Trump Treasury Sec. Rushes to Explain How Many Trade Deals He’s Made

Donald Trump’s outlandish claim that he’d struck 200 trade deals was a complete fiction, according to members of his own Cabinet.

During an appearance on ABC News’s This Week Sunday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent admitted the president’s statement that he’d “made 200 deals” during the first 13 days of his 90-day pause on his “reciprocal tariff” policy wasn’t referring to actual deals.

“Is there actually any deal at this point?” asked host Martha Raddatz.

“I believe that he is referring to subdeals within the negotiations we’re doing,” Bessent said.

“But those aren’t actual deals,” Raddatz noted.

“Martha, if there are 180 countries, there are 18 important trading partners—let’s put China to the side because that’s a special negoation—there’s 17 important trading partners, and we have a process in place over the next 90 days to negotiate with them. Some of those are moving along very well, especially with the Asian countries,” Bessent said.

Bessent’s response appears to be an attempt to move the goalposts on closing those deals, with only 17 deals being markedly different from trade adviser Peter Navarro’s prediction that Trump would make 90 trade deals in 90 days. Bessent has desperately tried to pull Trump back from the brink of a trade war, attempting to recast the president’s destructive “America First” trade policy as non-isolationist.

Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins also undercut the president’s claim of 200 trade deals, during an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday.

“We have 100 countries that are knocking on the door,” Rollins said. “I believe, I’m not in the room, I’m not negotiating the trade deals, but my understanding is we should have several this week that are coming forward that are very, very close.”

During a sweeping interview with Time magazine to mark his first 100 days in office, Trump said he would announce the supposed 200 trade deals in the “next three to four weeks,” but he seemed confused about whether the deals were actually done.

Some officials in the Trump administration tried to bring back Kilmar Abregoa Garcia just days after he was deported, but the president shut them down.

Since Abrego Garcia was unlawfully deported last month due to an administrative error, the White House has vehemently maintained that it will not try to return him to the United States. But a report in The Atlantic Friday revealed that in the days after Abrego Garcia’s deportation, some officials did in fact try to bring him home.

A lawsuit from Abrego Garcia’s family reportedly “sparked urgent conversations among attorneys at the Departments of State, Justice, and Homeland Security,” and concern about the lack of evidence behind Trump’s claims that Abrego Garcia was part of MS-13, sources told The Atlantic.

The officials floated plans for the father of three’s return and sought ways to protect his safety while he was detained in El Salvador’s notorious megaprison, CECOT. But at the same time, backlash against the administration’s response (or lack thereof) took off, prompting the White House to change course entirely. Abrego Garcia’s case was no longer an “administrative error” but now the justified deportation of a “foreign terrorist” and MS-13 member—an evidenceless story Trump is now using to defend his unlawful deportation efforts as a whole.

“Abrego Garcia’s deportation became far more than just the case of one man; it developed into a measure of whether Donald Trump’s administration can send people—citizens or not—to foreign prisons without due process,” The Atlantic’s Nick Miroff wrote.

The Supreme Court has since ordered the White House to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return, but few actions have been taken to do so. In an interview with Time published Friday, the president said he had not asked El Salvador to return Abrego Garcia—yet another reminder of the president’s complete disregard for the rule of law.

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley begged Trump to impose more sanctions on Russia, something the president will almost certainly never do.

“IVE SEEN ENOUGH KILLING OF INNOCENT UKRAINIAN women + children. President Trump pls put the toughest of sanctions on Putin,” Grassley wrote on X. “U ought to c from clear evidence that he is playing America as a patsy.”

This post comes as the Trump administration signals that it will abandon Ukraine and allow Russia to continue its takeover of the country under the guise of a ceasefire. On Thursday, Trump told reporters that Putin not colonizing Ukraine was some kind of concession. Earlier in the day, he had begged Putin on Truth Social to stop the attacks on Ukraine, but by Friday, Trump had gone back to pressuring Ukraine to sign a mineral rights deal with the United States.

Trump’s close relationship with Russia is a massive change in foreign policy protocol that has even traditional Republicans like Grassley disturbed.

President Donald Trump is refusing to promise that his staff didn’t engage in insider trading.

While speaking with reporters on Air Force One Friday, Trump was asked about a report that people inside the White House had given Wall Street executives a heads-up about an impending trade deal with India.

“Can you commit that that did not happen?” one reporter asked.

“I can commit to myself. That’s all I can commit, you know, I have thousands of people that work for me,” Trump replied. “But I can’t imagine anybody doing that. I have very honorable people, that I can say. So I can’t even imagine it.”

Trump’s insistence that he hires “only the best people” has become something of a running joke, but now it seems that the president won’t even bother to vouch that his staff isn’t breaking the law.

Even if Trump claims he did not engage in insider trading, it’s clear that the president is intrigued by some level of market manipulation. Earlier this month, he openly bragged about how much money his friends made off his abrupt 90-day pause on most retaliatory tariffs—an announcement that caused stocks to shoot up. Bloomberg reported that the day of this announcement was the “best day ever” for billionaires, as the world’s elite collectively made $304 billion when the markets went back up.

The Trump administration’s decision to target ActBlue has instead resulted in the left-leaning platform’s biggest fundraising day of the year.

On Thursday, Donald Trump ordered the Justice Department to investigate the online donations platform, directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to look into Republican allegations that ActBlue had allowed “‘straw’ or ‘dummy’ contributions or foreign contributions to political candidates and committees.” ActBlue is a crucial fundraising tool for Democrats, as almost all party candidates use it in both primary and general elections.

The announcement inspired donors across the country to open their wallets, handing the Democratic Party a massive financial boost as some PACs more than quadrupled their fundraising within 24 hours of Trump’s memorandum.

“PACs that typically raise $3,000 to $6,000 on a message raised $25,000 and counting,” Turn Left PAC senior adviser Randy Jones told The New Republic Friday.

Prior to Thursday, ActBlue had raised $400 million within the first three months of 2025.

But anxiety over the future of ActBlue under a second Trump administration persists. Despite assurances from ActBlue that service would continue, Democratic strategists and their teams are “drafting contingency plans and evaluating other options,” wary of a president who has expressed complete disregard for the rule of law, according to Jones.

Nixing the platform would deplete the donations pipeline to Democratic candidates. Cory Archibald, communications director at Turn Left PAC, described the open field of Democratic campaign tech as the party’s “Achilles’ heel.”

“There is no other fundraising platform that comes even close to the functionality, security, and stability of ActBlue,” Archibald told TNR. “Democrats need to democratize their campaign tech, and they need to do it yesterday.”

ActBlue has said it will use all the legal means at its disposal to continue its work, denouncing the Trump memorandum as an “oppressive use of power.”

“The Trump Administration’s and GOP’s targeting of ActBlue is part of their brazen attack on democracy in America. Today’s escalation by the White House is blatantly unlawful and needs to be seen for what it is: Donald Trump’s latest front in his campaign to stamp out all political, electoral and ideological opposition,” ActBlue said in a statement.

Conservatives have repeatedly claimed that ActBlue was acting as a conduit for foreign contributions. In December, an analysis of the fundraising network’s records by Republican Representative Bryan Steil not only failed to advance the theory but instead found proof that the platform’s automated program to reject donations from foreign nationals was working effectively.