China Exposes Trump’s Lies About Floundering Tariff Talks

Chinese officials tore into Donald Trump on Monday, accusing him of sabotaging his own trade negotiations.

Trump claimed Friday that China had “totally violated” the terms of the 90-day tariff pause that the two countries hammered out in Geneva at the start of last month. In a lengthy Truth Social post, Trump insisted he had taken a soft-handed approach to negotiations in the weeks since, but now he was done being “MR. NICE GUY!”

Trump’s comments came just hours after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who was one of the principal U.S. negotiators in Switzerland, admitted on Fox News that trade talks between Beijing and Washington had “stalled.”

China hit back Monday, stating Trump’s claims that the Asian powerhouse had been withholding rare earths were “groundless.” In reality, officials said, the U.S. had “seriously damaged” the agreement by imposing restrictions on Chinese-made microchips and student visas for Chinese nationals.

“The United States had unilaterally provoked new economic and trade tensions,” a spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said in a statement. “Instead of reflecting on itself, it has made bogus accusations and unreasonably denounced China for violating the agreement.”

“If the U.S. insists on its own way and continues to damage China’s interests, China will continue to take resolute and forceful measures to safeguard its legitimate rights and interests,” the spokesperson said, without providing details of what those measures might be.

The Trump administration agreed in May to temporarily lower tariffs on Chinese goods to 30 percent from 145 percent. China agreed to reciprocate by lowering tariffs on American products to 10 percent from 125 percent.

But it’s unclear what the future of tariffs between the two nations will be. In addition to the clearly struggling trade talks, two separate courts have deemed Trump’s sweeping global tariff plan illegal. The Trump administration plans to appeal at least one of those rulings.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced last week that the administration would work to “aggressively revoke” visas for those with alleged ties to the Chinese Communist Party as well as for any Chinese national studying in “critical fields” in the U.S. Rubio said his department would also “enhance scrutiny” of all visa applications from China, including Hong Kong.

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s editorial board lambasted Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, stating that it’s time for him to either “serve Pennsylvanians, or step away.”

The board, which endorsed Fetterman for Senate in 2022, wrote in a scathing column on Sunday that the senator had “checked out” of the Senate in the midst of a crucial political battle with the Trump administration.

“He has missed more votes than nearly every other senator in the past two years. He regularly skips committee hearings, cancels meetings, avoids the daily caucus lunches with colleagues, and rarely goes on the Senate floor,” they wrote.

“To be sure, mental health is a serious issue and not something to ignore. If Fetterman is still struggling, then he should seek immediate help,” the board continued. “Instead, Fetterman complained people have ‘weaponized’ his mental health battles against him. Being an elected official comes with public scrutiny. If Fetterman can’t handle the attention or perform his job, then in the best interest of the country and the nearly 13 million residents of Pennsylvania he represents, he should step aside.”

Fetterman told The New York Times last month that he found the Senate hearings boring and “performative” and only returned to them recently because he felt “shamed” into doing so. “I would go visit my dad instead of a throwaway vote,” he said.

The Inquirer struck back.

“Spending time with family is laudable, but if that is his priority, then Fetterman should get a job closer to one of the eight properties he owns in his hometown of Braddock, Pa,” they wrote, also noting that Fetterman only has to work in the Senate for an average of 165 days per year, well below the rest of the country.

“Many of Fetterman’s constituents would like to work half a year so they, too, could spend time with their families. Safe to say, many would do it for less than Fetterman’s salary of $174,000, which is more than double the nation’s median household income.”

They also had time for Fetterman’s lavish, politically questionable travel habits.

“Fetterman has flown to Israel twice in the past year, including a recent all-expense-paid junket to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been accused of war crimes and corruption. He and his wife flew first class and stayed in five-star hotels as part of a fact-finding mission that cost $36,000 and was paid for by a New York-based nonprofit,” the board wrote.

It’s been a swift, hard fall from grace for Fetterman. The Inquirer’s editorial column comes after the New York magazine report that detailed his public and private outbursts, bringing the question of his fitness to serve to the forefront of the news cycle. The Times article, which the embattled senator also did an interview for, then highlighted how much he hates doing the job he was elected to do.

It seems obvious to everyone around him that Fetterman is not mentally stable enough to perform his duties as a U.S. senator, and it’s also clear that he doesn’t care for them much in the first place. Even if Senate hearings are boring (and I bet they are), it’s the least he could be doing. He’s a senator. If sitting in a congressional hearing in his basketball shorts is too much for him, then the Inquirer is correct. He should have some “shame” and let Pennsylvanians have a leader who cares.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem quietly removed a list of “sanctuary” states, cities, and counties after outrage from the National Sheriffs’ Association.

