Poll shows 83 percent of Republicans still support the president, but they are increasingly isolated.
President Donald Trump’s approval rating has fallen to just 40 percent, the lowest since his return to the White House, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll. Reuters said the survey reflected dissatisfaction with Trump’s handling of the economy and immigration and showed how “deeply polarized” the nation is over his leadership. According to the poll, 83 percent of Republicans approve of Trump’s performance compared to just 3 percent of Democrats. Meanwhile, only around a third of independents said they supported the president. The poll, conducted over three days to Monday, surveyed 1,023 adults and had a margin of error of 3 percentage points. The dip in Trump’s approval rating comes as his administration continues to pursue aggressive policies on trade and border security, despite widespread opposition. Trump’s previous rating stood at 41 percent in mid-July.
Trump issues order imposing new global tariff rates effective Aug. 7
The executive order follows through on the president’s recent trade agreements with some trading partners and his threats to slap punishing new duties on others.
President Donald Trump signed executive orders on Thursday evening to impose tariffs of between 15 and 41 percent on goods shipped to the U.S. from more than 67 countries, ratcheting up tariffs to the highest levels in more than a century.
The new duties, however, won’t go into effect until Aug. 7 — giving countries yet another window to try to negotiate them down.
“This is historic, this is a new system of trade,” said a senior administration official, granted anonymity as part of the terms of a call. “It’s what I would call the Trump round of negotiations.”
According to the text of the first order, the Trump administration is maintaining its 10 percent so-called baseline tariff on countries where the U.S. has a trade surplus — i.e. it sells more American products to those countries than it imports from them. And it officially imposes the 15 percent rate that Trump agreed to set as part of negotiations with leading trading partners like the European Union, Japan and South Korea. The Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia also reached tentative agreements with the administration that set their duties at 19-20 percent.
Other countries, mainly smaller economies, face far higher rates, topping out at 41 percent for Syria, which is emerging from a civil war, and 40 percent for Myanmar, which is still in the midst of one. The Southeast Asian nation of Laos also faces a 40 percent tariff, and Iraq will be hit with a 35 percent duty.
Bigger trading partners like Switzerland also face a significant tariff hike — to 39 percent.
Trump also signed a second order raising tariffs on Canada, one of the country’s biggest trading partners, from 25 to 35 percent for goods that are not compliant with an existing North American trade deal known as the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. The senior official told reporters that Canada hasn’t “shown the same level of constructiveness that we’ve seen from the Mexican side.” Trump announced earlier Thursday that he was maintaining the 25 percent tariff on Mexico for another 90 days after a phone call with their president, Claudia Sheinbaum. Higher tariffs on Canada take effect Friday.
The executive actions suggests that Trump decided to punish countries that he did not believe offered enough concessions since the president first threatened to impose his “reciprocal” tariffs on April 2.
“Some trading partners have agreed to, or are on the verge of agreeing to, meaningful trade and security commitments with the United States, thus signaling their sincere intentions to permanently remedy the trade barriers,” the global order says.
“Other trading partners, despite having engaged in negotiations, have offered terms that, in my judgment, do not sufficiently address imbalances in our trading relationship or have failed to align sufficiently with the United States on economic and national-security matters,”
“There are also some trading partners that have failed to engage in negotiations with the United States or to take adequate steps to align sufficiently with the United States on economic and national security matters,” it continues.
White House officials said Thursday night that they expect to strike additional agreements with countries ahead of the new Aug. 7 implementation date for the tariffs. “We have some deals, and I don’t want to get ahead of the president on those deals,” the senior administration official told reporters. “I’ll just say generally, we have more to come.”
Taiwan is hoping to be one of those countries. The semiconductor powerhouse faces a 20 percent tariff in a week’s time, but in a statement released late Thursday, Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te suggested the rate was “provisional.”
“Due to the procedural arrangement of the negotiations, the Taiwan-U.S. sides have not yet concluded the final meeting. Therefore, the U.S. has temporarily announced a 20% tariff rate for Taiwan,” President Lai said. “Once an agreement is reached in the future, there is hope that the tariff rate can be further lowered. Both sides will also continue negotiations on supply chain cooperation and issues related to Section 232 tariffs.”
Raging Trump Orders Top Republican to Stop Letting Democrats Laugh at Him
Donald Trump has demanded that Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley scrap a “ridiculous” tradition that allows home-state senators to block judicial nominees.
