The public reaction to Donald Trump’s tariff reversal has not been good.

CNN’s John Berman decided to spew off a list of headlines Thursday morning related to the market frenzy while introducing Republican strategist David Urban, who was left with little more than sticks and stones and some misdirection to defend the president’s whiplash tariff rollout and his subsequent cave.

“Let’s go over some of the headlines and leads in today’s papers,” Berman started. “The Washington Post, ‘Trump Blinked.’ Wall Street Journal opinion, ‘Trump Blinks.’ The New York Times lede says ‘Bond Yields cause Mr. Trump to blink.’ The Financial Times, ‘Why did Donald Trump buckle?’

“And just for the sugar on top here, Politico says, ‘Getting yippy with it,’ and Puck says, ‘Un-liberation Day,’” Berman continued.

“So David Urban, blink, blink, buckle,” Berman concluded, before asking Urban, “Was this all bungled?”

“No, John, I don’t think it was bungled. I think that the markets got a little skittish,” Urban said. “I think the House and Senate are working diligently to get this tax bill done and get some things pushed through.”

Urban then blamed the markets, claiming that if investors “were a bit more patient,” they would have seen the administration get “a lot of good things done.” The lobbyist then posited that a forthcoming “stablecoin bill” would make the U.S. dollar stronger again on a global scale.

“However, you know, the bond markets, as you noted there, really put a scare into the administration, I think, when the cost of borrowing for the federal government goes way, way up and the U.S. dollar doesn’t become the reserve currency, which was what it looks like when you have a bond market sell-off like it was happening,” Urban said. “I think that’s what caused the pause button to be pushed.”

But Urban conceded, ultimately, that no one can know how the markets will react.

Trump appeared to intentionally sow volatility last week, when he announced some 200 tariffs on countries around the world (whose rates were discovered to be founded on bad math). After a week of panicked investors and a tanking economy, as well as a midday trade war with China, Trump decided to undo it all, with the White House revealing that it would be pausing the majority of its tariffs (except on China) and lowering the tariffs to a universal baseline rate of 10 percent. That sent the market into a different kind of frenzy, whose biggest winners were the demographic already with the most money: billionaires.

In its latest attack on the free press, the Trump administration is withholding pool reports that make it look bad.

Two recent dispatches from White House pool reporters, a rotating group of reporters designated to cover the president and share information with the rest of the press corps, never made it public, Status reported Wednesday.

On Tuesday evening, Dallas Morning News reporter Joseph Gordon, who was in the pool that day, sent a standard email noting that reporters were following Trump to a dinner but that two photographers from the Associated Press were “turned away from joining the pool.” The pool report never made it to news outlets, Gordon later learned. In February, the Associated Press was banned from the White House press pool for refusing to adopt Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, but a judge ordered the White House to lift the ban Tuesday.

Also earlier this week, Philip Wegman of RealClearPolitics sent a report noting the abrupt cancellation of a joint press conference with Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. That report also never made it to press, Status reported.

The White House press pool is essential to distributing information to news outlets across the country, and the censorship of its reports marks yet another attempt by the Trump administration to control journalists. In February, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced Trump’s press team would take over the press pool and determine which journalists get to travel with the president, declaring the job “a privilege, not a legal right.”

The announcement broke decades of historical precedent and marked the beginning of unparalleled hostility between the White House and reporters. Trump, Leavitt, and other MAGA members have since tried a number of ways to control the media and avoid being held accountable for their attack on democracy—it looks like censoring pool reports is their next attempt to do so.

Donald Trump claimed that his party was “working nicely together,” just hours after House Republicans’ infighting forced them to delay a vote on a multitrillion-dollar budget bill.

“Great News! ‘The Big, Beautiful Bill’ is coming along really well. Republicans are working together nicely. Biggest Tax Cuts in USA History!!! Getting close,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Thursday morning.

House GOP members were anything but united. The night before, Republican Representative Rich McCormick told CNN’s Manu Raju that there were still 15 Republican holdouts on the bill, which would provide the funding for Trump’s sweeping agenda, including tax cuts and bolstering immigration initiatives.

Representative Thomas Massie, who has become a regular holdout against Republican-backed government spending bills, said that a provision Republicans had added that would prevent efforts to roll back Trump’s tariffs was “illegal.”

“They used the Rules Committee resolution to circumvent U.S. law,” Massie told Raju.

On Wednesday night, House Speaker Mike Johnson said he hadn’t decided how best to rally Republican support behind the budget blueprint.

“We have a pretty well-developed playbook, and it’s got a number of plays in it, and I just haven’t made the call on which one it is yet,” he said.

House Republicans are expected to vote again on the bill at 10:20 a.m. before setting off on a two-week recess.

Donald Trump is taking revenge against two officials from his first term.  

On Wednesday, the president issued directives........

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