While Donald Trump took questions from the press at the White House Monday afternoon, the stock market plummeted, and Fox News displayed a graphic showing the dip while carrying Trump’s remarks live.
Trump told reporters that he planned to enact his long-threatened 25 percent tariffs against goods from Mexico and Canada and 10 percent tariffs against goods from China starting Tuesday, to which the Dow Jones, Nasdaq, and S&P 500 did not respond well. Fox News, along with their usual breaking news chyron, also had the Dow index displayed while Trump was speaking, showing a fall of more than 650 points.
Fox now displaying a ticker showing the stock market tanking while Trump is talking about tariffs pic.twitter.com/BmNlNvkCTz
— Acyn (@Acyn) March 3, 2025
Trump’s remarks were preceded by his early afternoon announcement on Truth Social addressed to “the Great Farmers of the United States.”
“Get ready to start making a lot of agricultural product to be sold INSIDE of the United States. Tariffs will go on external product on April 2nd. Have fun!” Trump posted. But it seems that there was little fun to be had in the stock market based on the fears of higher prices and other negative ripple effects.
This, coupled with fewer food imports from three of America’s largest trading partners, will ultimately lead to higher food prices across the country, something that Trump campaigned against during the 2024 election and that ultimately played a factor in his victory. Plus, the prices of various other goods, from cars to electronics to over-the-counter pills, also will likely see a sharp increase.
Don’t expect Trump to take responsibility for a sinking stock market or higher prices, though. He’s already saying that rising inflation isn’t his fault and has tacitly admitted that his tariffs will cause prices to go up. His administration is even discussing how to juke economic numbers to try and hide how badly Trump’s radical changes, including those from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, are hurting the economy. It looks like our wallets are about to have a rough spring.
More on Trump’s newest stupid tariffs idea:
Donald Trump is scheduled to speak with several Cabinet members Monday regarding Ukraine policy and the possibility of ending military assistance to the beleaguered Eastern European nation.
That could include withholding equipment, such as ammunition and radars, as well as limiting the amount of intelligence shared with the Ukrainian military, according to a U.S. official who spoke with The Washington Post.
The meeting will involve Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, and special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, the last of whom met with Russian officials last month regarding a potential peace deal.
During a White House press conference earlier Monday, Trump repeatedly ducked reporters’ questions as to whether his administration’s actions had aligned U.S. policy with Moscow. Rather than saying “no,” Trump went on a breathy rant claiming that the war never would have happened if he was in office at the onset of the conflict.
“I wanna see it end fast. I don’t want to see this go on for years and years. Now, President Zelenskiy supposedly made a statement today in AP—I’m not a big fan of AP, so maybe it was an incorrect statement—but he said he thinks the war is gonna go on for a long time, uh, and he better not be right about that, that’s all I’m saying,” Trump said.
Russian forces crossed the Ukrainian border on February 24, 2022, which Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to justify by falsely claiming that he needed to protect civilians in eastern Ukraine. The U.S. and Russia opened discussions at a meeting in Saudi Arabia last month, seeking a conclusion to the three-year war, but the assembly conspicuously excluded Ukrainian leadership.
When asked whether he had discussed the ending of military aid to Ukraine, however, Trump said that “things” were happening “as we speak.”
“I haven’t even talked about that right now,” Trump told reporters. “I mean, right now, we’ll see what happens. A lot of things are happening right now, literally as we speak.”
On Friday, Trump and JD Vance overtly showed where their loyalties lie: Seated in front of the press in the White House, the pair refused to let Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy speak, allowed a conservative reporter to mock Zelenskiy’s wartime attire, and effectively leveraged the critical meeting for measly political gain by defending Putin at the cost of denigrating former American officials. And in doing so, they challenged America’s strongest alliances while ceding the world stage to its adversaries.
Donald Trump buffered while trying desperately to talk around a direct question Monday about aligning U.S. foreign policy with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s designs for Ukraine.
During a press conference, Trump was asked whether he was “considering canceling military aid to Ukraine” after his disastrous meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy Friday.
Trump and Vice President JD Vance put on an outrageous display berating the wartime president for failing to prostrate before them as they demanded he pay the U.S. back for aid, imploding negotiations with Ukraine to the delight of the Kremlin.
The president was also asked to respond to concerns that he was moving the “U.S. worldview in alignment with Moscow.”
In response, Trump rattled off a list of everything that “would have never happened” if he’d won the presidential election four years ago.
Trump’s nonanswer, which veered further and further off-topic, included the October 7 massacre, “Israel,” inflation, the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, and China possessing the Bagram Air Base (the Taliban has denied that China controls the former U.S. base). Finally, he circled back to Ukraine—but only to complain, not to actually answer the question.
“I wanna see it end fast. I don’t want to see this go on for years and years. Now, President Zelenskiy supposedly made a statement today in AP—I’m not a big fan of AP, so maybe it was an incorrect statement—but he said he thinks the war is gonna go on for a long time, uh and he better not be right about that, that’s all I’m saying,” Trump said.