The president posted that Democrats will exploit it to “laugh” at Grassley and the Republicans.
In a lengthy tirade on Truth Social, Trump urged Grassley to eliminate the so-called “blue slip” custom, a decades-old Senate tradition that gives senators from a nominee’s home state the chance to object to federal judicial nominations.
Trump argued that Democrats will abuse the process, which is meant to encourage bipartisan consultation, to obstruct his picks for key judicial positions with nothing more than “a mere flick of the pen.”
“Senator Grassley must step up, like Crooked Joe Biden did, when he openly broke, at least two times, the ‘Blue Slip’ SCAM, and like others have done over the years, and let our Great Republican Judges and U.S. Attorneys BE CONFIRMED,” Trump wrote.
“He should do this, IMMEDIATELY, and not let the Democrats laugh at him and the Republican Party for being weak and ineffective. The Democrats have broken this ridiculous custom on us, it’s time that we break it on them. Chuck, I know you have the Courage to do this, DO IT!”
The custom is named after the blue-colored form sent to senators seeking their approval or disapproval.
A spokesperson for Grassley, while not directly answering Trump’s new demand, noted that the Senate Judiciary chair had already successfully moved Trump’s picks for U.S. attorneys through his panel with blue slip support from Democratic senators such as Tim Kaine and Mark Warner in Virginia and Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith.
“When a nominee comes out of committee all 100 senators have a say on the nomination and part of their consideration is based on the home state senators’ input,” the spokesperson told the Daily Beast.
Speaking to Politico, the 91-year-old Grassley added he has no intention of changing his approach to sending out blue slips for federal court nominees.
“I’ve already spoken about the blue slip problem. And I’ve got no more to say than what I’ve been saying for 50 years,” he said.
How Trump’s tariffs are already impacting Americans
Donald Trump has delivered a profound shock to the global trading system since returning to the White House.
The US president announced on 2 April, so-called Liberation Day, a slew of swingeing so-called “reciprocal” tariffs, or import taxes, hitting dozens of countries around the world.
Many of these have been paused. And since then, Trump has also announced agreements with several partners – including the UK, Vietnam, Japan, and the European Union – which reduce some tariff levels.
But particular commodities and goods such as automobiles and steel have also been targeted with significant industry-specific tariffs by Washington – and the overall average US tariff rate is at its highest in almost a century.
The tariffs themselves are ultimately paid by the US companies that bring goods into the country from abroad.
The impact of all this is being felt in the US and global economy in different ways.
More tariff revenue for the US government
The Budget Lab at Yale University estimates that, as of 28 July 2025, the average effective tariff rate imposed by the US on goods imports stood at 18.2%, the highest since 1934.
That was up from 2.4% in 2024, before Donald Trump returned to office.
That significant increase means the US government’s tariff revenues have shot up.
Official US data shows that in June 2025 tariff revenues were $28bn, triple the monthly revenues seen in 2024.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the independent US fiscal watchdog, estimated in June that the increase in tariff revenue, based on the new US tariffs imposed between 6 January and 13 May 2025, would reduce cumulative US government borrowing in the 10 years to 2035 by $2.5 trillion.
However, the CBO also judged that the tariffs would shrink the size of the US economy relative to how it would perform without them.
They also project that the additional revenues generated from the tariffs will be more than offset by the revenue lost due to the Trump administration’s tax cuts over the next decade.
A widening of the US trade deficit
Donald Trump regards bilateral trade deficits as evidence that other countries are taking advantage of the US by selling more goods to America than they buy from it.
One of the justifications for his tariffs is to address that imbalance by curbing imports and forcing other countries to lower their own barriers to US goods.
However, one of the standout impacts of Donald Trump’s trade war, so far, has been to increase US goods imports.
This is because US firms stockpiled supplies in advance of tariffs being implemented to avoid being forced to pay the additional tax.
Meanwhile, US exports have seen only a modest increase.
The net result is that the US goods trade deficit has widened, not fallen.
It reached a record $162bn in March 2025, before falling back to $86bn in June.
The distortion caused by stockpiling will fade, but over the longer term many economists expect the Trump administration will still struggle to bring down the overall US trade deficit.
That’s because they argue that the deficit is primarily driven by structural imbalances within the US economy – persistent national spending in excess of national production – rather than unfair trade practices directed at America by other nations.
