Trump Attempts to Troll Canada as He Loses Latest Trade War

The Trump administration has futilely projected a victory in its trade war with Canada, despite the obvious losses for the American public.

The White House’s official X account shared an image of a bald eagle attacking a Canada goose Wednesday, responding to a statement released the day before claiming that “President Trump is finally ending Canada’s free ride.”

“Canada has been ripping off the United States for decades—and President Donald J. Trump is done letting them get away with it,” the statement continued. The White House derided Canada’s previous trade commitments as “abuse” and insisted that, rather than negotiate, Canada “chose unreasonable demands, walk-backs, and flat-out rejection.”

But that’s not true.

According to Canadian officials, the trade talks collapsed after the Trump administration issued last-minute demands that Canada curtail its culture, asserting that two Quebec laws protecting the region’s use of the French language unfairly infringed upon American industry.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney suspended the talks on Friday, triggering Trump’s 50 percent tariff rate on roughly $28 billion in Canadian exports. Carney, in turn, promised to match the tariffs “dollar for dollar,” with the reciprocal levies expected to begin September 8.

In a powerful speech delivered the following day, Carney referred to the U.S. as untrustworthy and unreliable, informing the Canadian public that the country would need to forge a new path without its longstanding economic alliance with the U.S.

The “new U.S. tariffs are designed to hurt us and divide us,” Carney said. “They’re a miscalculation.”

The two nations had spent months drafting a suitable trade agreement—talks that, according to Trump, were fruitful. Last week, Trump told reporters that the countries had reached a deal and were fine-tuning some details. On Friday, hours before Trump’s midnight tariff deadline, the president insisted again that he believed a deal could be reached.

Canadian officials did not paint the same picture. Quebec Premier Christine Fréchette told reporters Saturday that the U.S. had approached a “red line” with its demands.

“Our culture, our language, is central to our identity, and it is important to exclude that from the negotiating table,” Fréchette said, according to The Montreal Gazette.“Even though we are threatened with different tariffs, it won’t change. We will stay the way we are.”

Carney, similarly, said that the U.S. had “asked too much.”

Trump, for his part, appeared not to have even realized he ruined the talks. When asked Tuesday about the late-stage demands blowing up the deal, the president appeared to have no memory of the events.

“That sounds like me,” he said, adding, “They have to pay a fair amount. And if they don’t pay a fair amount, we won’t make a deal. That’s fine.”

A Chinese hacking operation breached multiple sensitive U.S. government agencies, the Justice Department announced Wednesday.

The DOJ, Federal Reserve, Senate, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, NASA, and National Institutes ⁠of Health were among the targets of the operation. The cyber-espionage campaign also targeted defense contractors, hospitals, power companies, and telecommunications providers.

The China-based Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Technology Company was responsible for the hacks, according to the DOJ, which said its clients include China’s military, civilian intelligence agency, and its Ministry of State Security. According to an affidavit, the hacks have been taking place since at least 2018. Domains used by two hacking platforms, QScan and QTRouter, were seized by U.S. authorities this time around.

President Trump has not commented on the DOJ’s announcement, even though he has been posting on his Truth Social account all day. Chinese hackers have long targeted U.S. federal agencies and even went after now–Attorney General Todd Blanche in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election.

Trump attacked China in a speech to the American people last month, claiming that it interfered in the 2020 election, but later backtracked and downplayed his own accusations. This latest news appears to be a more serious attack on the U.S. government and American interests. Will Trump give it the appropriate level of concern?

GOP Senate nominee Darline Graham accidentally shared a horrifying anecdotal indictment of the U.S. health care system while attacking “government-run health care,” describing how her parents were forced to work while sick until they died and left her orphaned at 12, along with her older brother Lindsey, who recently died.

“Gun control, government-run health care, abortion until the moment of birth—bad idea after bad idea. Annie Andrews backs them all,” Graham said in a primary victory speech Tuesday attacking her Democratic opponent. “I have a different background and vision for our state.… My parents worked long, hard hours just to make ends meet. We didn’t take vacations. If they were sick, they had to get up and go to work because if the doors weren’t open, we weren’t making money. My mother passed away when I was 11, and my father just over a year later.”

Graham was immediately lambasted for her vivid depiction of exactly why universal health care is such a key issue for so many people. So many Americans—like Graham’s parents—can’t afford health care, can’t afford a day off, and can’t afford lifesaving care when they inevitably get sick, among other issues.

Andrews, a pediatrician, responded.

“Mrs. Graham Nordone says her family suffered and died without health care and apparently thinks yours should too,” she wrote Wednesday morning on X. “Call me crazy, but as a doctor, I believe there are few responsibilities more fundamental to government than keeping its citizens healthy and safe. No family should have to suffer simply because generations before them did.”

This eye-opening confession comes less than a week after Graham made another major flub, admitting she knew virtually nothing about the conflict between China and Taiwan, or national security in general. Nonetheless, she won a close primary contest against Ralph Norman with President Trump’s backing. She’ll face off against Andrews in November, an election that polls already indicate will be close.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the preeminent leader of the nation’s anti-vax movement, is suddenly blaming the Covid-19 lockdowns for the current surge in measles-related deaths.

