Even Trump Can’t Promise His Tariffs Won’t Raise Costs

Donald Trump still can’t promise positive dividends for Americans as a result of his “concepts” of an economic plan.

The president-elect dodged a direct question regarding his tariff plan during an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, refusing to acknowledge that his intent to impose massive tariffs on three of the United States’ biggest trading partners would ultimately hurt American wallets.

“Economists of all stripes say that ultimately, consumers pay the price of tariffs. Can you guarantee American families won’t pay more?” asked NBC’s Kristen Welker.

“I can’t guarantee anything. I can’t guarantee tomorrow. But I can say that if you look at my—just pre-Covid, we had the greatest economy in the history of our country—and I had a lot of tariffs on a lot of different countries, but in particular China,” Trump said.

He then boasted that he had effectively created the post-Covid boom, which saw the American economy returning to life (thanks to President Joe Biden’s efforts) after almost completely stagnating due to the global pandemic.

Trump then falsely claimed that Mexico and Canada’s trade deficits with the United States were “subsidies,” rather than indicators that America’s neighbors are purchasing more of its goods than they’re selling in return. In 2023, that differential—or deficit—was nearly $41 billion with Canada and $162 billion with Mexico, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Trump also vastly overinflated the reality of the deficits, wrongly asserting that the U.S. is “subsidizing” its neighbors to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars each.

The solution to that fake problem, according to Trump, is to turn Mexico and Canada into states.

“If we’re going to subsidize them, let them become a state. We’re subsidizing Mexico, and we’re subsidizing Canada, and we’re subsidizing many countries all over the world,” Trump said. “And all I want to do is I want to have a level, fast, but fair playing field.”

Trump has promised to tackle inflation by imposing extreme tax cuts and tariffs on countries around the world. The MAGA leader has floated several tariff ideas—including one impossibly high hike between 200 and 2,000 percent on imported Chinese goods.

Businesses across the country have balked at his numbers, with CEOs arguing that it will be Americans, not foreign countries, who pay the price.

Readying themselves for a second Trump administration, companies whose business models rely on foreign suppliers—from the auto industry to some of the nation’s most popular clothing lines—are already planning to introduce price hikes on their products.

“We’re set to raise prices,” Timothy Boyle, chief executive of Columbia Sportswear, told The Washington Post in October. “We’re buying stuff today for delivery next fall. So we’re just going to deal with it and we’ll just raise the prices.… It’s going to be very, very difficult to keep products affordable for Americans.”

Trump has also proposed a more modest 20–60 plan, in which his second term would impose a 20 percent worldwide tariff alongside a 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods. But even that plan would prove devastating for the economy, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, which found that it would lower household incomes by an average of $3,000 in 2025.

In a joint letter released before the election, nearly two dozen Nobel Prize-winning economists formally warned against Trump’s economic plan, arguing that the MAGA leader’s stiff tariff increases and tax cuts would spell disaster for the average American.

Donald Trump has just rewarded his lawyer Alina Habba with a plum job in his new administration: counselor to the president. 

The president-elect made the announcement Sunday on his Truth Social account, calling her “a tireless advocate for Justice, a fierce Defender of the Rule of Law, and an invaluable Advisor to my Campaign and Transition Team.”

There was speculation that Habba would be chosen as Trump’s press secretary, but ultimately Trump decided to go with his campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt. Habba has built a reputation going beyond Trump’s lawyer as one of his foremost defenders in the press, even backing him up when he spread conspiracy theories about Hurricane Helene. 

Well before that, Habba was speaking to the press during Trump’s hush-money trial earlier this year, offering defenses for Trump’s falling asleep in court as well as his penchant for holding press clippings. In many cases, though, she misspoke in court and actually seemed to hurt Trump’s case, even getting basic legal terms like “due process” wrong.  

Habba’s skill as a lawyer is questionable at best. Representing the president-elect in a defamation lawsuit from writer E. Jean Carroll, Habba’s opening statement seemed to undermine Trump’s case from the start. During the trial itself, Habba was reprimanded by the judge on multiple occasions. 

