Fatality rate of 47.4%

Congo's Ebola outbreak reaches 5,000 cases as it outpaces response efforts

By The Associated Press

The Ebola outbreak in Congo has reached 5,000 cases, government data showed Wednesday, as responders warn it is spreading at an unprecedented speed outpacing efforts to slow it in one of the country's remotest regions.

Data from Congo's Ministry of Health showed the outbreak had so far recorded 5,021 cases, including 2,378 deaths as of Sunday, as it rages in some of the most challenging conditions imaginable fueled by insecurity, displacement and intense population movements.

The outbreak has infected and killed more people at a greater speed than any other outbreak in history. The World Health Organization estimates it will likely surpass the outbreak of 2014 to 2016 across West Africa, which was the deadliest Ebola outbreak on record with more than 11,000 deaths.

Starting from the first detected case, the current outbreak has spread about three times faster than the deadliest on record.

The outbreak "has spread rapidly and the risk of further national and international spread remains high," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Tuesday at a meeting convened by the agency.

"We must be frank: the epidemic is far from being under control," he said.

Thérèse Anyiya, a nurse working in Ituri's capital Bunia, said she is exhausted by the work demands and poor working conditions. Some health workers have gone on strike after not being paid.

"If the managers don't take things seriously, we too will end up withdrawing. The way this epidemic is being managed is exhausting," Anyiya told The Associated Press.

A key challenge has been the lack of approved vaccines or treatments for the rare Bundibugyo virus, which is responsible for the current outbreak. Most new cases are being reported outside of the people being monitored, showing it has spread quickly and left surveillance teams racing to catch up.

Lack of information in Ituri causes attacks on health workers

Ituri, the province that has been hit the worst by the outbreak, has become a primary location for violence that has limited the response as health workers are targeted.

Residents on Monday attacked a health team in the territory of Aru after a suspected case was reported there. A mob set fire to an ambulance and damaged two other vehicles, according to Michael Wani, president of the Union of Cultural Associations for the Development of Ituri.

Dr. Martin Cwinyay, who is involved in the Ituri response efforts, explained it is "essential to bring the response closer to the people, particularly in rural, mining and displacement areas."

Trish Newport, an emergency coordinator with Doctors Without Borders, known by its French acronym MSF, said not all the people in the impacted areas have the essential information they need.

"The community needs to be aware about the outbreak. They need to be involved in the response. They need to know what the signs and symptoms are and what to do if they get sick," Newport said.

Limited care is resulting in more deaths

Experts believe the virus began spreading from the mining town of Mongbwalu as early as February, months before authorities declared the outbreak on May 15.

Responders racing to catch up are also battling several other challenges including threats by rebel groups, anger from communities that have been traumatized for years and bad roads into the affected territories.

Although the 2014-2016 outbreak is considered the deadliest among the virus types that causes Ebola disease, government data shows this Bundibugyo outbreak has killed a higher percentage of people as care and support are not getting to patients quickly enough, while many are not reporting symptoms or doing so late.

The situation also varies across the six affected provinces. While the case fatality rate is so far 47.4%, it is far worse in some places where response efforts are more challenging, such as in North Kivu province where the fatality rate is 70%.

If they do, they need to use Velcro, since it will be ripped off again...

Kennedy Center says it will add Trump’s name back to building in early September

By Devan Cole

The Kennedy Center plans to add President Donald Trump’s name back to the front of its building in early September, lawyers for the institution told a federal judge.

The revelation came in court filings submitted late Tuesday as part of a protracted legal fight over the fate of the historic preforming arts venue and memorial to the late President John F. Kennedy, which just last week voted, once again, to close its doors for a yearslong renovation and to add the president’s name to its marble façade.

The latest change would see the addition of an inscription below the Kennedy Center’s sign that says the venue was “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump.”

Another add to the front referencing Trump could come later if an endowment reaches $100 million, the board said. The center also plans to rename the physical site the building sits on in honor of Trump.

