Trump Flubs Major Details About His Own Trade Deals
Despite protestations from America’s trading partners, Donald Trump insisted Wednesday that his tariff scheme would pull in trillions of dollars of investment by some of the world’s largest economies.
“I think we’re going to have the richest economy you’ve ever seen,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We have money coming in that we’ve never even thought about, at numbers nobody has ever seen before.
“We have a deal with Japan where they’re going to pay us $550 billion,” he continued. “We have a deal with Europe where they’re doing $750 billion plus $400 billion, plus $300 billion, and many other countries. It’s likewise, relatively, those are two big ones.”
But those figures are inaccurate, according to Japanese and European leaders.
Ryosei Akazawa, Japan’s top chief negotiator, told public broadcaster NHK on Saturday that he expects just 1 to 2 percent of the $550 billion U.S. fund to be an investment, of which the U.S. and Japan would share the profits at a 90-to-10 ratio. The remainder of the fund would be deployed as a combination of loans and loan guarantees from banks with backing by the Japanese government, reported Bloomberg.
Beyond that, Japan estimates that its new trade deal with the Trump administration would actually save its country money, approximately 10 trillion yen ($68 billion), by way of decreased tariff rates.
“It’s not that $550 billion in cash will be sent to the U.S.,” Akazawa said. “By letting the U.S. have 90 percent of the profits rather than 50 percent, I think Japan’s loss will be at most a couple of tens of billions of yen. People are saying various things, such as, ‘You sold out Japan,’ but they’re wrong.”
Meanwhile, Trump has demanded that Europe reorient its liquefied gas purchases from Russia to the U.S. as a step toward new trading relations. And while European leaders have reiterated the potential of the plan, gas experts are not so convinced that the $750 billion “fantasy” works out.
“We are ready to go for those purchases,” EU trade chief Maroš Šefčovič said Monday, echoing comments from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen made the day before. “We believe these numbers are achievable.”
Actually following through on the arrangement would require Europe to triple its American imports by 2028, forgoing cheaper offerings from its neighbors, such as Norway, which delivers gas to the continent by pipeline. Even divesting from Russian oil would barely make a dent in Trump’s demand—the European Union imported just $23 billion in oil, gas, and nuclear products from Russia in 2024.
Laura Page, a senior analyst at the Kpler commodities firm, told Politico that the figure was “completely unrealistic.”
“The numbers are just beyond wild,” she said.
Donald Trump says that Democrats “love” talking about Epstein—but it’s the president who can’t seem to stop bringing up his old party pal, even when his cronies are desperately trying to buy him some cover.
Sources told Fox News Digital Wednesday that FBI Director Kash Patel had discovered multiple burn bags filled with sensitive documents stashed away in a secret room at the agency. During a press conference later that day, Trump was asked to give a statement about Patel’s far-fetched attempt to distract from the president’s ties to the alleged sex trafficker—but he couldn’t help but bring up Epstein anyway.
“Well, I want everything to be shown. You know, as long as it’s fair and reasonable I think it will be shown and it should be shown, and I think [Patel] feels that way, and I think Pam feels that way,” Trump said. But his comments echoed his previous statements about releasing any “credible” information from the Epstein files. Clearly, the president wasn’t all that interested in talking about Patel’s supposed bombshell.
“But it’s gotta be stuff that really doesn’t hurt people unfairly, because you have so many people involved. And if they can do that in a fair way, I think it’s great. I think it’s really great. The whole thing is a scam,” Trump rambled. “It’s a scam set up by the Democrats and they love talking about it.”
But it seems that Trump is the one who loves talking about Epstein, as he took off on a winding rant that had absolutely nothing to do with what he’d actually been asked about.
“I would like to see people exposed that might be bad, and we’ll see how that all works out, but it’s getting to be very old news. You know, if they had anything they would’ve done it the week before the election, because they were losing by a lot,” Trump continued. “If they had anything they would have done it. They controlled the file. The Democrats controlled it. Comey, and all the sleazebags, every one of them that you read about all the time.”
Trump on RussiaGate Burn Bags: It's a scam set up by the Democrats and they love talking about it. But I would like to see people exposed that might be bad and we'll see how that all works out. But it's getting to be very old news… They controlled the file. The Democrats… pic.twitter.com/05Kl5fkBlc
Trump’s defensiveness aside, one of the documents supposedly contained within the mysterious burn bags was the classified annex to former special counsel John Durham’s 2023 report on the FBI’s investigations into Russian interference with the 2016 presidential campaigns. This all just happens to be the very same subject of the Trump administration’s attempts to draw attention away from its sudden refusal to release more information from the government’s files on Epstein.
Durham’s report already resulted in criminal charges against only three people, and at trial, the special counsel lost two of those cases, with the third defendant pleading guilty to altering an email used to support a surveillance application. So the notion that this mysterious annex will unveil a vast conspiracy is severely unlikely, as the FBI’s conduct has already been litigated. Still, the Trump administration is currently working to declassify the annex and then share it with Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, according to Fox News Digital.
Earlier this month, Trump was asked by Just the News whether he would be open to declassifying Durham’s annex. “I would declassify it, yeah. Why not?” Trump said. “I would absolutely declassify it.”
Senate Democrats are pulling........© New Republic
