JD Vance Accidentally Undermines Trump While Trying to Blame Biden

Even Donald Trump’s right-hand man thinks that the economy is messed up.

In an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity Thursday, Vice President JD Vance acknowledged the reality for millions of Americans: that life has gotten more “expensive,” and that people are “suffering.”

But the person at fault for the rattled economy was still, according to Vance, former President Joe Biden, whose tenure saw historic gains in the job market.

“We need a good job to pay good wages, we need people to be able to go to the grocery store and be able to actually buy what they need for their family. That takes a little bit of time,” Vance said.

“I know there are a lot of people out there, Sean, who are saying that things are expensive,” Vance continued. “But we have to remember that we inherited this terrible inflation crisis from the Biden administration.”

Vance touted the progress of the president’s economic agenda, arguing that in the last 11 months, Trump had managed “trillions upon trillions” of dollars in new investments to rebuild America’s manufacturing class.

“Of course, I’m mindful that people are suffering because those factories do not get built overnight,” Vance said, again emphasizing that the American public would need to be patient to see the ultimate payoff of Trump’s policies. “These things actually take a little bit of time.”

Vance’s comments were a remarkable departure from the administration’s talking points, which have insisted on the country’s economic success despite myriad cost-of-living indicators suggesting otherwise. Trump has prattled on about “making America affordable again,” but the economic strain has become more severe since he entered office.

Practically everything has become more expensive, in large part because of Trump’s tariff plan: Beef prices are reaching new highs, coffee prices are up by 20 percent (and the price hike is likely here to stay), and the average price of gasoline—at $3.09 per gallon—is slightly higher than this time last year.

Beyond that, homeownership has become a pipe dream for millions, the job market is in historic decline, and the unstable economy has stopped business owners from making large-scale investments.

It took eight months, but it seems that the Trump administration has finally figured out that you can’t really grow bananas in the United States.

After his party suffered sweeping losses in a series of elections earlier this month that hinged on the issue of affordability, and then publicly spiraled when pressed on the rising price of groceries, President Donald Trump is reportedly gearing up to undermine his own key economic policy, three sources told The New York Times Thursday.

The Trump administration was preparing broad exemptions for certain tariffs—including on products from countries that have yet to strike a deal with the U.S. government—stalling a key negotiation lever in Trump’s economic policy that has been sparking financial strain for consumers.

While the decisions about what to exempt have yet to be finalized, the sources told the Times that they expect it will include citrus and beef—a concerning sign for U.S. cattle ranchers, who have already pushed back on the president’s offer to buy beef from Argentina. Trump has claimed that ranchers who felt betrayed just didn’t “understand” his brilliant economic machinations.

But Trump’s sweeping tariffs on U.S. beef suppliers, such as Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, and Uruguay, as well as tariffs on feed and farming equipment, have only driven the consumer price of beef higher and higher, according to NBC News.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent teased Wednesday that the president would make “substantial” tariff exemptions on products such as coffee, bananas, and other fruit—namely products whose domestic production couldn’t possibly be boosted through tariffs on foreign imports.

The Trump administration announced Thursday that it had struck new trade deal frameworks with Argentina, Ecuador, El Salvador, and Guatemala, with senior officials suggesting that could help alleviate rising prices on agricultural products from Latin America, such as coffee and bananas.

The British Broadcasting Corporation has apologized to President Donald Trump for editing his speech on an episode of Panorama, but will not fork over the $1 billion he threatened to sue for.

Earlier this week, the president’s legal team sent a letter to the BBC claiming that the British news outlet attempted to “interfere in the presidential election” by editing one of his January 6, 2021, speeches in a broadcast one day before the 2024 vote.

Panorama edited together two sections of Trump’s 2021 speech, including his line calling on supporters to “fight like hell,” while leaving out a section in which he told them to peacefully protest. Controversy ensued, causing Director General Tim Davie and news CEO Deborah Turness both to resign on Sunday, which Trump celebrated on Truth Social.