A federal judge had previously ruled that the center’s board violated the law when it added Trump’s name alongside that of Kennedy, the 35th president, and lawyers representing Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty, who brought the legal challenge, plan to ask him to step in again to block this latest change. The center told the court in the filing that they won’t add Trump’s name back until September 8 at the earliest.

“This Court should not permit defendants to effectuate this latest gambit, in direct contravention of its earlier decision and in naked defiance of the law,” lawyers for Beatty told US District Judge Christopher Cooper, urging him to decide whether adding Trump’s name back to the building is lawful before September 8.

The lawyers blasted the center for its decision to “refuse to unequivocally commit to forestall effectuation” of the latest name change until Cooper has a chance to decide whether or not it’s legal.

The case is one of several questioning the legality of Trump’s efforts to leave a lasting mark on historic sites in and around Washington, DC, by renovating buildings or adding new memorials. The center’s board, which is stacked with individuals picked by the president, is trying to close the center for extensive renovations to the building, but critics contend that the plans were cooked up so the center wouldn’t continue to face slumping ticket sales and lackluster programming.

Earlier this summer, Trump’s name was removed from the front of the building after Cooper, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, ruled the venue could only be named for Kennedy. Crews standing on scaffolding erected outside the building worked behind tarps to take down the letters spelling out “The Donald Trump and.”

But since then, the tarps have remained, obscuring the public’s view of the official name of the building.

The center had previously said that the tarps and scaffolding needed to remain up so workers could address damage to the part of the building where Trump’s name used to be. But in Tuesday’s filing, they said the scaffolding was still in place to help workers “investigate, and engineer structural repairs to the overhead soffit.”

Beatty’s lawyers say that explanation falls flat since “the soffits are some twenty feet or more above the scaffolding.” They’re asking Cooper to issue an order that would require the center to explain why the tarp should not be taken down in coming weeks.

“Defendants imply that they will erect more scaffolding around the rest of the Center, presumably to examine other portions of the roof,” they wrote. “But defendants tellingly have not done so for months, leaving only the Center’s iconic name obscured – a strong indication that this structure has nothing to do with the roof and is, instead, meant to defy a return to the status quo.”

The line about trump's whore makes me smile....

Jon Ossoff’s ‘travel with Natalie’ shows how candidates win attention in a culture of clips

Analysis by Brian Stelter

Sen. Jon Ossoff knew exactly what he was doing by invoking President Trump’s “travel with Natalie” the other day.

Google searches for Trump’s executive assistant Natalie Harp spiked by 5,000%. News outlets hurried to meet the demand for information by publishing new stories about Harp.

Liberal commentators cheered Ossoff while conservative commentators condemned him. Tuesday afternoon on Fox News, a bemused Jesse Watters remarked, “This is the first time we have covered Ossoff on this show in six years.”

That’s hard to believe, but it amounts to a victory for Ossoff, 39, who is running for re-election in Georgia while some Democrats dream about him running for president in 2028.

His “travel with Natalie” line — part of a broader but still just TikTok-length argument that Trump “doesn’t want to do the job” of president — showed a sophisticated understanding of the social media environment.

The comment at a rally last Sunday titillated, provoked and enraged different audiences simultaneously, all but guaranteeing saturation news coverage and even more attention.

Video clips of the comment were approvingly shared on X and other sites by Trump critics who had previously questioned Trump’s working relationship with Harp, 35.

“Pod Save America” co-host Tommy Vietor wrote that Ossoff was “winking” at the subject, and “the question now is whether this will kick up a round of actual reporting by news outlets.”

It did, in part because audiences were hungry for more information, and in part because of the White House’s aggressive pushback against Ossoff.

On Tuesday morning, an article titled “Who is Natalie Harp?” ranked as the most-read story on CNN’s website.

Vietor told CNN that Ossoff’s campaign “is doing a great job of peppering his speeches with new lines and attacks on Trump that are designed to get clipped and go viral.”

“In the old days, we called that putting a topper on a stump speech, which was designed to give the press something new and topical to write about,” Vietor said. “What’s odd is how few candidates seem to be executing what was once the most basic campaign tactic!”