China is exporting less to America
Trump imposed punitive tariffs on China, with levies at one stage hitting 145%.
They have come down to 30% but the impact of those trade hostilities on Chinese trade with America has nevertheless been significant.
The value of Chinese exports to the US in the first six months of 2025 were down 11% on the same period in 2024.
Meanwhile, Chinese exports to some of its other trading partners have grown, suggesting Chinese firms have been able to find customers in other countries.
China’s exports to India this year are up 14% on the same period last year and with the EU and the UK they are up 7% and 8% respectively.
Also notable is a 13% increase in the value of Chinese exports to the ASEAN nations, which include Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia, over that period.
The Trump administration has been concerned about the possibility of Chinese firms attempting to bypass US tariffs on China by setting up operations in neighbouring South East Asian countries – to which they export semi-finished goods – and exporting finished goods to the US from there.
Such “tariff jumping” occurred when Donald Trump imposed tariffs on Chinese solar panels in his first term and some economists argue the increase in Chinese exports to ASEAN nations could be related to the same phenomenon.
More trade deals
Some countries have responded to Trump’s trade war by seeking to deepen trade ties with other countries, rather than by putting up their own barriers.
The UK and India have signed a trade deal that they were negotiating for three years.
Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Liechtenstein – who are in a grouping called the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) – have concluded a new trade deal with a number of Latin American countries in a grouping known as Mercosur.
The EU is pushing ahead with a new trade deal with Indonesia.
Canada is exploring a free trade agreement with ASEAN.
Some countries have also taken advantage of the fracturing of trade between the US and China.
China has traditionally been a significant global importer of soybeans from the US, which it uses as fodder for its 440 million pigs.
But in recent years Beijing has been increasingly shifting towards buying its soybeans from Brazil, rather than America, a trend analysts argue has accelerated as a result of Donald Trump’s latest trade war and Beijing’s new retaliatory tariffs on US agricultural imports.
In June 2025 China imported 10.6 million tons of soybeans from Brazil, but only 1.6 million tons from the US.
When China put retaliatory tariffs on US soybean imports in Donald Trump’s first term his administration felt the need to directly compensate US farmers with new subsidies.
US consumer prices are starting to rise
Economists warn that Trump’s tariffs will ultimately push up US prices by making imports more expensive.
The official US inflation rate for June was 2.7%. That was up slightly from the 2.4% inflation figure for May, but still below the 3% rate in January.
Stockpiling in the earlier part of the year has helped retailers absorb the impact of the tariffs without needing to raise retail prices.
However, economists saw in the latest official data some signs that Trump’s tariffs are now starting to feed through to US consumer prices.
Certain imported goods such as major appliances, computers, sports equipment, books and toys showed a marked pick up in prices in June.
Researchers at Harvard University’s Pricing Lab, who are examining the effects of the 2025 tariff measures in real time using online data from four major US retailers, have found that the price of imported goods into the US and domestic products affected by tariffs have been rising more rapidly in 2025 than domestic goods that are not affected by tariffs.
Rebound in US economic growth in second quarter masks underlying slowing trend
Consumer spending, the engine of the economy, grew moderately after almost stalling in the January-March quarter. Business investment in equipment slowed sharply following double-digit growth in the prior quarter. Residential investment, which includes homebuilding and house sales via brokers’ commissions, contracted for a second straight quarter.
Though the Trump administration has announced a number of trade deals, economists expected tepid growth in the remaining two quarters of this year, arguing the nation’s effective tariff rate was still one of the highest since the 1930s. They noted about 60% of imports remained uncovered by trade agreements.
“The picture is not pretty, an own goal by U.S. policymakers,” said Freya Beamish, chief economist at TS Lombard. “An economy that was purring along, defying expectations of a slowdown, has been placed on hold.”
GDP increased at a 3.0% annualized rate last quarter, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis said. The economy contracted at a 0.5% pace in the January-March quarter, the first GDP decline in three years.
Economists polled by Reuters had forecast GDP rebounding at a 2.4% annualized rate. The economy grew 1.2% in the first half of the year. Economists expected a lackluster second half, which would limit growth to about 1.5% for the full year. That would be down from 2.8% in 2024 and below the 1.8% rate Federal Reserve policymakers view as the non-inflationary growth pace.
The U.S. central bank on Wednesday left its benchmark interest rate in the 4.25%-4.50% range, resisting pressure from Trump to lower borrowing costs. The Fed acknowledged the slowdown in growth in the first half, and noted that “uncertainty about the economic outlook remains elevated.”
