Brazil’s President Says He Won’t Cave to Trump Like Everyone Else

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva demanded “respect” from President Trump in a New York Times interview published just hours before Trump hit Brazil with sanctions and the whopping 50 percent tariffs he’d been threatening.

“Be sure that we are treating this with the utmost seriousness. But seriousness does not require subservience,” Lula told the Times. “I treat everyone with great respect. But I want to be treated with respect.”

These tariffs are based on politics and personal sensitivities, not economics. Lula has long made his disdain for Trump’s strong-arming known, and Trump’s recent tariff move is absolutely retribution for that. Trump is also attempting to stick it to Brazilian Judge Alexandre de Moraes for his prosecution (or as Trump calls it, “witch hunt”) of disgraced former President Jair Bolsonaro, who attempted a January 6–like coup in 2023 to remain in power.

“Maybe [President Trump] doesn’t know that here in Brazil, the judiciary is independent,” Lula said. “At no point will Brazil negotiate as if it were a small country up against a big country.... We know the economic power of the United States, we recognize the military power of the United States, we recognize the technological size of the United States.... But that doesn’t make us afraid. It makes us concerned.”

Trump’s 50 percent tariff is certain to make goods like coffee, beef, and other imports from Brazil much more expensive for the average American.

Lula also mentioned that he found Trump’s use of Truth Social as a platform for actual policy decisions “disgraceful.”

“President Trump’s behavior strayed from all standards of negotiations and diplomacy,” he said. “When you have a commercial disagreement, a political disagreement, you pick up the phone, you schedule a meeting, you talk and you try to solve the problem. What you don’t do is tax and give an ultimatum.”

In the past 24 hours, far-right internet personality Laura Loomer has majorly flexed the influence she wields over the Trump administration’s staffing decisions, claiming not one but two heads.

On Tuesday evening, Loomer publicly cast aspersions on Jen Easterly, a former Biden cybersecurity official who was recently named to a distinguished chair position in West Point’s social sciences department.

Responding to the West Point dean’s since-deleted announcement of Easterly’s appointment, Loomer wrote on X: “Wow [Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth]! Looks like some of your underlings are trying to screw you. There are clearly a lot of Biden holdovers at DOD undermining the Trump admin.” (Easterly, who—Loomer failed to mention—also worked in George W. Bush’s administration, has publicly disputed Trump’s baseless claims about recent elections being rigged.)

The right-wing provocateur urged a “massive” reduction in force at the Defense Department so as to weed out “moles” and tagged the accounts of West Point, the Department of Defense, and Hegseth in the post.

By Wednesday morning, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll publicly shared a memo stating that Easterly was dismissed,and that West Point will “immediately pause non-governmental and outside groups from selecting employees.” Driscoll also requested a “top-down review” of the academy’s hiring practices.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell lauded the decision, and Loomer also celebrated the outcome.

The shake-up at West Point, ostensibly the result of Loomer’s single-handed effort, comes on the heels of another victory for the self-described “pro-white nationalist,” who on Tuesday succeeded in taking down Vinay Prasad, a top official at Trump’s Food and Drug Administration.

Prasad was the FDA’s top vaccine official and an adherent of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement. But even RFK Jr.’s support wasn’t enough to shield him from Loomer’s wrath for supposed lèse-majesté against Trump.

Loomer launched a campaign against Prasad in recent days, claiming that he was a “progressive leftist saboteur undermining President Trump’s FDA.” Prasad stepped down Tuesday, with a Health Department spokesman saying he “did not want to be a distraction to the great work of the FDA in the Trump administration.”

These two back-to-back Loomerings are just the latest.

In April, Trump reportedly fired a number of national security council officials for disloyalty the day after Loomer flagged them to the president as “people who have played a role in sabotaging” him. She also reportedly sowed doubts about Mike Waltz before he was ousted from his national security adviser post.

Despite protestations from America’s trading partners, Donald Trump insisted Wednesday that his tariff scheme would pull in trillions of dollars of investment by some of the world’s largest economies.

“I think we’re going to have the richest economy you’ve ever seen,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We have money coming in that we’ve never even thought about, at numbers nobody has ever seen before.

“We have a deal with Japan where they’re going to pay us $550 billion,” he continued. “We have a deal with Europe where they’re doing $750 billion plus $400 billion, plus $300 billion, and many other countries. It’s likewise, relatively, those are two big ones.”

But those figures are inaccurate, according to Japanese and European leaders.

Ryosei Akazawa, Japan’s top chief negotiator, told public broadcaster NHK on Saturday that he expects just 1 to 2 percent of the $550 billion U.S. fund to be an investment, of which the U.S. and Japan would share the profits at a 90-to-10 ratio. The remainder of the fund would be deployed as a combination of loans and loan guarantees from banks with backing by the Japanese government, reported Bloomberg.

Beyond that, Japan estimates that its new trade deal with the Trump administration would actually save its country money, approximately 10 trillion yen ($68 billion), by way of decreased tariff rates.

“It’s not that $550 billion in cash will be sent to the U.S.,” Akazawa said. “By letting the U.S. have 90 percent of the profits rather than 50 percent, I think Japan’s loss will be at most a couple of tens of billions of yen. People are saying various things, such as, ‘You sold out Japan,’ but they’re wrong.”