Habba had a hush-money scandal of her own involving a former employee at Trump’s New Jersey golf club, which she ultimately escaped thanks to a court settlement. Now, as she moves into the White House, Habba will have to brush up on her legal skills, or hope that Trump makes her an unofficial spokesperson, otherwise she’s going to have a rough time.

Trump wants anyone involved with the House January 6 investigation committee in jail ASAP.

In an interview aired Sunday on Meet the Press—Trump’s first since his election night win—the president-elect laid out the framework for his draconian vision, starting with his revenge list.

“I think those people committed a major crime, and [Liz] Cheney was behind it,” he said of the House select committee tasked with investigating January 6. “And so was Benny Thompson. Everybody on that committee.… For what they did, yeah, honestly, they should go to jail.”

The committee, run by the aforementioned Cheney and Thompson, as well as six other Democrats and another Republican, was shut down when Republicans won the House back in 2023.  

The committee accurately deduced that Trump did indeed incite acts of violence during his attempt to hold onto the office after his 2020 defeat, which he refuses to acknowledge to this day. He also accused the committee of deleting and destroying evidence regarding January 6, a claim with no evidence. 

Cheney responded to Trump’s threat in a statement to The Washington Post. “Here is the truth: Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and seize power. He mobilized an angry mob and sent them to the United States Capitol, where they attacked police officers, invaded the building, and halted the official counting of electoral votes,” she said. “Donald Trump’s suggestion that members of Congress who later investigated his illegal and unconstitutional actions should be jailed is a continuation of his assault on the rule of law and the foundations of our republic.”

Former Illinois Representative Adam Kinzinger, the other Republican on the committee, also fired back at the president-elect. “If Donald wants to pursue this vindictive fantasy, I say bring it on,” he stated on his Substack. “I’m not intimidated by a man whose actions on January 6th showed a cowardly disregard for democracy and the rule of law.”

In the Meet the Press interview, Trump went on to express distaste for special counsel Jack Smith, who was heading the investigation into January 6, saying that he would let attorney general nominee Pam Bondi “do what she wants to do” to Smith. 

Trump used the entire election cycle to fill out his “prosecute and imprison” list, and is so deep in his lies about January 6 that he’s convinced himself of his own victimhood. It’s us who are the problem, not him. When asked if he would finally concede the 2020 election now that the dust has settled and he’s won again, Trump replied, “No, why would I do that?” 

Various outlets have reported that President Biden has put preemptive pardons on the table for anyone who might be on one of Trump’s lists.

Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s pick to take over the FBI, has put together an enemies list composed of members of the so-called “deep state.” But he may have already ruined his own plans to prosecute any of those people.

Paul Rosenzweig, the former deputy assistant secretary for policy in the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush, thinks that Patel has doomed his revenge plot by openly discussing it, he wrote in The Bulwark Friday.

Rosenzweig explains that if accused criminals can prove that their prosecution is vindictive, they have grounds to rebut the charges. Usually, that’s very hard for defendants to prove, but Patel’s many interviews and the long enemies list in his book Government Gangsters provide that proof.

“If Kash Patel becomes director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as President Trump has suggested he should, he will be the poster child of vindictiveness—and his infamous public declarations of retribution may lead to the dismissal of any politically motivated prosecutions he initiates against his enemies list of ‘Deep State’ opponents,” Rosenzweig writes.

Even if Patel has actual credible evidence against any of the people on that list, he has preemptively hurt those efforts, according to Rosenzweig.

“A defendant can still succeed if he or she can present direct evidence showing that the prosecution was intended as retribution, notwithstanding the fact that actual crimes may have occurred,” the ex-Bush administration official writes.

Patel has already demonstrated a willingness to go after his own critics, threatening legal action against Olivia Troye, his former colleague from the first Trump administration, after she criticized him during an appearance on MSNBC. Democratic and Republican senators alike reportedly aren’t in favor of his nomination, preferring that current FBI Director Christopher Wray serve out the rest of his 10-year term. If Patel has actually messed up Trump’s chances to take revenge against enemies, the MAGA loyalist might soon lose the support of the president-elect too.

