Trump Press Secretary Loses It When Asked to Explain Tariffs

The Trump administration is still trying to convince Americans that tariffs will save the economy, even as the stock market hemorrhages cash.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt got into a heated back-and-forth with an Associated Press reporter on Tuesday, in which she revealed that she really doesn’t understand how tariffs affect consumers—or at least is totally willing to lie about it.

“When President Trump last addressed the VR team when he was on the campaign trail, his big push was on tax cuts. He’s going there today as he’s proposing tax hikes in the form of tariffs—” the AP’s Josh Boak began, before Leavitt interjected to say that Trump is “not doing that.”

“I’m curious why he’s prioritizing that over the tax cuts,” Boak continued.

“He’s actually not implementing tax hikes. Tariffs are a tax hike on foreign countries that have been ripping us off. Tariffs are a tax cut for the American people,” Leavitt said. “And the president is a staunch advocate for tax cuts. As you know, he campaigned on ‘No taxes on tips, no taxes on overtime, no taxes on Social Security benefits.’ He is committed to all three of those things, and he expects Congress to pass them later this year.”

Except, even Donald Trump has admitted that his tariffs will destabilize the economy. ​​During an interview with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo that aired Sunday, Trump dodged a question on whether the country would dive headlong into a recession, and suggested that Americans should model their economic projections on a 100-year model—like China—rather than assess his performance on a quarterly basis.

“I’m sorry, have you ever paid a tariff? Because I have,” retorted Boak. “They don’t get charged on foreign companies. They get charged on the importers.”

“And ultimately, when we have fair and balanced trade, which the American people have not seen in decades, as I said at the beginning, revenues will stay here, wages will go up, and our country will be made wealthy again,” Leavitt said.

But the exchange then took a particularly hostile turn, with the 27-year-old claiming that the criticism had made her “regret” giving a question to the AP.

“And I think it’s insulting you’re trying to test my knowledge of economics and the decisions this president has made,” Leavitt added.

Trump has taken aggressive action to express his malcontent with the AP. In February, he rescinded the newswire’s access to the Oval Office and Air Force One, after the AP said it would not refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” citing its global audience. Also last month, Leavitt announced that the administration would take control of the White House press pool, hand-selecting which outlets are allowed access to the president and possibly replacing reporters from legacy publications with right-wing podcasters.

America’s deadly measles outbreak spread to a new state Tuesday, as the anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy has continued to push unproven medicines on the masses.

Oklahoma reported two “probable” cases of measles, indicating a spread beyond the worsening outbreaks in Texas and New Mexico. As of Tuesday, the number of cases in the United States rose to 223, with 175 confirmed infections among those ages 19 and under, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s likely that this number is an undercount, due to delays in reporting.

Meanwhile, Kennedy appeared in a wide-ranging interview on Fox Nation with Dr. Marc Siegel, during which he continued to push misinformation about treating measles and downplayed the importance of the MMR vaccine as a method of prevention, according to The New York Times.

Kennedy issued a dampened call for measles vaccinations, noting that the choice of whether or not to get vaccinated was a personal one. The health secretary also claimed that there was a benefit to gaining a natural immunity to measles through infection, as it could help protect against cancer and heart disease, even though there is no evidence to support that claim, according to the Times.

Kennedy also continued to push alternative treatments, claiming that doctors had seen “almost miraculous and instantaneous” recoveries with the use of the inhaled steroid budesonide and the antibiotic clarithromycin. He said that the Department of Health and Human Services would begin clinical tests to prove the benefits of these alternative medicines he had rushed to promote, as well as cod liver oil, which contains vitamin A.

Kennedy has already started promoting vitamin A, going so far as to add a section on its use as a measles treatment to the CDC’s website—conveniently omitting the possible health risks associated with inappropriate dosing, such as liver failure and death.

He has also been consulting with an alternative wellness clinic near the outbreak in West Texas, which has been working to distribute alternative medicines such as vitamin C, cod liver oil, and budesonide amid the growing outbreak.

Kennedy was torched over remarks claiming that a child in West Texas who had contracted measles had probably died because of poor nutrition and exercise—belying the fact that the most vulnerable population to die from measles is those who are unvaccinated.

The plummeting stock market has even Peter Doocy starting to question the Trump administration’s economic decisions.

Ahead of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s briefing on Tuesday afternoon, the Fox News correspondent called out some of Trump’s recent moves.

“We also expect the White House to try to reassure folks who are sittin’ there looking at their 401ks going down, and down, and down. This is a White House that came in trying to get federal workers to retire by the hundreds of thousands, but it’s tough to make the argument that you should retire if your retirement accounts are getting throttled, which is what is happening right now,” Doocy said on Fox News. “So we expect—we hope—for answers to all of these curiosities any minute.”