Two unvaccinated people died from measles in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, this month, spurring calls for Kennedy’s resignation. So far this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed 2,777 measles cases, far exceeding the tally for 2025 by hundreds of cases.

Yet despite having made a career out of pushing anti-vax falsehoods, Kennedy dodged any responsibility for the recent uptick, telling reporters at a conference on school nutrition Wednesday that the blame should be directed at the regional lockdowns that took place during Donald Trump’s first term in 2020. Kennedy suggested that lapses in vaccination records six years ago had deleterious effects on America’s current measles immunization rates.

“This is a worldwide epidemic, and it’s happening because of the lockdowns, because many kids did not get vaccinated during the lockdowns,” Kennedy said.

Yet publicly available data published by the agencies Kennedy oversees proves him wrong. While it’s difficult to know exactly what percentage of the American population is actively inoculated against measles, the vaccination rates of children—who are most likely to contract the illness—are recorded by federal agencies.

According to CDC data, vaccination coverage for U.S. kindergartners fell by nearly three percentage points—from 95.2 percent to 92.4 percent—between the 2019–2020 school year and the 2025–2026 school year. The dip is more significant than it seems at face value: The lowered figures place the age groups below the threshold for herd immunity (95 percent), which would protect even unvaccinated members of a community.

Measles does not have a cure. The disease can cause a blotchy rash, pink eye, a high fever, white spots inside the mouth, full body aches, pneumonia, and severe dehydration. It can result in hospitalization or even death.

Fortunately, however, it is highly preventable thanks to a vaccine that was developed by a couple of American scientists in 1963. Less than a decade later in 1971, researchers created yet another vaccine capable of preventing measles as well as two other contagious illnesses—mumps and rubella—due to miraculous developments in modern medicine. The joint shot was named the MMR vaccine, an acronym for “measles, mumps, and rubella.” Kennedy has railed against the three-in-one shot, baselessly claiming that it was not “safely tested.”

The vaccine that Kennedy so loathes was so effective that measles was declared eradicated from the U.S. in 2000, a status determined by the lack of continuous transmission of the disease over a period of 12 months or more. That designation could be lost in November, when the U.S. is scheduled to undergo another review.

America’s diminishing herd immunity is due to a growing movement of anti-vax parents—whom Kennedy champions at the federal level—who refuse to provide their children with the same public health advantages that they received in their youth, mostly in fear of thoroughly debunked conspiracy theories that, at one point, linked autism to the jab.

During the deadly measles outbreak in Texas last year, Kennedy advised that state residents take extra vitamins rather than receive the vaccine, and justified a local religious community’s decision not to receive the vaccine by claiming that the measles vaccine contains “aborted fetus debris” as well as “DNA particles.” Fact check: It does not.

But the 72-year-old has a lot to gain from pushing disinformation about the jab: The more doubt and division that Kennedy sows, the more money he’ll make. Ahead of his appointment, Kennedy disclosed that he made roughly $10 million in 2024 from speaking fees and dividends from his anti-vaccine lawsuits. He’s also made cash from merchandising handled by his nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, which bungled anti-vax messaging in Samoa so badly that it started a 2019 measles outbreak that resulted in the deaths of at least 83 people, the majority of whom were children under the age of five.

“No one needs to die from measles in 2026,” Republican Senator Bill Cassidy—a medical doctor who still voted to confirm Kennedy to lead the Department of Health and Human Services—wrote on X Wednesday. “Misinformation and misguided policies are leaving children unprotected against a disease we know how to prevent. The vaccine is safe and effective. Parents should talk to their doctor about protecting their children from this disease.”

As a reminder: Since their invention, vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have effectively eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat to the average, health-conscious individual.

President Trump’s renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is continuing to fail. 

Freelance photographer Joe Flood posted a video Wednesday of workers dealing with large chunks of sealant peeling off the dry concrete at the bottom of the pool, which was full of water before Trump turned his attention to it. 

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the pool was vandalized, with the Washington, D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office filing charges in July against former Olympic canoeist David Hearn for allegedly ripping a large gash from the pool’s blue paint and lining. Those charges were baseless, as the pool’s paint was peeling off due to the application of hydrogen peroxide to kill algae. The U.S. Attorney’s Office was forced to drop the case against Hearn and all other so-called “vandals.”

The state of the pool Wednesday would seem to confirm that Trump was wrong all along, although he has yet to admit it. Last week, court filings revealed that the Trump administration knew the pool’s paint was peeling almost a month before bringing charges against Hearn and other defendants.

Trump gave the renovation project to a business owned by a longtime Republican donor, curiously named  Greenwater Services, through a no-bid process. The Justice Department has admitted that the damage to the Reflecting Pool was caused by Greenwater’s “flawed” installation of the pool lining, not vandals, and it doesn’t appear to be over yet. 

Not only is the pool still in an awful state, but Trump could face legal action from Hearn over the false claims his administration made against him, and Democrats in Congress want to investigate why the administration pushed the made-up charges. This long, drawn-out, failed project that wasn’t even necessary in the first place is emblematic of Trump’s presidency.