Elon Musk was behind a pro–Donald Trump Super PAC that falsely claimed the president-elect’s position on abortion aligned with the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s.

Politico reported Thursday that the world’s richest man was the only funder behind RBG PAC, giving the group $20.5 million to spend on ads claiming that Ginsburg was of “one mind” with Trump on the issue of abortion. The PAC’s website even displayed photos of Trump and the justice, saying that “great minds think alike.”

Ginsburg’s family vehemently opposed the ads. In October, her granddaughter Claudia Spera said in a statement that using the late justice’s name to “support Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, and specifically to suggest that she would approve of his position on abortion, is nothing short of appalling.”

Musk’s donation is a small fraction of the more than $250 million he spent on the 2024 presidential election for Trump’s candidacy but among the most secretive of the tech CEO’s political expenditures. He donated the $20.5 million on October 24, which was not disclosed until Thursday in a Federal Election Commission filing, conveniently a month after Election Day.

The RBG scheme isn’t Musk’s only deceptive political action during the campaign. The billionaire, through his larger America PAC, spent money on ads that touted Vice President Kamala Harris’s support for Israel, aimed at pro-Palestine Arab and Muslim voters in Michigan, while also funding ads attacking her as supporting anti-Israel policies, which were aimed at Jewish voters in Pennsylvania.

Musk brazenly gave away daily $1 million “lottery” prizes to voters in battleground states in the weeks leading up to the election and successfully avoided any legal consequences for it. But all of this is his known spending. He may have spent much more on right-wing dark money groups and in downballot races, which could remain hidden to the public. And thanks to America’s easily exploitable campaign finance laws, it’s all perfectly legal.

As Donald Trump drilled down in support of his defense secretary nominee, Pete Hegseth, his MAGA acolytes fell in line—but some are pushing a little too hard on the throttle to illustrate their deference to the president-elect’s choices.

During an interview Friday on Real America’s Voice’s Charlie Kirk Show, while blowing off the rape allegations plaguing Hegseth’s nomination process, Texas Representative Chip Roy practically admitted to his own sexual assault scandal.

“I think Pete Hegseth was an exceptional pick,” Roy said of the former Fox News anchor, who has been decried as “inordinately unqualified” for the top Pentagon position by former Army National Guard officials.

“He’s under fire from squishy senators who’ve been against everything we want to do,” Roy continued. “So I hope that Pete holds the line all the way through. And we should all defend him.

“Look, we’ve all had some indiscretions in our past and things like that,” Roy added, seemingly referring to Hegseth’s situation. “Every human has. But good grief, Pete Hegseth—you know, he has the support of so many people. And he represents somebody who would take on the defense establishment.”

Hegseth, a 44-year-old former infantry officer, has been under fire since Trump tapped him to lead the Pentagon, primarily over a shocking 2017 police report that revealed the Army veteran was accused of raping an attendee at a Republican women’s conference in Monterey, California. Hegseth has also admitted to several other scandals, including five affairs that he had during his first marriage. Some of Hegseth’s former Fox colleagues have accused him of being “handsy” and groping them. Nearly a dozen of his former co-workers have spoken to various media outlets to warn that his drinking habits are “concerning,” and some noted that they had smelled alcohol on Hegseth as recently as last month.

Republicans at the forefront of the Senate confirmation process have bristled at Hegseth’s nomination, with some taking particular note of the 44-year-old’s drinking problem. In an interview with CNN earlier this week, Republican Senator Kevin Cramer specified that Hegseth needed to stay away from the bottle and offer a promise of sobriety before taking the reins of the country’s military intelligence.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s pick to run the Department of Health and Human Services, is already taking applications for people to work for him—and they include some bizarre questions. 

Puck News reported Friday that the anti-vaccine activist has a form on his “Make America Healthy Again” website where applicants can respond to a series of questions by selecting some odd pre-written responses.

Job hunters have to fill out a 90-minute questionnaire that recommends one be “well rested, have recently eaten, and will not be disturbed” before beginning. The questions themselves seem to concern personality traits, with applicants having to choose responses such as “Modesty doesn’t become me,” “I get upset when people don’t notice how I look when I go out in public,” and “I can usually talk my way out of anything.”