Trump doesn’t answer a question asking him about if he’s bringing US policy in alignment with Moscow pic.twitter.com/bACfEmMNkZ
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 3, 2025
Zelenskiy was quoted Monday saying that peace with Russia “is still very, very far away,” following his talk with the U.S. president. Trump called the quote “the worst statement that could have been made,” in a post on Truth Social.
Trump was also asked whether Americans should be disturbed that Kremlin officials said his foreign policy was “largely in line” with Russia’s vision.
“Well, I’ll tell you what, I think it takes two to tango,” Trump replied. “And you’re gonna have to make a deal with Russia, and you’re gonna have to make a deal with Ukraine. You’re gonna have to have the, uhhhh, assent and you’re gonna have to have the consent from the European nations, ’cause I think that’s important—and from us. I think everybody has to get into a room, so to speak, and we have to make a deal. And the deal could be made very fast. It should not be that hard a deal to make. It could be made very fast.”
Trump previously claimed that he could resolve the war within 24 hours of entering the White House.
Then the president pivoted to continue whining about Zelenskiy: “Now maybe somebody doesn’t want to make a deal, and if somebody doesn’t want to make a deal, I think that person won’t be around very long. That person will not be listened to very long. Because I believe that Russia wants to make a deal. I believe certainly the people of Ukraine want to make a deal—they’ve suffered more than anybody else. We talk about suffering, they suffered.”
“But if you think about it, under President Bush they got Georgia, right? Russia got Georgia. Under President Obama they got a nice big submarine base, a nice big chunk of land where they have their submarines. You know that, right? Crimea,” Trump said, inhaling heavily.
It’s worth remembering that Trump had been a cheerleader for Putin following Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, claiming that Crimeans “would rather be with Russia.”
“Under President Trump they got nothing. And under President O’Biden they tried to get the whole thing,” Trump said, garbling his predecessor’s name. “They tried to get the whole big, uh, big Ukraine. The whole thing. If I didn’t get in here, they would have gotten the whole thing.”
Trump’s support for the foreign dictator emboldened Russia, and his lack of support for Zelenskiy weakened the country, making way for Russia to launch its ground offensive in 2022.
With Trump in office, Russia wouldn’t walk away empty-handed.
The White House instructed the State and Treasury departments Monday to draft a plan lifting U.S. sanctions on Russian individuals and entities, including oligarchs, who Trump recently claimed “are very nice people.” It wasn’t immediately clear what the U.S. would receive in return for sanctions relief. And earlier this month, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth suggested that Kyiv should abandon hopes of restoring its illegally seized territory from Russia.
Read more about Trump on Ukraine:
The Department of Government Efficiency’s wide-ranging and haphazard cuts to the federal government have reached the nation’s nuclear safety programs.
Just before Valentine’s Day, at the direction of Elon Musk, the Trump administration nixed 17 percent of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s workforce despite the objections of senior officials, The Washington Post reported Monday.
“The president said workers critical to national security would be exempt from the firings. But then there was an active decision to say these positions are not critical to national security,” one unidentified official at the agency told the Post. “It is so absurd I don’t even know what to say.”
Previous reporting had revealed that the staff reductions at the nuclear agency were part of a larger layoff by DOGE directed at the Department of Energy that sought to ax up to 2,000 employees. DOGE pledged that the mass firing only affected noncritical employees who “held primarily administrative and clerical roles,” but that was little more than a bold-faced lie.
One of the staffers forced out of his position included acting Chief of Defense Nuclear Safety James Todd, a senior executive official and the “top authority for all nuclear-safety matters in the agency,” The Bulwark reported last month.
Other critical employees dismissed in the purge included staffers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is responsible for maintaining and minimizing radiation and potential damage from accidents at the nuclear site. The cut workers included an emergency preparedness manager, a radiation protection manager, the security manager, the fire protection engineer, and two facility representatives.
The losses were considered so ill-advised and extreme that the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration reversed course on the hatchet job, welcoming the affected employees back to their jobs. The White House also walked back the decision after it received a “stream of panicked calls” from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who demanded the immediate reinstatement of some 314 nuclear staff workers, including engineers, technicians, and managers, according to the Post.
“These are jobs directly tied to keeping bad things from happening at facilities in places like Tennessee, Texas, New Mexico, Nebraska, and Kansas City, Missouri,” another anonymous official who recently left their job told the newspaper. “A lot of them are in red states. These lawmakers are not thrilled by the potential for bad things happening in their communities.”
But the process wasn’t as simple as an invite back to the office. Instead, dejected and “shell shocked” employees at the NNSA are considering early retirement or looking for work in more stable sectors, unsure of if or when the Trump administration might try to dismiss them again, according to The Bulwark.
Musk’s rapid-fire cuts at the NNSA serve as another monstrous example that Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” philosophy can’t be easily adopted or translated into a federal bureaucracy providing critical services. The tech billionaire has similarly had to walk back cuts that his juvenile team made to the nation’s disease-prevention programs, as well as Food and Drug Administration teams responsible for reviewing AI-assisted surgery protocols and food safety, among other layoffs.
Further still, DOGE has not lived up to its promises. The organization has had to rescind claims that it saved the government billions of dollars, deleting details from the group’s “wall of receipts” after journalists fact-checked that the programs they slashed never actually tallied up to the bold savings.
Read more about the cuts:
