Trump Press Secretary Loses It When Asked to Explain Tariffs

The Trump administration is still trying to convince Americans that tariffs will save the economy, even as the stock market hemorrhages cash.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt got into a heated back-and-forth with an Associated Press reporter on Tuesday, in which she revealed that she really doesn’t understand how tariffs affect consumers—or at least is totally willing to lie about it.

“When President Trump last addressed the VR team when he was on the campaign trail, his big push was on tax cuts. He’s going there today as he’s proposing tax hikes in the form of tariffs—” the AP’s Josh Boak began, before Leavitt interjected to say that Trump is “not doing that.”

“I’m curious why he’s prioritizing that over the tax cuts,” Boak continued.

“He’s actually not implementing tax hikes. Tariffs are a tax hike on foreign countries that have been ripping us off. Tariffs are a tax cut for the American people,” Leavitt said. “And the president is a staunch advocate for tax cuts. As you know, he campaigned on ‘No taxes on tips, no taxes on overtime, no taxes on Social Security benefits.’ He is committed to all three of those things, and he expects Congress to pass them later this year.”

Except, even Donald Trump has admitted that his tariffs will destabilize the economy. ​​During an interview with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo that aired Sunday, Trump dodged a question on whether the country would dive headlong into a recession, and suggested that Americans should model their economic projections on a 100-year model—like China—rather than assess his performance on a quarterly basis.

“I’m sorry, have you ever paid a tariff? Because I have,” retorted Boak. “They don’t get charged on foreign companies. They get charged on the importers.”

“And ultimately, when we have fair and balanced trade, which the American people have not seen in decades, as I said at the beginning, revenues will stay here, wages will go up, and our country will be made wealthy again,” Leavitt said.

But the exchange then took a particularly hostile turn, with the 27-year-old claiming that the criticism had made her “regret” giving a question to the AP.

“And I think it’s insulting you’re trying to test my knowledge of economics and the decisions this president has made,” Leavitt added.

Trump has taken aggressive action to express his malcontent with the AP. In February, he rescinded the newswire’s access to the Oval Office and Air Force One, after the AP said it would not refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” citing its global audience. Also last month, Leavitt announced that the administration would take control of the White House press pool, hand-selecting which outlets are allowed access to the president and possibly replacing reporters from legacy publications with right-wing podcasters.

America’s deadly measles outbreak spread to a new state Tuesday, as the anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy has continued to push unproven medicines on the masses.

Oklahoma reported two “probable” cases of measles, indicating a spread beyond the worsening outbreaks in Texas and New Mexico. As of Tuesday, the number of cases in the United States rose to 223, with 175 confirmed infections among those ages 19 and under, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s likely that this number is an undercount, due to delays in reporting.

Meanwhile, Kennedy appeared in a wide-ranging interview on Fox Nation with Dr. Marc Siegel, during which he continued to push misinformation about treating measles and downplayed the importance of the MMR vaccine as a method of prevention, according to The New York Times.

Kennedy issued a dampened call for measles vaccinations, noting that the choice of whether or not to get vaccinated was a personal one. The health secretary also claimed that there was a benefit to gaining a natural immunity to measles through infection, as it could help protect against cancer and heart disease, even though there is no evidence to support that claim, according to the Times.

Kennedy also continued to push alternative treatments, claiming that doctors had seen “almost miraculous and instantaneous” recoveries with the use of the inhaled steroid budesonide and the antibiotic clarithromycin. He said that the Department of Health and Human Services would begin clinical tests to prove the benefits of these alternative medicines he had rushed to promote, as well as cod liver oil, which contains vitamin A.

Kennedy has already started promoting vitamin A, going so far as to add a section on its use as a measles treatment to the CDC’s website—conveniently omitting the possible health risks associated with inappropriate dosing, such as liver failure and death.

He has also been consulting with an alternative wellness clinic near the outbreak in West Texas, which has been working to distribute alternative medicines such as vitamin C, cod liver oil, and budesonide amid the growing outbreak.

Kennedy was torched over remarks claiming that a child in West Texas who had contracted measles had probably died because of poor nutrition and exercise—belying the fact that the most vulnerable population to die from measles is those who are unvaccinated.

The plummeting stock market has even Peter Doocy starting to question the Trump administration’s economic decisions.

Ahead of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s briefing on Tuesday afternoon, the Fox News correspondent called out some of Trump’s recent moves.

“We also expect the White House to try to reassure folks who are sittin’ there looking at their 401ks going down, and down, and down. This is a White House that came in trying to get federal workers to retire by the hundreds of thousands, but it’s tough to make the argument that you should retire if your retirement accounts are getting throttled, which is what is happening right now,” Doocy said on Fox News. “So we expect—we hope—for answers to all of these curiosities any minute.”

