Old Man Trump Falls Asleep in Middle of Saudi Briefing on Arms Deal

The world record holder for oldest person to be sworn in as U.S. president can’t seem to keep up with the Saudis.

Donald Trump was filmed falling asleep during a briefing with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Tuesday. Trump could be seen shutting his eyes and jerking awake.

The meeting consisted of signing more than a dozen agreements between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, focusing on the governments’ economies, militaries, and cultural institutions, according to the Associated Press.

Podcaster Brian Allen torched the caught-on-camera faux pas as “surreal and frankly humiliating.”

“This isn’t jet lag—it’s a walking security risk with a nap schedule,” Allen posted on X.

The 78-year-old’s long-awaited medical report was released in April, describing Trump as being in “excellent health,” including neurological functioning.

“President Trump exhibits excellent cognitive and physical health and is fully fit to execute the duties of the Commander-in-Chief and Head of State,” the report read. Prior to the report’s release, the president said he took a cognitive exam and “got every answer right.”

Trump has an oddball history with reportedly “acing” cognitive exams. During the 2024 presidential election, Trump took several—but his recollections of the tests called into question whether he had actually taken them at all.

While bragging about his results to the press, Trump would invariably tweak the questions he allegedly received on the test, at times boasting that he had correctly recited five words and performed basic multiplication while at other times insisting that he had passed thanks to correctly identifying a whale. That is in spite of the fact that the test’s authors reported that none of the three versions in circulation actually had a whale on them.

And Trump has struggled with staying awake in public before—even when all eyes are on him. In April 2024, Trump was caught shutting his eyes during pretrial hearings for his criminal case involving porn star Stormy Daniels.

Donald Trump is paving the way for white South African “refugees” to come to the United States, but they’re not all that interested in taking him up on his offer, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

The U.S. president falsely claimed Monday that Afrikaners, the white descendants of mainly Dutch colonizers in South Africa, are facing a “genocide” in their home country. So then why don’t they actually want to leave?

Maritz Grobler, a tenth-generation South African on his father’s side who owns a sprawling 1,000-acre farm in Settlers, wasn’t interested in the offer to relocate. “This is my country,” Grobler told the Journal.

“But it’s good to know that [Trump] will back us … if shit happens,” he added.

While white South Africans are the target of horrific crimes, they are killed in significantly lower numbers than Black South Africans, according to the Journal.

White people account for roughly 7 percent of South Africa’s population of 63 million people, and of that number, Afrikaners make up about two-thirds, so roughly three million people in total. Despite having a vastly smaller population, white commercial farmers—the majority of whom are Afrikaners—still possess about half of the country’s land and produce a whopping 90 percent of its agricultural products. In 2024, South Africa’s agricultural exports were worth a record $13.7 billion.

Afrikaners have therefore maintained a hefty chunk of the nation’s wealth. Only 1 percent of white South Africans live in poverty, compared to nearly two-thirds of Black South Africans. This accumulated land and wealth is the direct result of systemic historical racial oppression under South African apartheid.

Despite one Trump official’s claim that white South Africans have been given an exception to Trump’s refugee ban because they would be supposedly easier to assimilate into the majority-white U.S. population than refugees from other countries, Grobler said that the cultural difference was still too great.

“I don’t want to speak English for the rest of my life,” Grobler said. White South Africans typically speak Afrikaans, not English. But it seems that language barrier likely won’t incense Vice President JD Vance the way it did when the hypothetical immigrant children he was mad at were brown.

Grobler told the Journal that politicians “seek power and money and get it through playing the race card and hammering on historic events.”

“South Africans on the ground will be able to move forward together if politicians get out of the way and go do their bloody jobs,” he added.

Donald Trump’s appearances on several podcasts last summer helped him cinch important voting blocs, such as young male voters—but now the president’s economic plan could damage the audio industry.

All items on the consumer price index rose by at least 0.2 percent in April, according to data released Tuesday by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But some industries were hit even harder. Prices for audio equipment, for instance, rose by 8.8 percent, according to market columnist Sam Ro, who has a Substack called TKer.

“Podcasters are getting crushed,” Ro posted on X.

The president’s tariff rollout has been remarkably bad for business, sending investors on a roller-coaster ride since he first announced the plan in early April. As a result, working- and middle-class Americans have lost thousands of dollars in retirement savings, businesses have stalled on critical long-term decisions, and America has lost some of its most important international allies.

It was only the reversal of Trump’s corrosive tariffs on China—which on Monday dropped to 30 percent from 145 percent for the next 90 days—that rallied the markets.

