Trump Has Bonkers Theory for How Tariffs Will Save TikTok

President Donald Trump has once again swooped in to save TikTok, after the president’s sweeping tariffs undermined a deal with China.

“My Administration has been working very hard on a Deal to SAVE TIKTOK, and we have made tremendous progress,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Friday.

The president said that he planned to sign an executive order to delay the enforcement of the U.S. TikTok ban for an additional 75 days.

Trump continued to say that U.S. officials hoped to continue negotiations with China, “who I understand are not very happy about our Reciprocal Tariffs.”

“This proves that Tariffs are the most powerful Economic tool, and very important to our National Security! We do not want TikTok to ‘go dark.’ We look forward to working with TikTok and China to close the Deal. Thank you for your attention to this matter,” Trump wrote.

Trump appeared to suggest that his “reciprocal tariff” policy, which placed a baseline 10 percent tariff on nearly every country in the world, was some kind of chip in negotiations over TikTok’s parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance. In 2024, Congress passed a law that required the firm to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations to a non-Chinese owner, or see it banned in the U.S. Trump has now swooped in twice to rescue the app from going dark (after putting it on Congress’s radar in the first place).

In reality, Trump’s decision to impose steep tariffs on China has only gotten in the way of negotiations. The White House had nearly reached an agreement with China on TikTok, but the country hit the breaks after Trump’s tariff announcement Wednesday, the Associated Press reported.

After Trump imposed a 34 percent tariff on Chinese imports to the U.S. earlier this week, in addition to two previous rounds of 10 percent duties, China responded in kind, levying its own 34 percent tariff on all imports from the U.S. on Friday.

In 2024, the U.S. imported $438.9 billion worth of Chinese goods, and China imported $143.5 worth of American goods, according to the U.S. trade representative.

Trump previously signed an executive order in January to keep the app running for U.S. users for 75 days, “to permit my Administration an opportunity to determine the appropriate course of action with respect to TikTok.” The grace period was set to expire Saturday, April 5.

This story has been updated.

Then they came for the gamers: Nintendo is delaying preorders of the Switch 2 in the wake of Trump’s sweeping, unprecedented tariffs on the entire world. Experts, meanwhile, think the device’s high cost is a direct result of the company anticipating the devastating effect of tariffs.

“Pre-orders for Nintendo Switch 2 in the U.S. will not start April 9, 2025 in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions. Nintendo will update timing at a later date,” Nintendo said in a statement from IGN. “The launch date of June 5, 2025 is unchanged.”

The Switch is manufactured in China and Vietnam, countries that Trump placed 34 percent and 46 percent tariffs on, respectively. The Switch 2 is perhaps the most anticipated gaming console release of the year, as the first iteration was the third-bestselling gaming console of all time.

Trump’s tariffs have gamers everywhere bracing for aggressive price increases. “There’s no doubt that Nintendo and Sony bumped prices higher initially to pre-empt potential tariffs,” Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad wrote on X. “They are indeed higher than expected, but I wouldn’t expect the % price increase to be exactly in-line with the tariff.

“When [graphics processing unit] prices increased in February that’s because tariffs on China were 10%. When they increased again in March that’s because they were 20%,” he continued. “Now they’re 54% for China and other Asia markets incl. Vietnam are 46%. Unless reversed, expect all gaming hardware to see jumps.”

Others speculated that Nintendo waited until the very last minute to decide on a price increase due to the intense uncertainty surrounding the tariffs.

“Nintendo appears to be building in a buffer against these potential trade barriers while ensuring they maintain their traditional positive margin on hardware,” NYU professor Joost van Dreunen told IGN. “My view is that they probably had a range of pricing for the U.S. market in play up until the last minute due to the uncertainty on import tariffs.”

This reinforces the very basic economic concept of tariffs being a tax on the consumer more than anything else. And when used as wantonly and spitefully as Trump is using them, the price of everything, everywhere, shoots up.

A fifth of the jobs slashed at the Department of Health and Human Services were actually a mistake, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said.

Under the direction of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the health agency fired some 10,000 employees this week in an ongoing government reduction effort that Kennedy has said could downsize his department’s 82,000-employee workforce by as much as a quarter.

But by Kennedy’s own admission, that process is apparently so haphazard, rushed, and inefficient that it basically has to involve major mistakes that undermine the department’s work.

“Personnel that should not have been cut, were cut,” Kennedy told reporters on Thursday. “We’re reinstating them. And that was always the plan. Part of the DOGE, we talked about this from the beginning, is we’re going to do 80 percent cuts, but 20 percent of those are going to have to be reinstated, because we’ll make mistakes.”

Kennedy noted that some of the employees affected were not in administrative roles, as DOGE had promised, and that the layoff had affected the agency’s research work. One such program included a team of researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that monitors lead exposure in children.

“There were some programs that were cut that are being reinstated, and I believe that that’s one,” Kennedy said.

Other shuttered departments were responsible for research and policy recommendations on older adults, disabilities, HIV, minority health, mine safety, and smoking. It is unclear if these are among the research priorities that will return.

The negligent error is just one recent instance in which the “shock and awe” of the Trump administration’s federal makeover has resulted in dud details and mass confusion.