He also sent a letter to the BBC threatening a $1 billion defamation lawsuit unless the BBC did a “full and fair” retraction of the Panorama episode and “appropriately compensated” him for harm done. The deadline for the BBC to respond was Friday.

“We accept that our edit unintentionally created the impression that we were showing a single continuous section of the speech, rather than excerpts from different points in the speech, and that this gave the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action,” the BBC wrote in its Corrections and Clarifications section on Thursday.

While the BBC “sincerely regrets the manner in which the video clip was edited,” it still “strongly disagree[s] there is a basis for a defamation claim,” a spokesperson said. The letter to Trump’s team notes that the news agency did not distribute the Panorama episode in the United States, the clip was only edited for the sake of time, and the episode did not cause Trump any harm given that he won the election.

Trump has already made other large media corporations fold financially, getting a $16 million settlement from CBS News over edits to an interview with Kamala Harris prior to the 2024 election, and another $16 million settlement with ABC News after host George Stephanopolous used the phrase “liable for rape” to describe Trump’s E. Jean Carroll case verdict.

Right-wing commentator Megyn Kelly is trying to downplay the latest Jeffrey Epstein emails by questioning if the billionaire child sex offender was really a pedophile. 

On her Sirius XM radio show Wednesday, Kelly highlighted the ages of Epstein’s victims, declaring that there is a “difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old.”

“Yeah, so I don’t know what’s true about him, but we have yet to see anybody come forward and say I was under 10, I was under 14 when I first came within his purview. You can say that’s a distinction without a difference. I think there is a difference,” Kelly said to her guest Batya Ungar-Sargon.  

It’s a roundabout and indirect way of trying to soften the allegations against President Trump by downplaying Epstein’s offenses, and even casting a little doubt. It’s one of many attempts by Trump allies and people on the right to try and protect the president, who has been heavily implicated in this week’s email releases.

Among the many revelations are that Epstein bragged about “giving” his 20-year-old girlfriend to Trump and that he may have spent Thanksgiving with him in 2017, during his first term as president. House Republicans and the White House attempted to claim that one of the victims Epstein said Trump spent a lot of time with, per one email, was Virginia Giuffre, who died earlier this year and claimed she never witnessed Trump commit any wrongdoing. 

In doing so, however, Republicans confirmed that the emails are real, taking away the ability of Trump or any of his allies to deny their substance and forcing them into pathetic defenses like Kelly’s. To her credit, Kelly still expressed contempt for Epstein in the exchange, saying, “Every time we start talking about Epstein, it makes your skin crawl.” Well, so do the many defenses for Trump’s behavior. 

The man President Trump wanted to be attorney general was allegedly paying for sex with a 17-year old girl who was working at a McDonald’s, saving up for braces, and partly living at a homeless shelter.

Last year, a House Ethics Committee report found “substantial evidence” that former representative and former attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz “regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity with him,” and that he “engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl” in 2017. The report also mentioned that Gaetz possessed and used cocaine and ecstasy while in office. Last month, newly unsealed court documents further detailed just how dire a situation the girl was living in before she was connected with Gaetz.

As The New York Times reported, the girl was in and out of homeless shelters, where one of her parents lived after a divorce. In an attempt to save up for braces, she joined a sugar dating website, saying she was 18 instead of 17 to join.

The girl met Gaetz’s friend Joel Greenberg through the website in April 2017. He invited her on his boat and paid her $400 without having sex with her. They then had sex seven times for money after that. In July, she went to a party thrown by Republican lobbyist Chris Dorworth and had sex with then-Representative Gaetz twice.

“The vulnerable circumstances most crime victims face are rarely known to the public,” the victim’s lawyer Laura B. Wolf told The New York Times. “Although my client’s circumstances were revealed outside of her control, I hope it helps for the public to see a fuller and more human picture of her than the press has reported on to date.… Power imbalances can be age, but they can also be financial. My client had little economic security, which allowed for financial leverage over her.”

Gaetz has denied everything.

“I never had sex with this person.… This person threatened me with a lawsuit if I didn’t pay her $2.3 million,” he said in a text to the Times. “She never sued me because her story is fiction.”