susan Collins expressed her concern, writing that it would “inject uncertainty into the Federal award process, especially for awards that span multiple years and phases and make these awards more costly.” She also noted that the “termination of clinical trials would leave patients without treatment and could well result in significant scientific and financial losses to both the recipient and the Federal government.” 

The OMB, led by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought, has been one of the president’s most favored tools of administrative destruction, as it’s helped him do everything from slashing crucial programs like U.S. Agency for International Development to shifting money toward his White House ballroom.