Mastering the clipping economy

Some of Ossoff’s newfound fans know him mostly from clips — one or two-minute-long videos that travel wide and far on social media platforms.

Candidates are increasingly thinking in terms of clips when they deliver speeches and appear on TV shows, but some are obviously much more comfortable with the so-called “clipping economy” than others.

Ossoff is a natural. Clippable moments from his campaign speeches have repeatedly taken off on social media platforms and garnered millions of views.

Earlier this summer, veteran political journalist Jonathan Martin, now a columnist and host for Politico, said “the Ossoff model” entails a “weekend rally, clips delivered for social media and a tight corruption focus.”

Ossoff’s most recent viral moment also emphasized alleged corruption: His full sentence invoking Harp was, “He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”

“Travel with Natalie” led some on the right to accuse Ossoff of sexism, which in turn led some on the left to invoke Trump’s own track record, and on and on it went — just the type of political bickering that’s amplified and incentivized by social media algorithms.

Watters, on Fox, seemed to see through it all. “To suggest that Trump surrounds himself with attractive women — yeah, he’s done that his whole life, I don’t think he’s very upset about the comment,” he said.

The Fox host went on: “Am I fazed by this comment? No. Has Trump said so much worse, so much more sleazy things against other people? Yes. Have I defended those things? Absolutely. So I’m not going to pretend I’m all hot and bothered about it. And the president doesn’t care.”

But Fox proceeded with a full segment about it anyway, further amplifying Ossoff’s message.

Amanda Litman, president of Run for Something, which works to get young progressives elected, said “younger candidates, at basically every level, are fluent in the internet. They understand the lingua franca. They know their strengths and they lean into them.”

For Ossoff, she told CNN, that’s delivering speeches “that can be clipped up, because that’s really his strength.”

Litman said she senses that winning candidates are thinking more about social reach and attention versus individual TV hits or other one-off media appearances.

At rallies, she said, “It’s not just what’s happening in the room, it’s what the room can be cut up into for later use.”

The strategy is evident all across the political spectrum, not just among Democrats like Ossoff. It calls to mind something that Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres said about Zohran Mamdani back when the New York City mayor was running for office last year.

Torres told reporter Astead Herndon that Mamdani had mastered the “three threes,” meaning a 30-second social media video, a three-minute television segment and a three-hour long-form podcast.

Miami tied its all-time high temperature of 100 degrees.......

Miami hit an all-time record on Tuesday. It’s more significant than you think

By Andrew Freedman

Miami tied its all-time high temperature of 100 degrees Fahrenheit on Tuesday, amid a sprawling heat wave that is affecting areas from Texas to the Southeast. The heat wave, caused by a stalled-out heat dome, continues on Wednesday.

Yes, it’s significant that Miami tied its all-time record. It’s another example of the extreme warming trend caused by climate pollution. But perhaps what’s more surprising is how relatively cool the record is in Miami — a city with a reputation for being hot.

As Miami hit 100 degrees on Tuesday, parts of Oklahoma saw high temperatures soar well past that, with Kingfisher reaching 112 degrees, a record high there for the date. The all-time hottest temperature on record anywhere in Florida is 109 degrees. Oklahoma’s is 120 degrees. Minnesota’s is 115 degrees.

So what’s up with Florida?

The relatively low all-time record in Miami is tied to its proximity to the ocean and the city’s typically high levels of humidity. It is more difficult for the sun’s energy to heat very humid air to extreme levels than it is to raise the temperature of dry air. A lot of the solar energy goes into evaporating the moisture in the air, so in drier climates, more of the Sun’s energy can go directly into heating the air.

This is part of the reason the hottest locations in the US are in the desert Southwest, rather than in the humid Southeast.

Still, Miami — and the rest of the Southeast — has been experiencing a sharp increase in extreme heat in recent years, including dangerous combinations of heat and humidity that can cause people to succumb to heat illness.

Miami now has 44 more days with temperatures above normal during the summer months compared to the city’s summer climate during the 1970s, according to the nonprofit climate research and communications group Climate Central.