The central bank cut rates three times in 2024, with the last move coming in December. Most economists expect it to resume policy easing in September.
A rush to beat the duties boosted imports in the first quarter, resulting in a record goods trade deficit that weighed on the economy. That reversed last quarter, with imports declining at a record 30.3% rate. The resulting smaller trade deficit added a record 4.99 percentage points to GDP, more than offsetting a 3.17-percentage-point drag from inventories.
Stocks on Wall Street were higher. The dollar gained versus a basket of currencies. U.S. Treasury yields rose.
MODERATE CONSUMER SPENDING
With the labor market slowing amid hesitancy by businesses to increase headcount, consumer spending could be sluggish for the remainder of the year. Higher prices from tariffs, which started showing in the June consumer inflation data, could also hamper consumer spending.
Middle- and higher-income households have largely been driving spending. Economists say low-income consumers, already disproportionately affected by higher interest rates and slowing wage growth, would be the hardest hit by tariffs. They also noted the One Big Beautiful Bill’s tax cuts and spending provisions would not benefit lower-income households.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has estimated the bill will add $3.4 trillion to the nation’s $36.2-trillion debt and only raise inflation-adjusted GDP by an average of 0.5% over 10 years. But pressures are also building up for middle- and higher-income households.
Business spending on equipment grew at a 4.8% rate, slowing from the first quarter’s robust 23.7% pace. Spending on structures such as factories declined for a second straight quarter. Residential investment contracted at a 4.6% rate, the most since the fourth quarter of 2022, amid high mortgage rates.
Reporting by Lucia Mutikani; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama, Andrea Ricci, Rod Nickel
White House Says Liberal Outrage Over Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle Jeans Commercial Is ‘Moronic’ and a ‘Big Reason Americans’ Voted for Trump
The White House is weighing in on the controversial American Eagle jeans advertisement featuring Sydney Sweeney.
White House communications manager Steven Cheung slammed the Left for its response to the ad, which reads “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” The spot plays on “great genes,” which caused some liberal voices to denounce the campaign for glorifying her white heritage and thin physique.
“Cancel culture run amok,” Cheung wrote of the ad on X. “This warped, moronic and dense liberal thinking is a big reason why Americans voted the way they did in 2024. They’re tired of this bullshit.”
In the commercial, Sweeney says, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color. My jeans are blue.”
Popular on Variety
Conservative TV personality Megyn Kelly also called out the “lunatics on the Left” for their take-down of the ad, calling their reaction “absurd.”
“She’s being called a white supremacist by people who don’t like her latest ad, which is for American Eagle,” she said. “She’s advertising jeans, and yet the lunatics on the Left think she’s advertising white supremacy. This is obviously a reference to her body and not to her skin color, but the lunatic left is going to do what the lunatic left is going to do.”
Kelly added, “They’re upset because it’s about who gets to be the face of America’s Best Genes. They think it’s no accident that they’ve chosen a white, thin woman because you’re, I guess, not allowed to celebrate those things in any way, shape, or form. But they’re completely ignoring the reference to her body, which is the thing she’s famous for. It’s just absurd.”
Analysis: Donald Trump’s long history of fake history
President Donald Trump told a story on Monday about how he “made a correct prediction” about the outcome of the United Kingdom’s 2016 Brexit referendum while he was visiting his golf course in Scotland “the day before the vote.”
“You remember?” he asked reporters.
They couldn’t have remembered. It didn’t happen.
Trump actually visited Scotland the day after the Brexit referendum, not the day before it. And while he did say about three months prior that he thought the UK would end up leaving the European Union, he made no public predictions in an interview the day before the vote – saying he personally favored Brexit but also that “I don’t think anybody should listen to me because I haven’t really focused on it very much.”
Trump’s imaginary story about these events nine years ago might be considered trivial compared to his lies about pressing topics like inflation and the war in Ukraine. But it’s part of a pattern – a long line of similarly fabricated tales from the president about his own history and world history.
And the pattern has a purpose. Trump’s stories serve to exaggerate his foresight about and knowledge of domestic and foreign affairs, embellish his biography and record in office, and diminish his political opponents.
The stories tend to be colorful even though they’re fake. Trump’s historical fiction is sprinkled with vivid details and make-believe quotes, all the better to make it seem authentic and get it to stick in the minds of voters.