The Department of Homeland Security published a list Thursday of what it called “sanctuary jurisdictions,” accusing the areas of obstructing federal immigration enforcement. “Each jurisdiction listed will receive formal notification of its non-compliance and all potential violations of federal criminal statutes,” the DHS statement warned.

The list quickly sparked a harsh condemnation from the National Sheriffs’ Association, which represents more than 3,000 elected sheriffs across the country.

“This list was created without any input, criteria of compliance, or a mechanism for how to object to the designation,” Sheriff Kieran Donahue, the group’s president, warned in a statement on Saturday. “Sheriffs nationwide have no way to know what they must do or not do to avoid this arbitrary label.”

The list was created “in a manner that lacks transparency and accountability” and that “violated the core principles of trust, cooperation, and partnership with fellow law enforcement,” Donahue added.

The warning was especially notable given that the National Sheriffs’ Association, which has supported Donald Trump’s most controversial Cabinet nominees in his second term, has also historically backed federal immigration enforcement.

By Sunday, the DHS website had removed the list of sanctuary jurisdictions. When asked about it by Fox News host Maria Batiromo, Noem wouldn’t directly acknowledge the move.

“I saw that there was a list produced,” Bartiromo said on Sunday. “Now, the list I don’t see anymore in the media. Do you have a list of the sanctuary cities that are actually hiding illegals right now?”

“Some of the cities have pushed back,” Noem said. “They think because they don’t have one law or another on the books that they don’t qualify, but they do qualify. They are giving sanctuary to criminals.”

In April, Trump signed an executive order calling on DHS and the Department of Justice to publish a list of sanctuary jurisdictions, describing their policies as “a lawless insurrection.” Sanctuary cities and states limit local police cooperation with federal immigration enforcement in order to foster an environment of trust between immigrant communities and police, so that people aren’t afraid to report crimes.

It’s no surprise the list prompted backlash from the National Sheriffs’ Association, as it did indeed seem “arbitrary.” San Diego City Attorney Heather Ferbert told local outlets last week that San Diego appeared on the DHS list despite having never had a sanctuary policy.

“We suspect this is going to be used as additional threats and fear tactics to threaten federal funding that the city relies on,” she said.

Donald Trump boosted a wild conspiracy theory Sunday that former President Joe Biden has secretly been dead for years.

Trump reshared an outlandish post on Truth Social from an anonymous pro-Trump account under the screen name “llijh” that claimed, “There is no #JoeBiden,” because he was executed in 2020.

“#Biden clones doubles & robotic engineered soulless mindless entities are what you see. >#Democrats dont know the difference,” the post read, adding dozens of unrelated hashtags such as “#Blackwomen” and “#Jews” and tagging several accounts, including CPAC, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and multiple right-wing media sources. The anonymous account has little more than 6,000 followers, while Trump’s has close to 10 million.

The president’s far-right shitposting is a clear appeal to his followers, who find themselves similarly detached from reality. Trump is well aware that Biden is alive. Just last week, Trump said he didn’t have any sympathy for the “vicious” former president, who was recently diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer.

“If you feel sorry for him, don’t feel so sorry, because he’s vicious,” Trump said during a press conference. “What he did with his political opponent and all of the people that he hurt—he hurt a lot of people, Biden, so I really don’t feel sorry for him.”

Senator Lindsey Graham is really hoping that Israel bombs the Freedom Flotilla that political and environmental activist Greta Thunberg is taking on an aid trip to Gaza.

“Hope Greta and her friends can swim!” Graham posted on X, linking to a Times of Israel article about Greta.

The Freedom Flotilla Coalition is a civilian aid group that regularly goes into Israeli-controlled waters to deliver needed supplies to Palestinians as they starve behind Israel’s land and naval blockade. Thunberg and several others set sail on Sunday from Italy in another similar effort.

Graham’s post is clearly a call for targeted violence against Thunberg and the rest of the civilian passengers of the flotilla. In early May, another flotilla—which Thunberg was supposed to be on—was bombed twice on its way to Gaza. And while the Israeli government never confirmed or denied its involvement, it was obvious to the flotilla passengers that it was an IDF attack.

Graham’s incendiary post was quickly rebuked.

“This is when you sell your soul to Zionism. We are dealing with the Zio-Nazis who are the most murderous and hated people the earth has ever known. This is you,” Palestinian journalist Abubaker Abed wrote in response to Graham. “What a cowardly and despicable creature you are to wish death upon a girl! One day, all of you will collapse like smelly mosquitoes. You are a cancer to the earth.” Abed fled Gaza only recently to escape Israel’s genocide as the government continues to target thousands of other innocent journalists and civilians.