For the summer months of June, July and August, the city has warmed by 2.6 degrees on average, Climate Central found. The city has seen a huge jump in annual days of dangerously humid heat, going from 50 such days in the 1970s to 117 days in the 2016 to 2025 period, Climate Central researchers found.

They attributed a significant proportion of today’s dangerous heat days — 80 days — to human-caused climate change from burning fossil fuels. Tuesday was a good example of a day with dangerously high levels of heat and humidity, as the heat index, which measures how the air feels to the human body, soared as high as 107 degrees.

Miami is forecast to be unusually hot once again on Wednesday, with heat advisories covering all of the Florida Peninsula, with the exception of the Florida Keys, and a forecast high temperature in the mid-to-upper 90s in the city.

Burns Allies Over Iran

Trump Burns Allies Over Iran. South Korea and Oman Are Next.

Grudges are now driving US security policy.

Alex Nguyen

President Trump spent the weekend turning on two US security partners. He ordered a cutback in joint military exercises with South Korea, citing his “very good relationship” with Kim Jong Un, the North Korean dictator — and threatened to bomb Oman, one of the countries mediating between Washington and Tehran.

On Sunday, Trump posted on Truth Social that based on his “very good relationship with Kim Jong Un” and the finances required, he ordered Pete Hegseth to “substantially reduce” annual joint military exercises with South Korea, designed to prepare against threats from North Korea. At the end of his post: “While somewhat unrelated (?), I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, “No thanks!”

And on Monday afternoon, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office a similar account of his conversation with South Korea President Lee Jae Myung on Iran. “We can’t go around and protect all of these countries, especially when they’re not there to help us,” Trump said.

Seoul is downplaying it. South Korea’s Defense Ministry said the exercises began Monday as planned, and President Lee Jae Myung said the two governments had “maintained close coordination” on joint training and would keep doing so.

But the reversal is abrupt. Just three months ago, as the Associated Press noted, Hegseth praised South Korea for raising defense spending and “assuming primary responsibility for the security of the Korean Peninsula” — a shift he called proof of “alliance burden-sharing that all of America’s partners would do well to follow.” It’s the same pattern the administration ran on NATO members who declined to back the war on Iran.

Regarding Oman, Trump told Fox News on Monday that “if Oman gets in the way [of US-Iran negotiations], we’ll bomb the shit out of them.” Oman is reportedly close to an agreement with Iran to restore commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the passageway that carried 20 percent of the world’s crude oil before the US and Israeli strikes on Iran began in February.

Oman is also a strategic partner of the US in the region and often acts as a diplomatic mediator between the US and Iran. The US holds a security agreement with Oman that allows it to access Omani airfield and port facilities for military purposes.

It looks like yet another time where Trump makes decisions built on personal squabbles rather than its critical security relationships.

Golf Course Problem

Trump’s Bombing Threats Have a Golf Course Problem

His Oman resort sits just miles from the strait where he’s promising to send in the US military.

Russ Choma

On Monday morning, President Donald Trump issued a blunt warning to America’s erstwhile ally: “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them.” It was another one of his un-diplomatic jabs at a longtime friend—this time for the possibility that Oman might prove helpful to Iran in ending the war. But if Trump’s aggressive, crude attitude towards an ally isn’t confusing enough, it’s also another example of how Trump’s sprawling efforts at personal enrichment since he returned to office have only made US foreign policy more complicated.

Because, of course, Trump has a lavish golf course and real estate development deal, right in Oman, on the edge—literally, the cliff’s edge—of the Gulf of Oman, which is just a few dozen miles from the embattled Strait of Hormuz. And the incredibly lucrative terms of the deal—as is the case with most economic opportunities in absolute monarchies such as Oman—were granted to Trump and his business partners with the blessing of the Omani government and crown.

Will this business engagement actually deter Trump from bombing the oldest independent state in the Arab world? That’s unclear, if only because it’s so hard to distinguish Trump’s real threats when it comes to bombing from the empty ones. But the irrefutable fact that he has a large money-making opportunity in the same location where he proposes to bomb raises several questions about how he navigates his priorities as commander-in-chief and international developer.