A White House official, responding to CNN’s questions on condition of anonymity, noted that Trump correctly predicted Brexit and then said, “He was in Scotland before the vote.” The official didn’t acknowledge that, contrary to what Trump claimed Monday and has claimed for years, he wasn’t there the day before the Brexit vote and didn’t make a prediction that day.
Here is a fact check of eightother examples of false Trump stories about the past from the last two months alone:
- His false claim that he issued a “don’t go in” warning against the 2003 invasion of Iraq
- His false story about a supposed conversation with his late uncle about the Unabomber
- His false claim that he was the person who deployed the National Guard during civil unrest in Minneapolis in 2020
- His false claim that he signed a law in 2020 to impose automatic 10-year prison sentences on people who damage monuments
- His false claim that he was being sarcastic when he repeatedly promised to end Russia’s war on Ukraine within 24 hours of returning to office
- His false claim that the European Union was formed to take advantage of the US
- His false claim that tariffs were imposed merely after the Great Depression, not during it
- His false claim that South Korea convinced former president Joe Biden to allow it to stop making any payments to share the cost of the US military presence there
Trump’s own past
Trump and the war in Iraq
Trump, touting his foreign policy acumen, has been falsely claiming for years that he publicly warned the US not to invade Iraq in 2003. He did it again in comments to reporters in June: “I said it loud and clear – but I was a civilian, but I guess I got a lot of publicity – but I was very much opposed to the Iraq war. And I actually did say, ‘Don’t go in, don’t go in, don’t go in.’ But I said, ‘If you’re going to go in, keep the oil.’ But they didn’t do that.”
Very firm quotes. Except Trump didn’t utter them.
There is no record of Trump issuing any such public warnings before the 2003 invasion. When radio host Howard Stern asked Trump in September 2002 whether he is “for invading Iraq,” Trump said, “Yeah, I guess so. I wish the first time it was done correctly.” Trump did not express a firm opinion about the war in a Fox interview in January 2003, saying that “either you attack or don’t attack” and that then-President George W. Bush “has either got to do something or not do something, perhaps.”
Trump started publicly expressing critical thoughts about the war shortly after it began in 2003, then emerged as an explicit opponent in 2004. He did get considerable publicity for this commentary – but it was post-invasion criticism, not the pre-invasion criticism he keeps saying it was.
Asked about this false claim, the White House official responded, “He said that he was against it.” In fact, though, Trump went further than simply claiming to have been against the invasion; he said he made specific pre-invasion public comments he didn’t make.
Trump’s uncle and the Unabomber
Trump has repeatedly invoked his late uncle John Trump, a longtime professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as evidence of his own intelligence and good “genes.” At an event on energy and innovation earlier this month, he said he needed to “brag” about his uncle’s smarts, then made up a story that vividly but wrongly linked his uncle with the late “Unabomber” terrorist Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski.
“Kaczynski was one of his students,” Trump said, then went on to talk about having asked his uncle about what Kaczynski was like. “‘I said, ‘What kind of a student was he, Uncle John?’ Dr. John Trump. I said, ‘What kind of a student?’ And then he said, ‘Seriously, good.’ He said, ‘He’d correct – he’d go around correcting everybody.’”
This supposed exchange could not have happened. Aside from the fact that MIT says it has no information suggesting Kaczynski ever attended MIT (he went to nearby Harvard), the president’s uncle died in 1985, more than a decade before Kaczynski was publicly identified as the Unabomber in 1996. Given that Kaczynski had lived for years as a recluse in the wilderness, there is no apparent reason that Donald Trump would have been asking anyone about Kaczynski in 1985 or earlier.
The White House didn’t attempt to defend this story even on condition of anonymity.
Trump and civil unrest in Minneapolis
Trump, attacking a prominent Democratic opponent, told members of the military in a speech at Fort Bragg in June that “I’ll never forget” what happened with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020: “That city was burning down, Minneapolis – it was burning down, it was gonna burn to the ground – and he wouldn’t call the Guard. And I waited for a long time, and I called the Guard, and I saved it.”
Whatever Trump claims to recall, this is not what happened. In reality, Walz, not Trump, was the person who deployed the Minnesota National Guard, more than seven hours before Trump publicly threatened to deploy the Guard himself. While Walz was criticized by many Republicans and some Democrats for not sending in the Guard faster, it is indisputable that Walz, not Trump, was the person who eventually did it.
