Trump Flirts With New Tariffs in Major Whiplash

Donald Trump’s tariffs plan has caused a lot of confusion with his repeated reversals, carve-outs, and threats to raise them. So, in an interview that aired Friday, Fox Business’s Maria Baritromo asked the president to clear things up.

“Can you give us a sense of whether or not we are going to get clarity for the business community?” Baritromo asked the president, noting that business leaders need predictability for planning purposes.

Trump’s answer was anything but reassuring.

“Well, I think so. But you know, the tariffs could go up as time goes by, and they may go up, and you know, I don’t know if it’s predictability—” Trump meandered before Baritromo cut him off.

“So that’s not clarity,” Baritromo said. Trump responded by casting doubt on the business leaders and whether they actually want predictability.

“You know I think that they say that. You know it sounds good to say. But, for years, the globalists, the big globalists, have been ripping off the United States, they’ve been taking money away from the United States, and all we’re doing is getting some of it back,” Trump said.

When Trump instituted his tariffs against Canada, Mexico, and China on Tuesday, the stock market plummeted, with leaders in U.S. industries ranging from automobiles to agriculture expressing fears about how they would be affected. On Wednesday, Trump announced a carve-out for U.S. automakers, and on Thursday announced Mexico and Canada would not pay tariffs on products that comply with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, until April 2.

The real goal of the tariffs against Canada, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt admitted Wednesday, is to decimate the country’s economy to force it to become the U.S. fifty-first state. Such an effort would further cause extreme economic confusion and ruin, and if Trump is serious, this tariff fight won’t end anytime soon.

Amid a flurry of lawsuits against his administration, Trump is trying to make it a whole lot harder to sue him.

According to a memo sent to agency heads on Thursday, the White House is encouraging the use of a rarely used rule that would force anyone who sues the federal government to pay an upfront fee.

“It is the policy of the United States to demand that parties seeking injunctions against the Federal Government must cover the costs and damages incurred if the Government is ultimately found to have been wrongfully enjoined or restrained,” the memo obtained by CNN reads.

More than 100 lawsuits have been filed against the president since he took office in January. The cases range from challenging his immigration policies and funding cuts, to disputes against the Department of Government Efficiency’s attack on federal agencies. Many of the cases have been successful early on, and they are all ongoing.

In the memo, the White House framed the cases as a waste of “substantial resources to fighting frivolous suits instead of defending public safety.”

“Taxpayers are forced not only to cover the costs of their antics when funding and hiring decisions are enjoined, but must needlessly wait for Government policies they voted for,” the memo reads.

The rule the White House is attempting to invoke is rarely used in the courts, and the financial barrier could prevent individuals, organizations, unions, and agencies from taking action against the president.

It’s unclear exactly who would decide how much the plaintiff would have to pay, but the Justice Department would probably ask judges to set the amount, legal expert Mark Zaid told CNN.

That means the fee could be as little as $1, and as high as … who knows? It’s yet another sly move from Trump to dodge accountability for his relentless attack on the Constitution.

The president has decided to throw some weight behind one of his closest advisers when it comes to dealing with South Africa.

Despite tariff-induced tumult at home, Donald Trump took the time Friday morning to lambast South Africa for how it treats its farmers, threatening aggressive foreign policy toward the continent’s strongest economy by announcing that the United States would stop all federal funding to the African nation.

“South Africa is being terrible, plus, to long time Farmers in the country,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “They are confiscating their LAND and FARMS, and MUCH WORSE THAN THAT. A bad place to be right now, and we are stopping all Federal Funding. To go a step further, any Farmer (with family!) from South Africa, seeking to flee that country for reasons of safety, will be invited into the United States of America with a rapid pathway to Citizenship. This process will begin immediately!”

The missive came hand in hand with a complaint from Elon Musk, who whined on X mere hours before that South Africa would not allow his international internet project to get off the ground, due to a lack of diversity at the billionaire’s company.

“Starlink is not allowed to operate in South Africa, because I’m not black,” Musk posted on X Friday morning.

But that wasn’t exactly an accurate reflection of why Musk’s home country has refused to approve SpaceX’s Starlink service.

The South African government’s Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment policy stipulates that all companies that do business in the nation must have at least 30 percent of their ownership or economic involvement owned by Black South Africans.

The mandate is a part of the country’s efforts to correct inequalities left in the wake of apartheid, striving to “advance economic transformation and enhance the economic participation of black people in the South African economy,” per the South African Department of Trade, Industry, and Competition.

Musk has practically made the notion of diversity his enemy as he works—via the Department of Government Efficiency—to strip and defund federal agencies whose missions make mention of inclusivity efforts.

“DEI is just another word for racism,” Musk wrote in January. “Shame on anyone who uses it.”