Trump’s massive 50 percent tariffs on Canada, announced Tuesday, his 10 percent tariffs on China, and his continuous flirtation with more tariffs on Canada and Mexico, have the stock market in shambles. Monday was the worst day for the Nasdaq in over two years, and on Tuesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by nearly 1 percent.

Trump is telling Americans that it’s just a transition period. But even his own cable news mouthpiece is having second thoughts.

Staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development, which the Trump administration has targeted to be shut down, were given an order Tuesday that seems to violate federal law.

The few USAID employees remaining after Trump’s mass firings were directed on Tuesday to shred and burn classified and personnel documents remaining at the office’s Washington, D.C., headquarters, Devex reports.

“Shred as many documents first, and reserve the burn bags for when the shredder becomes unavailable or needs a break,” read an email from Erica Y. Carr, the acting executive secretary of USAID, noting that this would be an “all day” event beginning Tuesday morning. USAID employees were ordered to label the burn bags with the word “SECRET” and “USAID/B/IO” with permanent markers.

The shredding reportedly began at 9:30 a.m. at USAID headquarters, and was a shock to the union representing foreign service employees at USAID, the American Foreign Service Association. A spokesperson for AFSA told Devex that the union was “alarmed by reports that USAID has directed the destruction of classified and sensitive documents that may be relevant to ongoing litigation regarding the termination of USAID employees and the cessation of USAID grants.”

The spokesperson added that there are “strict requirements for the retention of official records, particularly those that may be relevant to legal proceedings” under the Federal Records Act of 1950 and its resulting regulations.

“Furthermore, the unlawful destruction of federal records could carry serious legal consequences for anyone directed to act in violation of the law,” the spokesperson added.

Kel McClanahan, a national security attorney, told ProPublica that the shreddings were illegal under the Federal Records Act. McClanahan filed an “unauthorized disposition complaint” with the National Archives and asked them to “take immediate measures to stop this destruction of vast quantities of federal records.”

The Trump administration has thoroughly gutted USAID in its near-complete effort to destroy the agency, having canceled 83 percent of its programs as of Monday. These ideologically motivated cuts will have devastating, deadly impacts throughout the world, including a rise in multiple diseases and other health disasters. And now, in their misguided goal, they are breaking more laws.

JD Vance is desperate to shore up support among House Republicans for a spending bill that will keep the government open for the next seven months—and to do so, he revealed that Donald Trump doesn’t actually intend to allow them to spend all of the money Congress allocates.

During a meeting with House Republicans Tuesday, just hours ahead of the vote on the bill, Vance warned that Republicans would take the blame if the government had to shut down, according to three people in the room who spoke to Politico.

Vance tried to make a desperate plea for unity. “We already lost one vote, we can’t lose another,” he said.

The holdout Vance is referring to is Republican Representative Thomas Massie from Kentucky.

Massie pledged Sunday that he wouldn’t support the continuing resolution. “Why would I vote to continue the waste fraud and abuse DOGE has found?” he wrote on X.

“We were told the CR in December would get us to March when we would fight. Here we are in March, punting again!” Massie added.

To be clear, the Department of Government Efficiency has yet to publish any actual evidence of fraud or abuse. Instead the group has claimed that they’ve canceled droves of government contracts—while a closer look reveals that many were already canceled or are worth a lot less than DOGE claims. But Massie’s conviction, even if mistaken, seems unshakeable. He was the only Republican who didn’t support a GOP budget resolution in February, which would necessitate massive cuts to social services, including the very popular Medicaid.

That bill had passed by a very slim margin of 217–215. Clearly, Vance is concerned about a repeat performance, this time with new defections. So, the vice president tried to meet concerns such as Massie’s by downplaying the actual utility of the government spending bill he hoped to rally Republicans behind.

Vance promised that Trump would “ensure allocations from Congress are not spent on things that harm the taxpayer,” according to Notus’s Reese Gorman.

Vance said Trump would do this under “Section II,” but it’s likely that he meant Article 2 of the Constitution, which the Trump administration has claimed gives the executive the power of impoundment, or a line-item veto of congressionally-appropriated spending.

But Vance’s promise is really a pipe dream: Congress legally retains power of the purse, granted by the Constitution, and the president’s purported powers are severely limited by the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.

If it seems a little outrageous that even with control of the House, Senate, and White House, the Republicans must openly admit that they are working to pass laws they have no intention of actually enforcing, that’s because it is. Rather than forge actual party unity behind his agenda, Trump wants the power to act unilaterally—leaving Vance to bully party members into saying “yes” to Trump doing whatever he wants when it comes to federal funding.