Since January, the Trump administration has fired more than 100,000 federal employees, killing the Education Department and attacking the Environmental Protection Agency. Mass layoffs were also conducted at the Department of Energy in February, where DOGE similarly and mistakenly nixed critical workers focused on nuclear safety.

Bringing those employees back wasn’t as easy as simply having them return to work the next day. Instead, dejected and “shell shocked” employees at the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration were reportedly considering early retirement or looking for work in more stable sectors, unsure if or when the Trump administration might try to dismiss them again, according to The Bulwark.

But tens of thousands more government jobs are expected to be on the chopping block as Trump pursues a second round of “voluntary” buyouts in the coming weeks.

The former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Robert Califf, condemned the Health Department layoffs in a statement on LinkedIn.

“The FDA as we’ve known it is finished, with most of the leaders with institutional knowledge and a deep understanding of product development and safety no longer employed,” Califf wrote, describing the action as “a dark day for public health.”

Donald Trump is defending his tariff plan with poorly sourced hype videos.

The president shared an X video, a copy of a TikTok post, to his Truth Social account Friday morning calling his economic plans “genius” without much substance. The video starts out by saying Trump is crashing the economy on purpose and that billionaire investor Warren Buffett is praising the president for making “the best economic moves he’s seen in 50 years.”

This isn’t true at all, though. Last month, Buffett openly called Trump’s tariffs “a tax on goods” in an interview.

“Tariffs are actually, we’ve had a lot of experience with them. They’re an act of war, to some degree,” Buffett said. “I mean, the tooth fairy doesn’t pay ’em! And then what? You always have to ask that question in economics. You always say, ‘And then what?’”

Trump’s video goes on to make several other unsourced claims, including that the Federal Reserve will be forced to slash interest rates in May, allowing trillions of dollars in debt to be refinanced inexpensively. The video also claims that the dollar will be weakened and that mortgage rates will drop, and repeats Trump’s claims that tariffs will compel businesses to build in the U.S. and force farmers to sell more crops stateside as well. There is no indication that any of this will happen. Indeed, Trump is practically begging—or maybe threatening—Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to slash rates.

The video shows that Trump is deluded that his tariffs are going to succeed and is pushing any source that backs him up. The TikTok account that the video comes from lacks credibility, as it doesn’t even have a bio and seems to only post summary videos of news events without any indication of who is making them. Meanwhile, the stock market continues to plummet and Americans continue to worry about their jobs.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent may be planning to cut and run after Donald Trump’s disastrous “reciprocal tariff” announcement earlier this week.

During an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Friday, contributor Stephanie Ruhle reported that the key Cabinet member is already looking for an escape hatch.

“My sources say that Scott Bessent is kind of the odd man out here and, in the inner circle that Trump has, he’s not even close to Scott Bessent or listening to him,” Ruhle said. “Some have said to me, he’s looking for an exit door to try to get himself to the Fed, because in the last few days he’s really hurting his own credibility and history in the markets.”

To be sure, Trump’s tariff policy represents a sort of defeat for Bessent, a former hedge fund manager who entered office under the delusion that he might actually succeed in stopping Trump from wrecking the economy. Should he flee the administration now, he would likely forfeit what little credibility remains.

Bessent warned other countries Wednesday not to make any rash decisions in reaction to Trump’s sweeping “retaliatory tariff” policy, which included a 10 percent baseline tariff on almost every country in the world.

“My advice to every country right now is: Do not retaliate. Sit back, take it in, let’s see how it goes. Because if you retaliate, there will be escalation. If you don’t retaliate, this is the high-water mark,” he warned.

Bessent’s warning came off particularly clueless given that democratically elected foreign leaders are likely beholden to their electorate, who won’t take lightly to Trump’s blatant bullying.

Ruhle’s sources told her Bessent must understand just how ridiculous Trump’s tariff policy is because he “actually understands how the markets work, and what’s happening right now is only going to hurt markets,” she said.

And it already has: The Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq Composite experienced their single worst sessions since 2020 on Thursday. Bessent’s nomination had received strong Republican support because of his experience with financial markets.

“And even for Scott Bessent to say a few weeks ago, you know, getting cheap goods fast is ‘not part of the American dream.’ No, it’s not part of the American dream, but it’s part of the way Americans live, especially people who are economically vulnerable,” Ruhle said. “They don’t have the option to say, ‘No, I’d like higher things that cost more.’ They need low-cost things because they don’t make that much money.”

Already, countries are ignoring Bessent’s weak warning. China announced Friday that it would impose a reciprocal 34 percent tariff on all imports from the U.S. Trump had levied two rounds of 10 percent duties on all Chinese imports, and then an additional 34 percent tariff on Wednesday. It’s easy to see how prices can quickly add up for working- and middle-class Americans who have relied on cheap products from countries like China.

Before he was nominated to serve in the Trump administration, Bessent had defended the use of tariffs as a form of sanctions. He told Bloomberg in August that tariffs were a “one-time price adjustment” and were “not inflationary.”

“I think that tariffs in a way can be regarded as an economic sanction without a sanction. If you don’t like Chinese economic policy, flooding the market with over production, you could put a sanction on them, or a tariff,” Bessent said at the time.