MAGA Senator Threatens Walmart for Responding to Trump’s Tariffs

Walmart may be wading through dangerous waters with Donald Trump’s administration after announcing that the president’s tariffs would likely lead to price increases for consumers.

During CNBC’s Squawk Box Monday, co-host Andrew Ross Sorkin asked Tennessee Senator Bill Hagerty about the president’s recent outrage at Walmart. The mega retail chain’s CFO warned last week that consumers might start to see higher prices on products as soon as June.

“In the short term, if Walmart decides that they have to raise prices, do you think that that’s un-American, effectively?” Sorkin asked.

“I think Walmart’s gonna have to make some decisions; Walmart has the broadest base of American clients there is. I think they’re gonna be very careful about how they do this. I know that they’ve received some criticism from the president. I think they need to think hard,” Hagerty replied.

Walmart’s CFO had explained that Walmart imports a third of its merchandise and food from other countries, with China being the largest supplier, followed by Mexico, Canada, India, and Vietnam, making it vulnerable to supply chain disruptions sparked by Trump’s sweeping reciprocal tariff policy. He also said that it wouldn’t be easy to adapt to changes in demand sparked by fluctuations in pricing.

Trump had hit back at the retail corporation in an angry post on Truth Social Saturday. “Walmart should STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain,” he wrote.

The president advised Walmart, which had made more money than it expected, to “EAT THE TARIFFS” and not increase prices on consumer goods. CNBC reported that Walmart had beat earnings estimates but fallen short on sales.

“I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!” the president warned.

On Sunday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was asked whether Trump’s “Eat the tariffs” line meant that he wanted American companies to be “less profitable.” Bessent confirmed that Walmart CEO Doug McMillon had told him the company planned to “eat some of the tariffs.” The rest would likely still fall on consumers.

Last week, the White House announced that it had negotiated a lowered tariff rate of 30 percent on Chinese imports to the U.S. for the next 90 days.

The president’s tariffs on China appear to have backfired.

Last week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that U.S. tariffs on China would temporarily decrease to 30 percent from 145 percent for the next 90 days. The suspension followed a meeting in Geneva where Bessent and other U.S. officials met with their Chinese counterparts and temporarily put aside some of their differences. In exchange, China said it would lower its import tariff on American products to 10 percent from 125 percent. Both nations agreed to maintain a reciprocal tariff rate of 10 percent.

But countries “from Seoul to Brussels” have taken notice of the exchange, observing that tougher tactics against Trump appear to be the best recourse against the punishing tariffs, Bloomberg reported Sunday.

“This shifts the negotiating dynamic,” Stephen Olson, a former U.S. trade negotiator, told Bloomberg. “Many countries will look at the outcome of the Geneva negotiations and conclude that Trump has begun to realize that he has overplayed his hand.”

The Trump administration is running out of time to secure what it had promised would be “90 deals in 90 days” on U.S. trade—and other foreign leaders are realizing that they have better cards than they originally thought, leading them to play the waiting game rather than participate in a frenzied lineup for potential trade relief from Washington.

South Korea’s leading presidential candidate Lee Jae-myung has indicated that there’s no need to rush negotiations with U.S. trade officials. Japan’s Trade Minister Yoji Muto skipped a meeting with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer in South Korea last week.

“We will keep time limits in mind during negotiations, but we have no intention of compromising our national interests by becoming overly fixated on them,” Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba said in Parliament Monday.

And some nations could be banking on the fact that the U.S. will be the first to feel the sting of Trump’s tariffs, forcing a policy change from within.

“The economic pain is more immediate and broad-based in the U.S., and this deal can be seen as the Trump administration acknowledging that,” Robert Subbaraman, head of global markets research at Nomura Holdings Inc, told Bloomberg.

Senator Rick Scott thinks that people who won’t work are choosing not to have health care.

The Florida Republican made the outrageous statement in an interview on Fox and Friends Monday morning, responding to Charles Hurt’s leading question about “one of the sticking points” of the GOP’s budget bill being “about paying able-bodied 30-year-old men without dependents welfare with no work requirement.”

“Why do some of your colleagues have a problem with that?” Hurt asked Scott. The Florida senator then responded with his pronouncement.

“If you don’t want to work, you’re the one that decided you don’t want health care. That’s number one. Number two: Medicaid is supposed to be for children that don’t have health care and people with chronic illness,” Scott said.

Scott’s perception of Medicaid is horrible. It fails to take into account people whose illnesses prevent them from working, those whose jobs don’t offer health insurance, or those who want to work but can’t get jobs for multiple reasons, such as serving as a caregiver or having a criminal record.

And aside from that, Scott’s own background betrays his massive hypocrisy. Before he entered politics, Scott was the head of Columbia/HCA, one of the country’s biggest for-profit hospital chains, which was found responsible for the largest Medicare and Medicaid fraud case in the country’s history, receiving $1.7 billion in fines. The company “systemically defrauded” federal health care programs while paying kickbacks to its physicians.

Scott knows quite well that the real waste and fraud in health care is from companies like his own, which made him one of the wealthiest people in Congress. He has never faced consequences for his role in the fraud, serving as Florida’s governor and later a senator. Perhaps, though, he should keep his mouth shut when it comes to attacking people who depend on the government health care service.