The White House official said Walz activated the Guard “only” after Trump urged him to. That’s an implicit concession that Trump was wrong when he said he was the one who activated the Guard – and the official’s statement is wrong too. Walz activated the Guard before he spoke with Trump on the matter and before Trump’s public statement.
Trump and damage to monuments
Trump told another dramatic but fake story about his response to 2020 protests during a speech in Iowa early this month.
Trump said that, while protesters were marching toward the Jefferson Memorial trying to rip down a statue of Thomas Jefferson, “we signed a law” – “an old bill from 1909” – that “said if you so much as touch a monument or a statue, you go to jail for a 10-year period. No anything.” He claimed that he held a news conference in the middle of the march saying anyone who touches a monument “immediately goes to jail for a 10-year period,” and then “that march broke up so quickly.”
“Do you remember that night? It was crazy,” Trump asked during his story.
Nobody could possibly remember that night because it didn’t occur. Trump did not sign any “law” on penalties for damage to monuments, he did not do anything to impose rapid or automatic 10-year jail sentences on people who damage monuments, and the policy he did announce in June 2020 did not suddenly break up an active march to the Jefferson Memorial.
What really happened: Trump announced that he had issued an executive order that directed the attorney general to prioritize investigations and prosecutions of people who damaged government-owned monuments and to prosecute offenders “to the fullest extent” allowed under existing federal law, which provided for a maximum – not immediate or mandatory – sentence of 10 years in prison. It’s not clear what impact, if any, this announcement had on the protests that followed Floyd’s murder.
Trump and Russia’s war on Ukraine
When a reporter reminded Trump at a press conference in June that Trump had previously promised to end Russia’s war on Ukraine in “24 hours” but had later said he had been speaking sarcastically, Trump said, “Of course it was sarcastic.”
It was plainly not sarcastic. When Trump claimed in April that he had made the promise “in jest,” CNN found 53 examples in which he had pledged on the campaign trail, in an entirely serious tone, manner and context, that he would end the war either within 24 hours of his return to the White House or even sooner than that, as president-elect.
When CNN asked the White House about this false claim, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly responded on the record with a comment that did not directly address its accuracy. “Russia and Ukraine are having direct talks for the first time in years because of President Trump’s leadership,” Kelly said.
US and world history
The formation of the EU
Trump occasionally offers lessons on world history to bolster his contemporary arguments. But those lessons have sometimes been bogus. In June, for example, he said while discussing his trade negotiations with the European Union: “The European Union was formed in order to take advantage of the United States on trade. That was why they were formed.”
Experts on the history of the EU have previously told CNN that this Trump claim is “preposterous” and “could not be more wrong or inaccurate,” noting US presidents consistently supported European integration efforts that were intended to stabilize the continent and promote prosperity.
Tariffs and the Great Depression
Trump has made tariffs one of his signature policy tools. During a Cabinet meeting early this month, he defended them with a wildly distorted history of their role in the Great Depression – wrongly claiming tariffs were revived “after the Depression,” not during it.
Trump said: “There was no income tax system … in 1913 that came back, and lived well for a while, and then you had the Great Depression. And then later they brought – they tried to bring back their tariffs. But the whole thing was, you know – this was after the Depression. It was one of the great misconceptions as people like to say. ‘Oh, but it was during the’ – no. The country had a Great Depression, and then after the Depression, after – long after it started – they brought back tariffs to see if they could save it. But it took them really 25 years, wouldn’t you say, about 25 years to get out of the Great Depression. A lot of people don’t understand that.”
Thoroughly wrong.
The US imposed major tariffs near the beginning of the Great Depression, via the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930; they are widely thought to have contributed to deepening the Depression, which began in 1929 and is generally thought to have run until 1939. And while economic history can always be debated, there’s no reasonable basis for the claim that it took 25 years to “get out of” the Great Depression; World War II, from 1939 to 1945, served as a massive boon to the US economy.
Biden and South Korea’s military cost-sharing
At the same Cabinet meeting, Trump repeated a false story about how South Korea supposedly persuaded Biden to let it completely abandon the payments it had been making to help cover the cost of the US military presence in South Korea, saying, “And you know what Biden did? They probably went to him and they said, ‘Listen, Trump treated us terribly and we shouldn’t be paying anything,’ and he cut it down to nothing.”