As I’ve written before, Trump has a very good deal in Oman.

A livestream of the site shows a sun-drenched stretch of water, edged by brown desert rock outcroppings, where it’s easy to imagine minimalist boxy units, cantilevered 400 feet above the sea, starting at just $1 million.

Built by Saudi real estate developer Dar Global on land provided by the Omani government outside its capital city of Muscat, all those seaside views and quiet luxury could be a gold mine for the US president. In 2024, he earned $1 million in licensing fees from the deal. The project’s website boasts of its “ideal location.” It offers “easy access” to the Persian Gulf, which sits just a few hundred miles to the northwest via the Strait of Hormuz. Oman, the website notes, is “one of the safest countries in the world.”

But whatever conflicts of interest may be playing out in Oman are nothing new. It’s difficult to list all the places Trump’s personal business interests are intermingled with US national security interests. Even in South Korea—which Trump also lambasted recently—recently disclosed financial statements showed that Trump embarked on a new deal with some Korean developers.

Previous presidents simply have avoided conflicts of interest. But there is a special problem when it comes to Trump’s: Whether it’s in Oman, or Saudi Arabia, or the Korean peninsula, they’re all mostly licensing deals.

That means that Trump technically doesn’t own any property in Oman. The land on which the project will be constructed is owned by an Omani government entity joint partner on the project, and the project itself is owned by Dar Global, the Saudi development firm. But Trump gets paid for applying his name, managing the property, and selling luxury villas. In total, he has earned somewhere around $35 million on his licensing projects in the Middle East, most of which have been in partnership with Dar Global. In Oman alone, he appears to have earned $6.8 million—and that’s before the property has been built. It’s not clear from the livestream or any information on Dar Global’s website how far along the construction has progressed.

But for a president trying to negotiate Middle East peace or head off a nuclear threat, this is a uniquely bad conflict of interest. Not only are his personal money-making efforts located in the middle of conflict zones, but his chief way to make money is selling the image of success, luxury, and peace. And that’s something our enemies definitely know.

Cesspool of Financial Conflicts

Trump’s White House Business Shindig Will Be a Cesspool of Financial Conflicts

He’s welcoming leaders of crypto firms and prediction markets—industries he’s deeply invested in—to discuss regulation.

Russ Choma

Donald Trump will welcome the leaders of major cryptocurrency and prediction-market companies to the White House on Wednesday to discuss how they should be regulated—a potential make-or-break moment for nascent industries that have struggled to establish themselves as credible and legal.

As it happens, Trump himself is a crypto and prediction-market leader. The president and his adult children are major investors in both industries.

In the past, presidents have divested from their business interests while serving, or have taken pains to distance themselves from any involvement. During his second term, Trump has done essentially the opposite. And his hand in the regulation of two industries he’s directly involved with is merely one headline from this president’s Financial Conflicts News of the Week.

Consider World Liberty Financial, a crypto firm Trump co-owns, in which a senior government official from the United Arab Emirates acquired a $500 million stake just months before the administration, ignoring national security concerns, agreed to provide the UAE with America’s most advanced AI chips.

World Liberty Financial calls itself as a “de-fi” company—as in de-centralized finance, the idea that you can do most banking activities through the crypto blockchain rather than at a real bank. And as it happens, Trump’s company just got the greenlight from one of Trump’s regulators to be a bank.

Under the charter it was granted, World Liberty won’t do much in the way of traditional banking (no deposits or loans) but it will make it much easier, and profitable, for the firm to issue crypto tokens. That’s not a traditional use of a bank charter.

The ambiguity around what these crypto and prediction firms really do, how they should be regulated, and whether they should be treated differently than traditional banks, puts Trump’s business interests at the bleeding edge of the debate over these industries. These issues are essentially the agenda for Wednesday’s White House meeting and a subsequent regulatory meeting on Thursday.

Another example of a Trump business foray that would likely be scrutinized by regulators—if regulators are allowed to scrutinize the new crypto and prediction markets—is his meme coin ($TRUMP), an inherently worthless bit of digital branding that has netted him around $635 million while costing “investors” around $3.8 billion as its value fell to almost zero. It’s the kind of financial shenanigan into which, in a less corrupt administration, government regulators might be inclined to look.