Trump’s massive 50 percent tariffs on Canada, announced Tuesday, his 10 percent tariffs on China, and his continuous flirtation with more tariffs on Canada and Mexico, have the stock market in shambles. Monday was the worst day for the Nasdaq in over two years, and on Tuesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by nearly 1 percent.

Trump is telling Americans that it’s just a transition period. But even his own cable news mouthpiece is having second thoughts.

Staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development, which the Trump administration has targeted to be shut down, were given an order Tuesday that seems to violate federal law.

The few USAID employees remaining after Trump’s mass firings were directed on Tuesday to shred and burn classified and personnel documents remaining at the office’s Washington, D.C., headquarters, Devex reports.

“Shred as many documents first, and reserve the burn bags for when the shredder becomes unavailable or needs a break,” read an email from Erica Y. Carr, the acting executive secretary of USAID, noting that this would be an “all day” event beginning Tuesday morning. USAID employees were ordered to label the burn bags with the word “SECRET” and “USAID/B/IO” with permanent markers.

The shredding reportedly began at 9:30 a.m. at USAID headquarters, and was a shock to the union representing foreign service employees at USAID, the American Foreign Service Association. A spokesperson for AFSA told Devex that the union was “alarmed by reports that USAID has directed the destruction of classified and sensitive documents that may be relevant to ongoing litigation regarding the termination of USAID employees and the cessation of USAID grants.”

The spokesperson added that there are “strict requirements for the retention of official records, particularly those that may be relevant to legal proceedings” under the Federal Records Act of 1950 and its resulting regulations.

“Furthermore, the unlawful destruction of federal records could carry serious legal consequences for anyone directed to act in violation of the law,” the spokesperson added.

Kel McClanahan, a national security attorney, told ProPublica that the shreddings were illegal under the Federal Records Act. McClanahan filed an “unauthorized disposition complaint” with the National Archives and asked them to “take immediate measures to stop this destruction of vast quantities of federal records.”

The Trump administration has thoroughly gutted USAID in its near-complete effort to destroy the agency, having canceled 83 percent of its programs as of Monday. These ideologically motivated cuts will have devastating, deadly impacts throughout the world, including a rise in multiple diseases and other health disasters. And now, in their misguided goal, they are breaking more laws.

JD Vance is desperate to shore up support among House Republicans for a spending bill that will keep the government open for the next seven months—and to do so, he revealed that Donald Trump doesn’t actually intend to allow them to spend all of the money Congress allocates.

During a meeting with House Republicans Tuesday, just hours ahead of the vote on the bill, Vance warned that Republicans would take the blame if the government had to shut down, according to three people in the room who spoke to Politico.

Vance tried to make a desperate plea for unity. “We already lost one vote, we can’t lose another,” he said.

The holdout Vance is referring to is Republican Representative Thomas Massie from Kentucky.

Massie pledged Sunday that he wouldn’t support the continuing resolution. “Why would I vote to continue the waste fraud and abuse DOGE has found?” he wrote on X.

“We were told the CR in December would get us to March when we would fight. Here we are in March, punting again!” Massie added.

To be clear, the Department of Government Efficiency has yet to publish any actual evidence of fraud or abuse. Instead the group has claimed that they’ve canceled droves of government contracts—while a closer look reveals that many were already canceled or are worth a lot less than DOGE claims. But Massie’s conviction, even if mistaken, seems unshakeable. He was the only Republican who didn’t support a GOP budget resolution in February, which would necessitate massive cuts to social services, including the very popular Medicaid.

That bill had passed by a very slim margin of 217–215. Clearly, Vance is concerned about a repeat performance, this time with new defections. So, the vice president tried to meet concerns such as Massie’s by downplaying the actual utility of the government spending bill he hoped to rally Republicans behind.

Vance promised that Trump would “ensure allocations from Congress are not spent on things that harm the taxpayer,” according to Notus’s Reese Gorman.

Vance said Trump would do this under “Section II,” but it’s likely that he meant Article 2 of the Constitution, which the Trump administration has claimed gives the executive the power of impoundment, or a line-item veto of congressionally-appropriated spending.

But Vance’s promise is really a pipe dream: Congress legally retains power of the purse, granted by the Constitution, and the president’s purported powers are severely limited by the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.

If it seems a little outrageous that even with control of the House, Senate, and White House, the Republicans must openly admit that they are working to pass laws they have no intention of actually enforcing, that’s because it is. Rather than forge actual party unity behind his agenda, Trump wants the power to act unilaterally—leaving Vance to bully party members into saying “yes” to Trump doing whatever he wants when it comes to federal funding.