The world’s richest man’s affinity for Nazi salutes have also called into question his racial ideology, especially as a descendant of Nazi sympathizers. That is according to his father, Errol Musk, who told the Podcast and Chill Network in November that the billionaire’s maternal grandparents supported Adolf Hitler and were members of the German Nazi Party in Canada before moving to South Africa in support of apartheid.

Pete Hegseth’s Department of Defense has marked an image of the USAAF B29 bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima for deletion—and its reason may be the perfect illustration of why right now really isn’t a good time to be closing the Department of Education.

That historical image was among 26,000 that were marked for deletion as part of the  DOD’s rushed efforts to weed out any traces of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion by Wednesday, according to the Associated Press. The photograph was marked for removal because it prominently features the name of the aircraft: Enola Gay, named for the pilot Colonel Paul Tibbetts’s mother. 

The Associated Press published a database Thursday of thousands of images marked for deletion. While some of the photographs were still visible Thursday, it’s not clear if they will remain so. One official told the AP that close to 100,000 files could be deleted as part of the Pentagon’s latest purge. 

It’s not surprising that the sweep for DEI has consequently targeted the records and achievements of women and minorities in the military, removing mentions of Women’s History Month and Black History Month. One collection of images titled “Women’s History Month: All-female crew supports warfighters” saw its main page removed, though one photograph of an all-female C-17 crew remained. Another photograph titled “Engineering pioneer remembered during Black History Month” was deleted, as well. 

Other photographs swept up in the purge included those of service members with the last name Gay, war heroes such as Marine Corps World War II Medal of Honor recipient Private First Class Harold Gonsalves, and a photograph of a group of Army Corps biologists, who appeared to have earned their spot on the chopping block because they were collecting data about fish including, among other things, their gender.

Online, people weren’t at all impressed by the Pentagon’s thoughtless CTRL-F style of searching for woke.

Former Pentagon spokesperson Chris Meagher called the report “bonkers” in a post on X Thursday. 

Rick Pearson, a political reporter for the Chicago Tribune, called the Pentagon’s purge “complete lunacy and literally an attempt to whitewash history” in a post on X.

“Republicans spent years complaining about cancel culture and then took office and banned photos of the Enola Gay because it has the word gay in it,” posted Skyler Johnson, a candidate for New York State Senate. 

“These fuckers are bigots and fucking idiots too,” wrote Army veteran Fred Wellman, who hosts the podcast On Democracy. 

“What a piece of shit you are @SecDef,” he added in a second post. 

The president’s ruthless back-and-forth on enforcing sweeping tariffs against Canada and Mexico is starting to frustrate his MAGA allies.

Last month, Trump announced he would impose a 25 percent tariff on goods from America’s closest neighbors. Two days later, he backtracked, giving Canada and Mexico a one-month delay. On March 4, the tariffs went into effect, sparking retaliatory tariffs from Canada, as well as outcry from America’s Big Three automakers.

Two days later, Trump directed another one-month pause for goods that met his 2020 trade deal, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which a White House official told CNBC covered roughly 50 percent of Mexican imports and 38 percent of Canadian imports. And then, in an interview that aired Friday, Trump said the tariffs could go higher than 25 percent.

As a result, the last week saw drastic market fluctuations, with the stock market tumbling as the tariffs went into effect. The Dow dropped 670 points, and by the end of the week, Republican lawmakers were fed up.

“Almost every industry in Kentucky has come to me and said, ‘It will hurt our industry and push up prices of homes, cars,’ and so, I’m gonna continue to argue against tariffs,” Senator Rand Paul told CNN on Thursday.

Senator Thom Tillis agreed that the administration should back off the tariffs if they were hurting constituents.

“When we start losing, you back off. There’s such a thing as strategic retreat,” Tillis told the network. “At the end of the day, I think we have more leverage than any other nation. But we gotta be smart. And we don’t have all the leverage.”

Louisiana Senator John Kennedy told Fox Business he was “worried” about the tariffs, adding that the president should “recalibrate” if the levies start to cause inflation—while insisting that he’s not doubting Trump’s leadership.

“I’m not saying that tariffs are going to cause inflation. President Trump did them in his first term and they didn’t,” Kennedy said. “I’m saying that we just don’t know. We’re in very obscure territory. We’re in uncharted waters. I think if the tariffs do start to cause inflation, I think the president will back away from them.”

Among other tariff proposals, Trump has enforced a 10 percent tariff hike on Chinese goods. That momentarily caused a panic in February for online retailers as the postal service placed a ban on Chinese packages, which it lifted days later. Casting China as a “bulwark of stability” against a backdrop of Trump-induced chaos, the Asian nation’s top diplomat Wang Yi said that China would “definitely, resolutely counter” America’s tariffs.