Another major Trump asset is his stake in Truth Social, which has tethered itself to the crypto industry by acquiring lots and lots of Bitcoins—a strategy that has proved unwise, at least in the short term, as Bitcoin prices have declined more than 25 percent this year.

Trump has made no secret of his support for the prediction markets—he has publicly backed them in their fight to avoid state regulators who have tried to rein them in.

The White House did not return a request for comment, but its standard denial of Trump’s financial conflicts usually includes the claim that his adult sons, Eric and Don Jr., are in charge of his finances. If anything, those two are even more involved than their father in the crypto and prediction industries that Trump will determine how to regulate—or not regulate. In addition to helping manage his father’s crypto investments, Eric has his own crypto-mining company—American Bitcoin. Don Jr. is closely linked to the prediction industry: Kalshi gave him a stake that has become enormously valuable, and he sits on an advisory committee for Kalshi’s chief rival, Polymarket.

Wednesday’s meeting is a warm-up for the much more formal and significant meeting on Thursday, when the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, one of two major government agencies that regulate investments, holds the first meeting of a new committee that will determine how the government regulates the markets in question.

Trump is never all that predictable (he did once call crypto “a scam”), but it’s a good bet that the committee—which is stacked with crypto and prediction market reps, including Trump associates, many of whom will be at Wednesday’s event—will get a warm White House welcome.

Can't get enough TACO....

'TACO' Trump U-turns on Canada tariffs and posts absurd update on Keystone pipeline with Biden burn

Reanna Smith

Donald Trump has been ridiculed for pulling out of another one of his threats at the 11th hour, reviving his "TACO" nickname.

"TACO," which stands for "Trump always chickens out," was first coined by Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong in May 2025 as critics mocked Trump's flip-flopping on his controversial tariff policies. The nickname was reignited back in April over the president's handling of the Iran war.

Following a ceasefire, he repeatedly threatened to strike Tehran in massive bombing campaigns, only to reverse course as his deadlines approached while he continued to claim that a deal, which still has not materialized, was near. On Tuesday, Trump's TACO nickname reemerged, this time referring to the president's tariff policies again.

Trump took to Truth Social to announce that he was not going through with his threat to hit Canada with 50% tariffs at the last minute. "I have paused the 50% Tariffs against Canada, that were scheduled to kick in tomorrow morning for a three day period, based on the fact that Canada and the U.S.A., subject to the finalization of documents, have a DEAL!" The president declared.

He went on to make a dig at former president Joe Biden as he claimed that the deal included a plan to revive the controversial Keystone XL pipeline project. "The great Keystone XL Pipeline, long ago killed by Sleepy Joe Biden, may be awoken from the grave! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP," he added.

Critics were quick to ridicule the president's announcement. "It's Snoozing Donnie TACO Tuesday," one X user wrote.

"Taco strikes again! #TrumpIsAGoof," a second commented. "The Art of the Deal, No Deal, Deal, No Deal, Deal, No Deal etc," a third mocked.

"Taco and Coward in Iran, now Canada, you are the biggest clown of history," a fourth wrote. "You're such a gutless clown, TACO," another added.

In a follow-up post, the president then shared a bizarre AI-generated image showing him lifting the Keystone pipeline out of the ground. Two US flags could be seen in the background while a gravestone with the words "Buried by Biden" was positioned next to Trump.

Trump in his first term approved the Keystone XL project in 2020 despite concerns from Native American tribes about possible spills and environmental groups about fossil fuels’ contribution to climate change. It got partially built before President Joe Biden, citing climate change, canceled its permit on the day he took office in 2021.

Its cancellation by Biden frustrated Canadian officials, including then-Prime Minster Justin Trudeau, after Alberta invested more than $1 billion in the project.

Following Trump's post, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney said that “substantial progress” had been made towards a trade deal, but admitted that more work was needed.

Trump TACO Tuesday. Again. And Again. And Again. And Again. And Again.