“A sitting United States Senator threatened a convoy full of nonviolent activists—including Greta Thunberg—with a bombing,” Medhi Hasan wrote on X. “It’s difficult to describe how sociopathic, unhinged, and criminal some of the pro-Israel folks have become.”

Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy experienced some pushback during what he thought was a friendly interview on Fox News Friday morning. 

Fox’s Steve Doocy was interviewing Duffy at the Cabinet chief’s New Jersey home on Friday, and Doocy asked Duffy if he flew from Washington to the Garden State. Duffy replied that he was going to but drove instead because he had a “delay at Newark, like a lot of people have,” referring to the recent delays and issues, including rolling blackouts, at Newark Liberty International Airport.

“But we’re working on Newark, it’s going to get a lot better,” Duffy said. “Improvements are coming.” 

Doocy was skeptical, replying, “Yeah, that’s what you say.” 

Duffy was slightly taken aback, replying, “You don’t believe me?” 

Doocy replied that he had recently been forced to change a flight to Newark from South Florida that was delayed for four hours, and then had to switch to a flight to LaGuardia Airport in New York that was delayed for five hours. 

“So it’s not just Newark, it’s also LaGuardia! Why can’t you fix this?” Doocy complained. 

“I thought this was a friendly interview, Steve!” Duffy replied, as Doocy laughed. 

While the interview was pretty much lighthearted, Doocy still pointed out to Fox News viewers at home that flights in the U.S. have been experiencing major issues during the Trump administration. That’s in large part thanks to cuts to important agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Other cuts have come to a key aviation safety committee and layoffs of air traffic controllers, the latter worsening a problem decades in the making. 

Duffy is to blame for many of these issues, focusing on anti-wokeness  instead of safe and smooth air travel. He and President Trump should roll back the many changes that have hurt air travel over the past few months in order to make air travel functional again. But that would require them to admit their mistakes in the first place.  

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s error-laden Make America Healthy Again report was updated Friday to remove citations to several nonexistent studies—as well as some perfectly real ones—and replace them with citations that still make no sense, NOTUS reported.

A NOTUS investigation published Thursday found that Kennedy’s report taking aim at childhood vaccines, ultraprocessed foods, and pesticides listed studies that authors said were either misinterpreted or had never even occurred, leaving artificial intelligence researchers partially blaming AI for the errors. Several studies cited in the original report identified by NOTUS as nonexistent were replaced Friday, as well as some studies with which NOTUS had not identified any issues.

But in some cases, the replacements weren’t much better.

One study that the original report cited to support the claim that psychotherapy was a better treatment for children experiencing mental health issues than medication was replaced by another “systemic overview” by Pim Cuijpers, a widely referenced psychologist in Amsterdam. But Cuijpers told NOTUS that his study covered the use of psychiatric medication in adults, not children.

The two “cannot be compared, and this reference is therefore not usable in adolescents,” Cuijpers wrote in an email to NOTUS. He also noted that there was no evidence to support the report’s claim that psychotherapy was more effective than antidepressants for adolescents.

This wasn’t the only detail that undermined the report’s arguments that American children were overmedicated. Cuijpers pointed out to NOTUS that the report’s claim that “antidepressant prescription rates in teens increased by 14-fold between 1987 and 2014” was a little less convincing considering that antidepressants were only developed in the late 1980s.

“So it can also be said that these drugs were simply used for the adolescents who could benefit from them,” Cuijpers told NOTUS.

Another faulty citation attributing work to the incorrect authors was fixed, NOTUS reported, but the new study cited also failed to support the claim that “since the 1970s, recess and physical education (PE) have steadily declined.”

Yet another incorrect citation referred to pulmonologist Harold J. Farber but didn’t cite an actual paper he’d worked on to support the claim that “an estimated 25-40% of mild cases” of asthma were overprescribed drugs. The new citation referred to Farber’s actual study, which had been about a Medicaid-managed care program study in Texas, but Farber told NOTUS that the notion that those results applied to the general population required a “tremendous leap of faith.”

After the initial NOTUS report, so many changes were made to the documents to remove evidence of AI-chatbot handiwork that White House officials stopped denoting changes to the document, and deleted references to prior corrections, NOTUS reported.

The Trump administration has begun carrying out its expanded vetting for student visa applicants, surveilling their social media accounts to make sure they aren’t posting anything in support of Palestine, which the administration considers antisemitic. This vetting will start with Harvard visa applicants but is expected to be adopted nationwide.