Meanwhile, Trump has demanded that Europe reorient its liquefied gas purchases from Russia to the U.S. as a step toward new trading relations. And while European leaders have reiterated the potential of the plan, gas experts are not so convinced that the $750 billion “fantasy” works out.

“We are ready to go for those purchases,” EU trade chief Maroš Šefčovič said Monday, echoing comments from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen made the day before. “We believe these numbers are achievable.”

Actually following through on the arrangement would require Europe to triple its American imports by 2028, forgoing cheaper offerings from its neighbors, such as Norway, which delivers gas to the continent by pipeline. Even divesting from Russian oil would barely make a dent in Trump’s demand—the European Union imported just $23 billion in oil, gas, and nuclear products from Russia in 2024.

Laura Page, a senior analyst at the Kpler commodities firm, told Politico that the figure was “completely unrealistic.”

“The numbers are just beyond wild,” she said.

Donald Trump says that Democrats “love” talking about Epstein—but it’s the president who can’t seem to stop bringing up his old party pal, even when his cronies are desperately trying to buy him some cover.

Sources told Fox News Digital Wednesday that FBI Director Kash Patel had discovered multiple burn bags filled with sensitive documents stashed away in a secret room at the agency. During a press conference later that day, Trump was asked to give a statement about Patel’s far-fetched attempt to distract from the president’s ties to the alleged sex trafficker—but he couldn’t help but bring up Epstein anyway.

“Well, I want everything to be shown. You know, as long as it’s fair and reasonable I think it will be shown and it should be shown, and I think [Patel] feels that way, and I think Pam feels that way,” Trump said. But his comments echoed his previous statements about releasing any “credible” information from the Epstein files. Clearly, the president wasn’t all that interested in talking about Patel’s supposed bombshell.

“But it’s gotta be stuff that really doesn’t hurt people unfairly, because you have so many people involved. And if they can do that in a fair way, I think it’s great. I think it’s really great. The whole thing is a scam,” Trump rambled. “It’s a scam set up by the Democrats and they love talking about it.”

But it seems that Trump is the one who loves talking about Epstein, as he took off on a winding rant that had absolutely nothing to do with what he’d actually been asked about.

“I would like to see people exposed that might be bad, and we’ll see how that all works out, but it’s getting to be very old news. You know, if they had anything they would’ve done it the week before the election, because they were losing by a lot,” Trump continued. “If they had anything they would have done it. They controlled the file. The Democrats controlled it. Comey, and all the sleazebags, every one of them that you read about all the time.”

Trump’s defensiveness aside, one of the documents supposedly contained within the mysterious burn bags was the classified annex to former special counsel John Durham’s 2023 report on the FBI’s investigations into Russian interference with the 2016 presidential campaigns. This all just happens to be the very same subject of the Trump administration’s attempts to draw attention away from its sudden refusal to release more information from the government’s files on Epstein.

Durham’s report already resulted in criminal charges against only three people, and at trial, the special counsel lost two of those cases, with the third defendant pleading guilty to altering an email used to support a surveillance application. So the notion that this mysterious annex will unveil a vast conspiracy is severely unlikely, as the FBI’s conduct has already been litigated. Still, the Trump administration is currently working to declassify the annex and then share it with Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, according to Fox News Digital.

Earlier this month, Trump was asked by Just the News whether he would be open to declassifying Durham’s annex. “I would declassify it, yeah. Why not?” Trump said. “I would absolutely declassify it.”

Senate Democrats are pulling out a rare stop in hopes of compelling the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation to release all documents related to notorious late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

On Wednesday, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer announced that he and the seven Democratic members of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs are demanding the files, citing “a century-old and little-known” statute known as the “rule of five.”

Under the rule, executive agencies are, upon the request of five members of the Homeland Security Committee, required to submit “any information requested of it relating to any matter within the jurisdiction of the committee.”

“When any five senators on the Homeland Security Committee call on the executive branch, the executive branch must comply,” Schumer explained.

The Senate Democrats’ request includes all DOJ and FBI “documents, files, evidence, and other materials” related to the case United States v. Jeffrey Epstein.

“It’s not a stunt, it’s not symbolic,” Schumer said. “It’s a formal exercise of congressional power under federal law.”

“We are using very unique statutory authority that is granted only to our committee,” said the committee’s ranking member, Gary Peters, who emphasized that the request covers documents that Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel “have publicly already confirmed they have in their possession.”

The Senate Democrats expect an answer by August 15.

The announcement comes as the Trump administration scandalously fails to fulfill a campaign promise to release the files, which reportedly mention Trump repeatedly.

The House is currently on what Schumer has dubbed an “Epstein recess,” as Speaker Mike Johnson called off the legislative session early after Democrats forced the Epstein issue in vote after vote.

Meanwhile, the president’s allies seem to see convicted Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell as presenting a path out of the mire.

Trump’s deputy attorney general has met with Maxwell twice behind closed doors, and the House Oversight Committee plans to depose her on August 11. But Maxwell’s attorney said she will refuse to testify unless she is either granted certain concessions or receives clemency from Trump. The president, for his part, has refused to publicly rule out granting such a request and has insisted repeatedly that he is “allowed” to pardon her.