The White House has officially opened its doors to a website accused of spreading Russian propaganda.

Press secretary Karoline Leavitt welcomed Zero Hedge’s Liam Cosgrove to the new media seat Monday—who predictably proceeded to relay conspiracy theories when given an opportunity to ask the first question at the morning press briefing.

Zero Hedge is a financial blog started under a pen name by Bulgarian-born former investment banker Daniel Ivandjiiski, and has been accused by U.S. intelligence officials of publishing articles crafted by Moscow-controlled media. The site has also spread conspiracy theories about Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement, and circulated fake quotes from politicians. The site amassed a large alt-right (now mainstream) audience, including racists, antisemites, and conspiracy theorists. Now it’s being granted an even larger platform and preferential treatment from the White House.

Cosgrove asked two questions. The first was about whether Donald Trump planned to stop “financing foreign wars” in Ukraine and Gaza, during which Cosgrove managed to laud Trump and take a shot at Joe Biden. The second was about an old conspiracy theory resurfaced by the president himself.

“So, over the weekend, President Trump posted [on] Truth Social, a video highlighting what most people call the ‘Clinton body count,’” Cosgrove said. “Which is the strange number of suicides that seem to happen in Clinton circles—”

As Cosgrove spoke, Leavitt was visibly holding back a smile.

Cosgrove took issue with reporting from The Washington Post that Trump’s Truth Social post had amplified “false” conspiracy theories. Although it wasn’t mentioned in the video shared by the president, Cosgrove raised the apparent suicide of Mark Middleton, a former aide to President Bill Clinton who had been a point of contact between the White House and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, as his own evidence of the “Clinton body count.”

“That’s just a lead-in to my question about the most famous Clinton-related suicide, which is that of Jeffrey Epstein. There’s still a lot of questions about the Epstein files—” Cosgrove continued, asking whether the White House planned to release information that would connect Epstein’s trafficking activities to intelligence agencies, “even potentially as part of a blackmail ring with potential ties to the Israeli government.”

In a classic Leavitt nonanswer, she said that more information about Epstein would be released soon because Attorney General Pam Bondi had said she would release more information soon.

The White House opened up its briefing room to “new media” in January and has made way for a revolving door of professional journalists, podcasters, and influencers. This crowd has inevitably included several MAGA talking heads, including content creators from Breitbart, the right-wing video platform Rumble, BreakingPoints, the Daily Wire, former Newsmax host Mark Halperin, and the right-wing substack Washington Reporter.

Republicans in the House Budget Committee passed Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” on their second try late Sunday, advancing his 2017 tax cuts for multimillionaires and corporations closer to the House floor.

And by Monday morning, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was plainly lying about the impact of the forthcoming legislation.

“Is the president OK with this bill adding to the deficit?” a reporter asked.

“This bill does not add to the deficit. In fact, according to the Council of Economic Advisers, this bill will save $1.6 trillion, and the president absolutely understands and hears the concerns of fiscal conservatives and of Americans who want to get our fiscal house in order,” Leavitt responded.

“That’s what the intention of this bill is. There’s $1.6 trillion worth of savings in this bill,” she continued. “That’s the largest savings for any legislation that has ever passed Capitol Hill in our nation’s history.”

Where Leavitt acquired that number is not clear, but other, non-administration-related estimates say otherwise.

Trump’s tax cuts for corporations and multimillionaires is estimated to add trillions to the national deficit. The reconciliation bill’s final deficit price tag has yet to be determined, but last week, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget released a report indicating that the proposal was expected to add somewhere between $3.8 trillion and $5.3 trillion to the national deficit over the next 10 years. As of the time of publishing, the U.S. deficit is currently at $36.8 trillion.

To offset the hike, Republicans proposed cutting $880 billion from Medicaid by way of adding work requirements and booting undocumented immigrants off the public health coverage program (undocumented immigrants are ineligible to receive Medicaid, though lifesaving care under EMTALA can be covered by emergency Medicaid).

To alleviate the whopping deficit growth, the bill also didn’t follow through on things that Trump had promised to his base, such as stripping taxes from tips, overtime pay, and Social Security benefits.

The bill initially stalled Friday due to a far-right flank in the committee that remained skeptical of adding such a significant sum to the national debt. In a statement prior to the vote, Representative Chip Roy—who voted “no” last week but flipped his vote to “present” on Sunday—said that the bill fell “profoundly short.”

Stephen Miran, the chair of the Trump administration’s Council of Economic Advisers, is possibly best known for his plan to correct the U.S. deficit by weakening the dollar—something he’s dubbed the “Mar-a-Lago Accord.” Miran, a Harvard-trained economist, has other controversial theories that have made him an outlier among his peers.

In addition to his dollar-weakening stratagem, Miran has been a vocal proponent of Trump’s tariff plan, pitting him against dozens of Nobel Prize–winning economists who have warned since Election Day that the MAGA leader’s stiff tariff increases and tax cuts would spell disaster for the average American.

Columnists have labeled Trump’s bill the second coming of Reagonomics, promising to slash taxes for the wealthy while leaving the rest of the U.S. population to scramble for the trickle-down, a wealth distribution theory that economists, think tanks, and newspapers have concluded doesn’t “hold up.”