Kennedy has some unusual views, including believing that the Covid-19 pandemic was planned, AIDS isn’t caused by HIV,  and that WiFi causes cancer, so it’s not a big surprise that he would have an unusual application process. However, at this point, Kennedy has not even begun his Senate confirmation hearings, let alone been sworn into Trump’s Cabinet, so these applications don’t meet federal hiring standards and laws.

If Kennedy is confirmed, it will be interesting to see if his application process faces legal challenges, especially since many federal agencies are unionized. Trump has pledged to purge the civil service of his opponents and is putting Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of “government efficiency,” which effectively means massive cuts to government programs and the firing of civil servants in large numbers. 

Kennedy’s strange hiring standards may not initially hold up, but if Trump and his new friends get their way on overhauling the civil service, these kinds of unusual applications could become the norm in the federal bureaucracy, to the detriment of the government actually functioning well. 

Ex–Fox 5 New York host and Trumpian acolyte Greg Kelly uncharacteristically dropped the hammer on one of the president-elect’s Cabinet picks, warning that his former network colleague—defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth—has “serious baggage” that makes him “blackmailable.”

“I was once accused of sexual assault, falsely,” Kelly said on Newsmax, his current home network, Wednesday. “I would never in a billion years pay that person a dime. That doesn’t sound like a fighter. That sounds like somebody who’s blackmailable. And I’m not comfortable with that individual being the secretary of defense.”

Kelly, the son of New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, was accused of raping and impregnating a woman in 2011 before the charges were dropped a year later by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.

Hegseth, meanwhile, has been under fire since Donald Trump tapped him to lead the Pentagon, primarily over a shocking 2017 police report that revealed the Army veteran was accused of raping an attendee at a Republican women’s conference in Monterey, California. Hegseth has also admitted to several other scandals, including five affairs that he had during his first marriage. Some of Hegseth’s former Fox colleagues have accused him of being “handsy” and groping them. Nearly a dozen of his former co-workers have spoken to various media outlets to warn that his drinking habits are “concerning,” and some noted that they had smelled alcohol on Hegseth as recently as last month.

Republicans at the forefront of the Senate confirmation process have also taken note of Hegseth’s drinking problem. In an interview with CNN earlier this week, Republican Senator Kevin Cramer specified that Hegseth needed to stay away from the bottle and offer a promise of sobriety before taking the reins of the country’s military intelligence.

Even Hegseth’s own mother couldn’t defend the white nationalist-connected conservative, accusing her son in a scathing 2018 email following his separation from his second wife of “using women for his own power.” (Penelope Hegseth has since publicly changed her tune—on Wednesday morning, she appeared on Fox News to beg people to support her son for defense secretary.)

But beyond the unsavory misconduct, Kelly’s gripe with Hegseth is that he’s an unqualified candidate who simply hasn’t demonstrated enough loyalty to Trump to warrant such a title.

“Pete Hegseth is no Matt Gaetz,” Kelly said, referring to the legally embattled ex-congressman who was practically forced to drop his attorney general nomination last month over sex trafficking allegations. “He hasn’t done nearly enough for MAGA to warrant the Department of Defense job. And he’s got serious baggage. Serious baggage. It happens sometimes. Not every pick is perfect.”

Trump, meanwhile, has drilled down on his endorsement of the former Fox host.

“Pete Hegseth is doing very well. His support is strong and deep, much more so than the Fake News would have you believe,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Friday morning. “He was a great student—Princeton/Harvard educated—with a Military state of mind. He will be a fantastic, high energy, Secretary of Defense Defense, one who leads with charisma and skill. Pete is a WINNER, and there is nothing that can be done to change that!!!”

Fox News’s “Patriot of the Year” loves the United States so much that he wants to completely reshape it—starting with the country’s elections.

Speaking to a crowd he referred to as “friends” during the network’s sixth annual Fox Nation Patriot Awards Thursday night, President-elect Donald Trump signaled his full intentions to enact sweeping changes to the process by which the nation chooses its leaders.

“We’re going to do things that have been really needed for a long time. No, we are going to look at elections,” Trump said.

