Fed Reserve Chair Says Trump’s Policies Mostly to Blame for Inflation

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell once again confirmed the obvious—that President Trump’s impulsive tariffs and his war on Iran are responsible for skyrocketing prices.

“If you look at total core inflation, it’s about 3 percent. And some big chunk of that, between a half and three quarters, is actually tariffs,” Powell said at a Wednesday press conference.

Powell also cast blame upon Trump’s war on Iran, which has caused oil and gas prices to rise to their highest national levels in years.

“Near-term measures of inflation expectations have risen in recent weeks, likely reflecting the substantial rise in oil prices caused by the supply disruptions in the Middle East,” he said earlier in the conference.

Powell blamed these policies while announcing the Federal Reserve would leave interest rates unchanged. “The forecast is that we will be making progress on inflation; not as much as we had hoped, but some progress on inflation,” he said.

The Trump campaign can’t blame growing inflation on former President Biden forever, and the issue will persist long after Powell leaves. It’s clear that its president’s policies are responsible for the frustrated cries of millions of Americans who were already struggling financially. Powell’s admission only further cements Trump’s apathy toward affordability issues.

Democratic Representative Dan Goldman revealed an unredacted document from the Epstein files on the House floor Wednesday, saying that it directly contradicts Donald Trump’s account of his relationship with the billionaire sex offender.

The document is an October 2009 email containing information about a conversation between one of Epstein’s attorneys, Jack Goldberger, and an attorney for Trump, Alan Garten. The email was initially released to the public in redacted form. In the unredacted version, as Goldman highlighted, Goldberger wrote that Garten said Epstein was never asked to leave Trump’s Mar-a-Lago country club in Florida as he was not a member, but may have been a guest.

This directly contradicts Trump’s claim that he kicked Epstein out of the resort in 2004 due to his poaching of Mar-a-Lago employees. Goldman claimed that the document was being deliberately withheld by the Department of Justice, violating the Epstein Files Transparency Act that Trump signed into law in November.

“This document here was redacted to the public. It was unredacted to Congress and it completely disputes everything that Donald Trump has said about Jeffrey Epstein,” Goldman said, displaying a blown-up poster of the email. “Now, why is this important? Because if the attorney general is covering up this information that she then reveals to Congress, what else is she covering up about Donald Trump’s involvement in the Epstein files?”

Bondi is already under fire for allegedly mismanaging the release of the Epstein files, and has been subpoenaed by the Republican-led House Oversight Committee to appear for a deposition on April 14. This latest revelation is only going to make her seem more guilty of slow-walking and covering up damning information about Trump and Epstein.

Vice President JD Vance admitted there’s a “rough road ahead” with regard to skyrocketing gas prices caused by the war on Iran, which still has no clear end in sight.

“We’re seeing gas prices here climbing at home, in particular here in metro Detroit with what’s going on in Iran and the impacts on the Strait of Hormuz,” a reporter asked Vance at a Wednesday press conference in Michigan. “What is the administration doing to help keep gas prices down, and where do you see gas prices going in the near future?”

“Well, the president of the United States has been crystal clear about this. Look, gas prices are up. And we know they’re up. And we know that people are hurting because of it. And we’re doing everything we can to make sure they stay lower,” Vance replied. “The president said this, and I certainly agree with it. This is a temporary blip, OK?”

Vance then went on to blame former President Joe Biden rather than elaborate on how exactly the Trump administration would be bringing gas prices down.

“Frankly, [gas prices] aren’t even as high as they were during certain parts of the Biden administration because of what’s going on in the Middle East. It’s not gonna last forever. We’re gonna take care of business, we’re gonna come back home. And when that happens, you’re gonna see energy prices come back down.… But yeah, we’ve got a rough road ahead of us for the next few weeks, but it’s temporary.”

This comes just one day after Ken Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council, proudly declared that the Iran war’s negative impact on the average U.S. consumer is “the last” of the administration’s concerns.

The Trump administration is spiraling over a New York Times story that says it is pushing Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel to step down as a requirement for negotiations between the U.S. and Cuba to move forward.

The Times reported Monday, citing four anonymous sources, that U.S. negotiators want economic hard-liner Díaz-Canel to go in order to open up the country’s economy. The report has infuriated Trump administration officials, who are disputing the reporting.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is personally handling Cuba, said Tuesday night on X, “The reason so many in US media keep putting out fake stories like this one is because they continue to rely on charlatans & liars claiming to be in the know as their sources.”

Charlie Stadtlander, a spokesperson for the newspaper, responded to Rubio Wednesday morning, saying that the Times reached out to the State Department “well before publication and received no disagreement with the information we were bringing to light.”

“Neither you nor anyone else has presented a factual dispute to the reporting,” Stadtlander stated. “Our reporting is real, and accurate.”

Hours later, White House communications director Steven Cheung jumped in and insulted the Times on X, saying, “The only people who are privy to Cuba are President Trump and Marco Rubio. Your lazy reporters relied on uninformed sources who know nothing about what’s going on.”

What Rubio and Cheung are mad about is unclear. Trump told reporters last month that he thinks that there could be a “friendly takeover” of Cuba, and, unprompted, told CNN just a week later that “Cuba is going to fall pretty soon.” Maybe Rubio and Cheung, amid the administration’s various regime change plots, are mad that the Times got inside information that they didn’t want revealed to the public.

The leader of the FBI admitted Wednesday to unconstitutionally buying location data monitoring the general public.

The confession emerged during a heated exchange with Democrat Senator Ron Wyden, who asked FBI Director Kash Patel if he would pledge to refrain from such purchases.

“Can you commit this morning to not buying Americans’ location data?” asked Wyden.

“The FBI uses all tools … to do our mission,” Patel said. “We do purchase commercially available information that’s consistent with the Constitution and the laws under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. It’s led to some valuable intelligence for us to be utilized with our private and partner sectors.”

“So you’re saying that the agency will buy Americans’ location data?” Wyden said. “I believe that’s what you’ve said in some kind of intelligence lingo.”

“Doing that without a warrant is an outrageous end run around of the Fourth Amendment. It’s particularly dangerous given the use of artificial intelligence to comb through massive amounts of private information,” the Oregon lawmaker noted.

The Fourth Amendment protects people in America from unlawful search and seizures by the government, mandating that law enforcement officials obtain search warrants, which require a legal standard of probable cause. That standard remains true for any attempted information collection by government agencies, which typically have to convince a judge to authorize a search warrant before they can access such details from tech or phone companies.

Patel’s tacit approval of his administration’s intrusions into the personal details of everyday Americans illustrates that the agency not only failed to meet that standard—but also that the current leader appears to not understand the gravity of the violation.

Wyden was one of four lawmakers who last week introduced the bipartisan Government Surveillance Reform Act, which among other things would explicitly require surveillance agencies to seek judicial warrants from data brokers. It would also prohibit “warrantless backdoor searches,” would prohibit the targeting of foreigners as “a pretext for spying on the Americans with whom they are communicating,” and “prohibits the collection of domestic communications.”

In a statement, Representative Warren Davidson noted that Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act had been “stretched far beyond its original purpose” to the point that it effectively permits “unconstitutional warrantless searches of American citizens and their private communications.”

“The bipartisan Government Surveillance Reform Act counters these abuses by requiring a warrant to search Americans’ data and by closing the data broker loophole that allows the federal government to spy on citizens by purchasing private data that would otherwise require a warrant or subpoena,” the Ohio Republican wrote.