In fact, Biden’s administration signed two cost-sharing agreements with South Korea, one in 2021 and one in 2024, that included South Korean spending increases – meaning South Korea twice agreed to pay more than it did during Trump’s first term.
The White House official claimed that “President Trump is right” because Biden negotiated “bad” deals that secured “much lower” payments than Trump would have. But that defense contradicts Trump’s own false claim that Biden agreed to allow no payments at all.
Trump’s frayed relationships with Putin and Netanyahu are impeding his foreign agenda
President Donald Trump hasn’t found his recent phone calls with war-entangled leaders encouraging.
“Very disappointed,” Trump said of his last conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose war in Ukraine is only escalating, despite Trump’s efforts to end it.
“It was sort of disappointing,” Trump said Friday of a call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose war in Gaza continues amid a dire humanitarian crisis.
With those two conflicts so far unresolved — impeding his chances for a Nobel Peace Prize — Trump is discovering the limitations of his complicated personal ties with Putin and Netanyahu, whose respective wars Trump once insisted he could quickly resolve. And he’s clearly grown frustrated he can’t seem to solve the crises any better than former President Joe Biden, who he regards as a failure on foreign policy in particular.
In Trump’s telling, Putin tells him one thing, then does another. The Kremlin leader, whose relationship with Trump has been the subject of fascination for a decade, has gone “absolutely crazy” in his relentless waves of missile and drone attacks in Ukraine, Trump insists.
Netanyahu, meanwhile, has tested Trump’s patience with airstrikes in Syria and Gaza, where images of starving children have led to international outcry and new divisions within Trump’s own party about how much to support Israel. The two men share a tumultuous history, with their relationship running hot and cold as Trump seeks an end to the war.
Trump’s challenges in leveraging his relationships extend beyond Russia and Israel. He has found a tough trade negotiator in his friend Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, despite once being Modi’s guest of honor at a 125,000-person rally in Gujarat. And his onetime North Korean pen-pal Kim Jong Un is not currently responding to Trump’s overtures; though Kim’s sister said this week their relationship was “not bad,” she said Pyongyang would never abandon its nuclear ambitions.
Trump has always applied a uniquely personal approach to foreign affairs, handing out his cell phone number and encouraging his counterparts to call or text outside the usual diplomatic channels. That has resulted, often, in improved relationships that many diplomats say can yield real results, including Trump’s success in boosting NATO members’ defense spending.
Yet the approach also has its limits.
From Nobel prize to starvation crisis
At the start of this month, Netanyahu dramatically presented Trump with a letter over dinner in the White House Blue Room nominating him for the Nobel prize. Trump seemed momentarily speechless.
By the end of July, however, Netanyahu’s actions in Gaza and Syria — including the bombing of a Catholic Church and the targeting of government buildings — were testing Trump’s patience. And this week, Trump openly broke with Netanyahu, who has claimed there was no starvation in Gaza, after seeing images of the crisis on television.
“I think everybody, unless they’re pretty cold-hearted — or worse than that, nuts — there’s nothing you can say other than it’s terrible when you see the kids,” the president said in Scotland, where he was visiting his golf properties.
On the evening before he departed for Scotland, Trump was watching the footage of starving children in Gaza, telling aides he wanted to discuss the horrifying images with Netanyahu and asking what the US could do to help, two White House officials told CNN.
“It had already been on his mind before he left,” one of the officials said, adding Trump was deeply disturbed by the images he saw.
Trump has previously been spurred to action by images of human devastation, and seeing the suffering of the children captured in photos helped motivate him to boost US aid efforts, the officials said.
First lady Melania Trump was particularly affected by the images, they told CNN, and played a key role in Trump’s shifting rhetoric. Trump acknowledged as much when speaking with reporters on Air Force One on his trip back to Washington from Scotland on Tuesday.
It’s not the first time the first lady has factored into Trump’s views of the two intractable conflicts he’s so far been unable to end. Trump has also cited his wife when lamenting what he says is Putin’s duplicity about the war in Ukraine.
“I go home, I tell the first lady, ‘I spoke to Vladimir today, we had a wonderful conversation.’ And she says, ‘Oh really, another city was just hit,’” Trump said this month in the Oval Office.
The Trump-Putin connection
Trump’s exasperation with Putin has been building for months, fueled in part by the US president’s inability to leverage what he once believed to be a positive relationship into a successful peace deal.