Secretary of Stato Marco Rubio sent a cable to all U.S. embassies and consulates on Thursday ordering them to “conduct a complete screening of the online presence of any nonimmigrant visa applicant seeking to travel to Harvard University for any purpose.” That would apply not just to students but also to faculty, staff, and researchers visiting the university.

The Trump administration is taking particular interest in people who have their social media accounts on “private,” an obvious, ominous crossing of boundaries.

The State Department has ordered officers to examine “whether the lack of any online presence, or having social media accounts restricted to ‘private’ or with limited visibility, may be reflective of evasiveness and call into question the applicant’s credibility.”

This is yet another instance of Harvard serving as a test subject for the administration’s larger crackdown on free speech and international students at American universities. Trump has already revoked billions of dollars in research funding from the Massachusetts school, and even banned it from admitting any international students at all, although the latter policy was temporarily revoked by a judge.

Stephen Miller had a dismissive response Friday to new reports of Elon Musk’s drug use during Trump’s campaign last year. 

CNN’s Pamela Brown asked the far-right Trump adviser if there was “any drug testing or requests for him to drug test when he was in the White House given the fact that he was also a contractor with the government.”  

A chuckling Miller ignored the question and said, “Fortunately for you and all of the friends at CNN, you’ll have the opportunity to ask Elon all the questions you want today yourself,” before he then segued into the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda. 

“The drugs I’m concerned about are the drugs that are coming across the border from the criminal cartels that are killing hundreds of thousands of Americans,” Miller said. 

Perhaps Miller laughed instead of answering because his wife, Katie Miller, has left her job as adviser and spokesperson for the Department of Government Efficiency to work full-time for Musk and his companies. Miller has probably had enough of Musk, as he has also been subtweeting the tech oligarch, trying to refute Musk’s criticisms that the Republican budget bill would raise the deficit. 

“The Big Beautiful Bill is NOT an annual budget bill and does not fund the departments of government. It does not finance our agencies or federal programs,” Miller said, in a long X post earlier this week. Is there bad blood between Miller and Musk that has now spiraled because Miller’s wife is working for the tech oligarch and fellow fascism enthusiast?

Hours after reports emerged Friday that Elon Musk had been under the influence of heavy drugs during his time advising the president, Musk and Donald Trump stumbled and fumbled their way through a White House press conference recognizing the end of the tech billionaire’s special government employee status.

The wildly unusual joint conference featured Musk’s black eye, a giant gold key that Trump said he only gives to “very special people,” cringe-worthy regurgitations by Musk of Trump’s take on his Pulitzer Board defamation suit, and claims that Musk’s unpopular and controversial time in the White House was not quite over.

But as Trump continued to praise Musk and his time atop the Department of Government Efficiency, the president’s verbal gaffes became more apparent. He claimed that DOGE had uncovered $42 million in wasteful spending, referring to expenditures related to Uganda, which Trump pronounced as “oo-ganda.” The 78-year-old also mentioned he would have Musk’s DOGE cuts “cauterized by Congress,” though he quickly corrected himself by saying they would be “affirmed by Congress,” instead.

Trump’s on-camera slippage has gotten worse in recent weeks: Earlier this month, Trump dozed off while in a meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. That is despite the fact that the president received a clean bill of health in a medical report released in April that described Trump as being in “excellent health,” including neurological functioning.

Musk, meanwhile, refused to acknowledge emerging reports of his alleged drug use. But the news of White House drug use under Trump’s helm is nothing new: In fact, if the reports prove true, it would be little more than a return to form. Last year, a report by the Department of Defense inspector general indicated that the West Wing operated more like a pill mill than the nation’s highest office. Common pills included modafinil, Adderall, fentanyl, morphine, and ketamine, according to the Pentagon report. But other, unlisted drugs—like Xanax—were equally easy to come by from the White House Medical Unit, according to anonymous sources that spoke to Rolling Stone.

While other presidents were known to take a mix of drug cocktails to fight off back pain (like JFK) or bad moods (like Nixon), no previous administrations matched the level of debauchery of Trump’s, whose in-office pharmacists unquestioningly handed out highly addictive substances to staffers who needed pick-me-ups or energy boosts—no doctor’s exam, referral, or prescription required.

“It was kind of like the Wild West. Things were pretty loose. Whatever someone needs, we were going to fill this,” another source told Rolling Stone in March 2024.

Meanwhile, pharmacists described an atmosphere of fear within the West Wing, claiming they would be “fired” if they spoke out or would receive negative work assignments if they didn’t hand pills over to staffers.