Health care professionals are torching Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s response to a slew of measles cases popping up across the country.

The health and human services secretary suggested Monday that a poor diet could have been behind the death of a West Texas child who contracted measles.

“It’s very, very difficult for measles to kill a healthy person,” Kennedy told The New York Times, adding that there is “a correlation between people who get hurt by measles and people who don’t have good nutrition or who don’t have a good exercise regimen.”

Kennedy’s comment, however, belied the fact that the most vulnerable populations to die from measles are unvaccinated children.

“To be crystal clear: 1. Measles is a nasty disease,” an epidemiologist under the handle @HealthNerd posted on BlueSky. “2. You cannot treat measles with antibiotics or cod liver oil. 3. The measles vaccine is very safe and highly effective, as shown by the ELIMINATION OF THE DISEASE IN THE US FOR 25 YEARS. 4. RFK Jr. is an ignorant fool.”

So far, two individuals who contracted measles were reported to have died this year. Both of them were unvaccinated.

New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie slammed Kennedy’s blasé attitude toward public health as “eugenicism.”

The highly contagious virus has no cure, so doctors say that the best way to remedy the disease is simply to get inoculated against it and never contract measles in the first place. But vaccination rates have dipped in several states due to conspiracy theories that vaccines are linked to autism.

In Gaines County—where the first victim lived—the measles vaccination rate among kindergartners is just 82 percent, reported The Atlantic. That’s far below the 95 percent threshold required to maintain herd immunity against pathogens.

And Kennedy—a virulent vaccine conspiracy theorist himself—has so far refused to encourage the public to receive the jab.

In an interview with Fox News last week, Kennedy claimed that local Texas doctors were “getting very, very good results” by treating their measles patients with steroids and cod liver oil.

As a reminder: Since their invention, vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have effectively eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat for the average, health-conscious individual.

Only 14 Democratic representatives signed a letter calling for the release of Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestine activist and green card holder disappeared by the Trump administration for his organizing at Columbia University.

“We are horrified by the recent illegal abduction and now indefinite detention of Mahmoud Khalil—a U.S. legal permanent resident—by Department of Homeland Security agents, and we unequivocally demand his immediate release from DHS custody,” the letter reads, addressed to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.

“Khalil has not been charged or convicted of any crime,” the letter continues. “As the Trump administration proudly admits, he was targeted solely for his activism and organizing.... We must be extremely clear: this is an attempt to criminalize political protest and is a direct assault on the freedom of speech of everyone in this country.”

Representatives Rashida Tlaib, Mark Pocan, Nydia Velázquez, Delia Ramirez, lhan Omar, Jasmine Crockett, Summer Lee, Ayanna Pressley, Lateefah Simon, Al Green, Gwen Moore, André Carson, Nikema Williams, and James McGovern signed the letter.

The absence of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was noted given her previous criticism of Khalil’s arrest, as well as the fact that only 14 congressional Democrats felt compelled enough to publicly support Khalil.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has joined the attacks on Mahmoud Khalil, the pro-Palestine Columbia University activist detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but can’t name any crimes allegedly committed by Khalil.

At a press conference Tuesday morning, Johnson was directly asked what crimes Khalil committed to warrant his arrest, and gave a meandering answer calling the protest organizer a terrorist and attacking university officials for “refusing to take control” of the campus.

“If you are on a student visa and you’re an American, and you’re an aspiring young terrorist who wants to prey upon your Jewish classmates, you’re going home. We’re gonna arrest your—tail, and we’re gonna send you home where you belong,” Johnson said.

There’s just one big problem with that explanation: Khalil doesn’t have a student visa, he has a green card. It’s telling that Johnson couldn’t name a law that was broken but gave a full-throated defense of ICE’s detention of Khalil and President Trump’s decision to target a legal permanent resident of the United States (with a pregnant, U.S. citizen wife) for deportation. It’s an attack on the First Amendment to the Constitution and the right to free speech.

Only a select few Democrats have come out to condemn Khalil’s detention, such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and some members of the House Progressive Caucus. Considering that Trump promises to conduct more arrests and further infringe on a basic American right, with the full support of his fellow Republicans, the entire Democratic Party should be sounding the alarm and pulling out all of the stops.

Just two weeks after insisting that Donald Trump’s budget resolution wouldn’t touch entitlement programs, Republicans have opted to completely give up the game on slashing Medicare and Medicaid.