“We want to have paper ballots, one-day voting, voter ID, and proof of citizenship, a little thing like proof of citizen—” Trump continued before trailing off on a rant about voting laws in California, which, like many other states around the country, doesn’t require voters to show photo ID at the booth. Instead, the Golden State asks its denizens to register to vote with either their Social Security number, their driver license number, or their California ID number.

Trump’s late-night ode to election fraud (despite having been relatively mum on the issue since winning his race in November) is a neon-emblazoned sign that his administration has no intention of dropping his 2020 voter fraud conspiracy—even if actual voter fraud is, statistically, a relative nonissue in U.S. elections.

A statewide audit out of Georgia, the epicenter of Trump’s baseless theory, revealed in September that just 20 noncitizens out of 8.2 million residents existed on the state’s voter roll. Out of those 20, only nine participated in elections years ago, before ID was required as a part of the voter verification process. The other 11 individuals were registered but never actually voted, according to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

Critics argue that restrictions on the front end of the electoral process—such as one-day voting and requiring day-of voter ID—would minimize voter turnout and limit the democracy’s ability to represent its constituents. This would especially be true in high-density areas like the nation’s biggest cities, where those stipulations would significantly drain resources (i.e., the number of volunteers required) and require more time to process, potentially leading to delays.

Trump’s continued focus on the nativist nonissue belies the fact that it is, of course, already illegal and impossible for noncitizens to vote in U.S. elections, including in Georgia, where the individuals who fell through the cracks in the system accounted for just 0.00024390243902439 percent of the state’s voting population.

Meanwhile, Trump has said nothing about campaign finance reform, an electoral issue that has, over the last few decades, increasingly placed politicians in the pockets of major corporations and billionaire donors. Project 2025—which Trump briefly disavowed before his allies practically admitted postelection that it was the blueprint all along—has actually promoted the opposite, advocating that the incoming Trump administration loosen campaign finance laws, raise limits on campaign contributions, and oppose Federal Election Commission reforms that could help the agency enforce the laws regarding the country’s elections.

The Heritage Foundation, the far-right think tank behind Project 2025, has also urged Trump—a man who used his own campaign funds to foot his legal fees—to appoint FEC commissioners who won’t enforce the law.

Russian state media thinks Tucker Carlson might be acting as a back channel between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

During a Thursday broadcast of the state-controlled channel Solovyov Live, host Vladimir Solovyov spoke to his guest, U.S. expert Malek Dudakov, and referred to Carlson’s recent Moscow interview with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, which was posted that same day on X.

“What is important here is that the man who came to talk to Lavrov spent the last six months shoulder-to-shoulder with Trump. Obviously, he didn’t just come to conduct an interview. He has something to say. Apparently, he has a message that he is bringing,” Solovyov said.

Dudakov agreed, saying, “Yes, we currently see quite a few similar emissaries.”

“It seems Viktor Orbán is again planning to meet with Trump, and after that, he may come to Russia once again. There are people who are willing to pass messages back and forth, indirectly,” Dudakov continued.

Carlson’s interview was very sycophantic toward Trump and Putin, lending some credibility to Dudakov’s theory. Six months ago, Carlson interviewed Putin himself, and was so deferential to the Russian leader that Putin even mocked him afterward. Still, Carlson is liked enough by the Russian government that his show has aired on Russian TV channels, although his producer claims that was without permission.

Russian strategy has focused on using fear of nuclear war against the U.S. over its support of Ukraine, and Carlson’s interview with Lavrov was very much in line with that goal, according to The Daily Beast.

“We’re on the brink of global war. Why isn’t anyone talking about it?” Carlson said during the episode’s introduction. The rest of the interview was framed around how the U.S. could avert doomsday by ceasing to back Ukraine.

Trump promised during his presidential campaign to end the war in Ukraine quickly, a possibility that Putin has seemingly dismissed. But if Carlson, as well as pro-Putin leaders such as Orbán, are carrying messages from Russia to the president-elect, negotiations related to the war could be in the pipeline. They will likely favor Putin and Russia over Ukraine, though.