The news also made the dollar flourish, surging 1.1 percent against several other currencies in the wake of the tariff pause to hit a one-month high. The dollar was still down 2.3 percent, however, since Trump first announced his sweeping plan.

“Now the conditions are falling into place for a deeper adjustment and a bigger recovery of the dollar to catch up with U.S. equities and bond yields,” Kenneth Broux, senior strategist at Societe Generale in London, told Reuters.

Still, market columnists have been quick to note that the 90-day truce between the two countries is “not a deal.” The Trump administration has promised sector-specific tariffs—something that could fundamentally undermine the fragile $600 billion trade agreement set in place over the weekend.

Trump has argued that tariffs are the best solution to closing the country’s trade deficits, which he has incorrectly likened to taxpayer-backed “subsidies” for other nations. He has claimed that without tariffs, the U.S. is transferring wealth to other countries while receiving nothing in exchange. He has also pitched that hiking tariffs on other nations would bring jobs and manufacturing opportunities back to American shores, but economists don’t agree with either point.

Instead, droves of financial and economic experts have insisted that tariffs on other nations will only serve to harm America and its markets, making products more expensive stateside and making American consumers less likely to spend their money (something that Trump doesn’t seem to have any problem with, actually). The Harvard Kennedy Business School even floated in April that America’s trade deficit basically doesn’t matter, writing that “Americans earn more from, or earn just about as much from, their total investments abroad as foreigners earn in the United States.”

Donald Trump announced a weapons deal with Saudi Arabia worth $142 billion Tuesday, bragging that it is the “largest” arms deal in history.

According to a fact sheet released by the White House, the deal, which was signed on the first day of Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia, will provide “state-of-the-art warfighting equipment and services from over a dozen U.S. defense firms.” The U.S. will also help train the Saudi armed forces, including Saudi service academies and military medical services. The White House says the arms deal is part of a “historic $600 billion investment commitment” from the country.

The announcement comes after Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman pledged a $600 billion investment in the U.S. in January during Trump’s first phone call to a foreign leader as president. The White House is floating the idea of renaming the body of water to the “Arabian Gulf,” a move that will please Saudi and the U.S.’s other Arab allies.

Trump has extensive business ties with Saudi Arabia, with his company announcing the multimillion dollar Trump Tower Jeddah in December. Trump has also hosted Saudi-backed LIV Golf tournaments and events at his clubs, and an investment fund belonging to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has taken $2 billion from Saudi’s sovereign wealth fund.

Kushner has been advising White House officials about negotiations with Arab leaders in advance of Trump’s trip to the Middle East, specifically about normalizing ties with Israel. He reportedly speaks with bin Salman every week, and is trying to convince Gulf states, and particularly Saudi Arabia, to normalize ties with Israel.

The weapons deal could be part of a larger deal in which Saudi Arabia announces normalization with Israel, which has long been sought by the U.S. Right now, though, Trump and his associates are more concerned with deals that make money, regardless of whatever human rights concerns come from the Saudi regime.

This story has been updated.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is placing a hold on all political appointments at the Department of Justice until Attorney General Pam Bondi provides answers over Qatar’s $400 million luxury plane gift to Donald Trump.

Schumer plans to announce the move on Tuesday morning on the Senate floor, and it will be the first time that he will be placing a blanket hold on presidential nominees. The New York senator will also ask the DOJ’s Foreign Agents Registration Act unit to come clean on any Qatari foreign agents inside the United States who could benefit Trump or his businesses, which seems like an allusion to Bondi’s past job as a lobbyist for Qatar.

Punchbowl News reports that Schumer wants to know the specifics of the deal, including how it affects an existing contract with Boeing to provide the planes for Air Force One.

“Until the American people learn the truth about this deal, I will do my part to block the galling and truly breathtaking politicization at the Department of Justice,” Schumer will say, according to Punchbowl.

Trump has tried to explain away the jet gift as something other presidents, such as Ronald Reagan, have also done, even though that isn’t true. In addition to Democrats, some of Trump’s biggest fans on the right have come out against the deal. Even though Trump claims the gift is “free,” it will likely cost taxpayers millions of dollars in modifications to meet Air Force One standards.

In effect, this plane isn’t really a gift, but a bribe, especially considering that earlier this month, Trump’s businesses cut a deal to build a luxury golf resort in Qatar. It’s good that Schumer is taking action, but it’s coming after many other ethical issues in the Trump administration that apparently didn’t warrant a hold on nominees.