In an interview with Fox News on Monday, Elon Musk used lies and deceit to try to convince the American public that they should hack the popular social programs—along with food stamps, Social Security, and unemployment—by hundreds of billions of dollars. By Tuesday, Republican lawmakers had already fallen in line.

“If he moves to largely eliminate entitlement programs, are you OK with it?” pressed CNN’s Kate Bolduan.

“I think when he talks about elimination, we’re talking about waste, abuse, and fraud, and it is true that the Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security make up about 75 percent of our budget. It’s mandatory spending,” Missouri Representative Mark Alford said. “We’ve got to find the savings there. We will do that.”

“The budget director was speaking to our whip team last night in a meeting, and he pointed out that there are savings to be made in the Medicaid program,” Alford added.

But Alford’s fealty to the Trump administration might come at the cost of his reelection, as even his own supporters have expressed their malcontent with the destructive White House agenda.

Alford was practically shut down at his own town hall last month after he expressed support for Musk’s sweeping federal layoff plan. At one point, while suggesting to the crowd that they could vote for someone else in the next election if they didn’t approve of Musk’s appointment, one person shouted back, “We didn’t elect Elon!”

Alford seemed to take a page out of Trump’s own playbook in the immediate aftermath, refusing to chalk up the local frustration to his own inaction. In an interview with CNN, Alford referred to his own constituents as “outside agitators.”

The House GOP passed a budget resolution in late February that would gut major social services, including Medicaid, which provides health insurance to more than 72 million Americans. The $880 billion cut is a trade-off for conservatives whom Trump tasked to extend his 2017 tax plan, which will overwhelmingly benefit corporations and is projected to add as much as $15 trillion to the national deficit.

The party practically lied about the contents of the resolution, misdirecting Americans into believing that the bill did not task the House Energy and Commerce Committee to find, at minimum, $880 billion in savings from programs that fall under its jurisdiction, a seismic order that left the committee with practically no other option than to cut away at Medicaid.

In the days immediately following the vote, House Speaker Mike Johnson “ruled out” the largest cuts to the health insurance program, though he failed to offer any specifics as to how his party would make them without affecting Americans’ benefits.

Conservatives are teeing up a vote on the budget measure this week, though they can only spare one party vote without bipartisan support. Johnson has effectively dared Democrats to oppose the effort, hurtling the government toward a potential shutdown come Friday.

Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he would double his disastrous tariffs on Canada, dragging the United States further into a trade war as its stock market continues to fall.

In a lengthy post on Truth Social, the president wrote that his 25 percent tariffs on aluminum and steel coming into the U.S. would now be doubled to 50 percent, and go into effect as soon as Wednesday.

Trump’s newest round of tariffs came in response to Ontario—which is the main provider of electricity to Minnesota, New York, and Michigan—slapping a reciprocal 25 percent tariff on electricity imported to the U.S.

Those tariffs went into effect Monday, and Ontario Premier Doug Ford said he would “not hesitate to shut the electricity off completely.” Trump’s tariff war now threatens the livelihoods of the American citizens living in those states. But don’t worry, Trump wrote that he intends to announce a “National Emergency on Electricity within the threatened area.”

Trump also demanded that Canada remove its steep tariffs on U.S. dairy products—conveniently forgetting to mention that those tariffs only apply after the U.S. has made a Trump-negotiated quantity of tariff-free dairy sales to Canada.

If Canada failed to lower “other egregious, long time Tariffs,” Trump threatened to raise tariffs on imported cars from Canada into the U.S. on April 2, to “essentially, permanently shut down the automobile manufacturing business in Canada.”

“Those cars can easily be made in the USA!” Trump claimed.

Despite his specific demands, Trump revealed that in the end, the only thing that would satisfy his destructive tendencies would be total submission.

“The only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State,” Trump wrote. “This would make all Tariffs, and everything else, totally disappear.”

The president continued to wax poetic about the outlandish imperialist dream he intends to manifest through economic pressure.

“Canadians’ taxes will be very substantially reduced, they will be more secure, militarily and otherwise, than ever before, there would no longer be a Northern Border problem, and the greatest and most powerful nation in the World will be bigger, better and stronger than ever—And Canada will be a big part of that,” he said.

Trump claimed that getting rid of the “artificial line of separation” would create the “safest and most beautiful Nation anywhere in the World.”

Trump’s announcement comes as the U.S. stock market enters another rough week, after a major sell-off last week that caused Trump to roll back some of his tariffs and then immediately threaten more the next day. Trump’s tariff whiplash has resulted in a roiling stock market that even Fox News is having trouble defending. What’s more, it seems to have taken a sizeable bite out of Elon Musk’s net worth, and sent Tesla stock tumbling.