“We got along very well. And I never, you know, I never really thought this would happen,” Trump said this week. “I thought we would be able to negotiate something, and maybe that’ll still happen. But it’s very late down the process. So I’m disappointed.”
That frustration boiled over earlier this week, when Trump abruptly announced he would be moving up the deadline he had given Russia earlier this month — initially 50 days — to either make a deal, or face what the president has characterized as strict secondary sanctions and tariffs. On Tuesday, Trump said Putin had 10 days left to negotiate a ceasefire, after previously sniping that there was “no reason” to wait when he didn’t “see any progress being made.”
A White House official said Trump personally decided to ramp up pressure on Putin after the initial 50-day deadline failed to draw the Russian president back to the negotiating table. Trump decided a shortened timeline was a good negotiating tactic, they said.
The president’s relationship with Putin has drawn intense scrutiny, particularly during Trump’s first term when he appeared to side with Putin over US intelligence agencies on the subject of Moscow’s meddling in the 2016 election.
Trump has suggested a certain kinship with the Russian leader after enduring investigations into the election interference efforts, saying in February Putin had been “through a hell of a lot with me.” Trump’s aides, including his foreign envoy Steve Witkoff, cited the two men’s existing connection as a reason for optimism as he was seeking a negotiated settlement this spring.
While Trump has insisted he wasn’t “played” by the Russian president, he isn’t the first US leader to find that working with Putin is easier said than done. George W. Bush once described gleaning “a sense of his soul” after looking into Putin’s eyes, finding him “very straightforward and trustworthy” — seven years before Russia invaded Georgia. Barack Obama ordered up a “reset” with Russia, complete with red prop button presented by his secretary of state to her counterpart, five years before Russia invaded Crimea.
Exerting pressure on Netanyahu
So, too, have Trump’s predecessors discovered that personal ties to Netanyahu only go so far in shaping the longtime Israeli prime minister’s approach to the region. Biden had known Netanyahu for four decades when he became president in 2021. By the start of his final year in office, Biden was complaining to advisers and others that the prime minister was ignoring his advice and obstructing efforts to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Last fall, some Biden administration officials even believed Netanyahu was prolonging the Gaza conflict in the hopes Trump would win the election.
Trump did lift some restrictions on weapons transfers to Israel when he entered office. But his attempts to pressure Netanyahu and Hamas into a permanent ceasefire have so far fallen short. And a relationship that has seen its ups and downs — including a falling-out over Netanyahu’s acceptance of Biden’s victory in 2020 that Trump has never fully forgotten — has been tested.
Just this summer, Trump heaped praise on Netanyahu, calling for Israeli authorities to drop corruption charges against the prime minister after the US and Israel joined together to strike targets in Iran.
“Bibi and I just went through HELL together,” Trump wrote, echoing his description of the experience he shared with Putin.
But it was only a matter of weeks until Trump was on the phone with Netanyahu to demand an explanation for the church bombing in Gaza and the targeting of sites in Damascus, which caught Trump by surprise, according to the White House.
This weekend, Trump’s ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee denied any rift between the men, saying on Fox News the relationship was “stronger than it’s ever been.”
Some of Trump’s other counterparts hold out hope he may employ his leverage on Netanyahu to do more to alleviate the humanitarian suffering in Gaza.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whose decision to fly to Scotland and meet directly with Trump this weekend was largely due to the unfolding humanitarian crisis, worked to persuade Trump to use his influence to help, including calling on the president to apply pressure on Netanyahu, sources familiar with the discussions said.
Trump said Monday he had spoken directly with the Israeli prime minister regarding the issue, adding that he told Netanyahu he may need to approach the war “in a different way.” White House officials did not divulge the substance of their call, but told CNN the president is dedicated to working with Israel to help solve the famine.
Over the weekend, Israel’s military said it began “humanitarian pauses” in densely populated parts of the enclave and opened corridors for UN convoys to make aid deliveries. However, it said fighting would continue elsewhere.
While the president’s comments condemning the lack of resources being made available to the people of Gaza served as a major break with Netanyahu — who stated over the weekend that there “is no starvation in Gaza” — one White House official told CNN that the divisions between the two leaders are being “far overblown” by the media.
“I don’t think having POTUS acknowledge that children are clearly starving represents some major break with Bibi,” they said, adding that Trump is still committed to fully supporting Israel in their efforts to end their war with Hamas.
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