Trump TACOs on Canada With Bonkers Excuse for Reversal

The president lived up to his nickname on the perfect day.

Cameron Adams

President Donald Trump used Taco Tuesday to announce that he was backtracking on his plan to impose hefty new tariffs on Canada.

The president, 80, earned the nickname “TACO Trump”—standing for Trump Always Chickens Out—for flip-flopping on his regular trade-war threats.

He announced on Truth Social at 10:15 p.m Tuesday that he had paused the 50-percent tariffs on goods from Canada, due to start on Wednesday, “for a three day period.”

He said his last-minute decision was “based on the fact that Canada and the U.S.A., subject to the finalization of documents, have a DEAL!”

Canadian and ‌U.S. officials ⁠have been meeting each day for the past week in an attempt to avert the tariffs and resolve trade issues.

Trump’s trademark backdown came less than two hours before a 50-percent levy was set to be activated on on nearly $20 billion worth of Canadian imports. The feuding between the two countries has seen clashes over U.S. tariffs on automobiles and many Canadian provinces banning the sale of American liquor.

Trump did not provide further details, except to refer to the Keystone XL pipeline, which he said “may be awoken from the grave!”

The oil pipeline, which would connect Alberta to the U.S., was blocked by both the Obama and Biden administrations and has been opposed by environmentalists and indigenous groups.

Trump said the pipeline was “long ago killed by Sleepy Joe Biden,” and that reviving the project means it could carry 830,000 barrels of oil a day.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney posted on social media that his country has been engaged in “intensive discussions” with America to address outstanding trade issues.

“Substantial progress has been made, although there is still important work to be done,” Carney stated, saying the postponement is due to last until midnight on Aug. 21.

“Canada remains focused on building a stronger, more independent, and more competitive economy at home,” he wrote.

“The deal will include comprehensive market access for all American goods, economic security commitments, digital trade alignment, and many important provisions that will continue to protect our market and American workers, along with our Canadian partners,” the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative said in a separate social media post.

The latest tariffs threatened by Trump were set to impact key Canadian imports including wine, dairy, cement, clothing and hockey equipment, and were in addition to existing tariffs already imposed on Canadian steel, aluminum, autos, and lumber.

In the final hours before Wednesday’s deadline, negotiators were plotting a deal that would reduce U.S. tariffs on Canadian autos from 25 percent to 15 percent, according to a Reuters report, which cited anonymous sources.

However, both were unable to agree on which vehicles would be eligible for tariff reductions, with the U.S. wanting it to only apply on cars with a high level of American-made content.

The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.

Ambitious trade war????

Trump is trying to wage an ambitious trade war with a shrinking army

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has hit a staffing low point even as its workload expands exponentially. Former officials say it is taking a toll.

By Oliver Ward

The staff of the tiny agency on the front lines of President Donald Trump’s trade wars has shrunk to its smallest size in two decades as its responsibilities balloon. Its work is suffering.

Since Trump returned to the White House, the agency has rolled out new tariffs across the globe, launched trade negotiations with dozens of countries and reopened the signature pact governing North American trade. And after the Supreme Court struck down many of his initial tariffs, it has begun four probes into countries’ unfair trade practices to provide legal justification for new duties — with more threatened.

The trade agency is attempting to do all of this with a staff that has dwindled by about a fifth, which along with a hiring slowdown and an intensely compressed schedule is leading to often slapdash work, according to eleven former trade officials from the Trump and Biden administrations who spoke to POLITICO.

Some of the errors are embarrassing, including letters sent to foreign dignitaries announcing new tariffs that went out addressed to the wrong titles and genders, according to one former official.

Others could undermine the president’s drive to impose new duties on dozens of trading partners. A recent investigation into whether other countries’ inaction on forced labor is giving their exports an unfair advantage was rushed out in a matter of months when previous investigations have taken more than a year. An announcement of a second investigation lacked basic details like what policies are harming U.S. businesses. Tariff challengers have already seized on similar weaknesses in court.

“When you’re rushing like that, right, it’s kind of like crap in, crap out,” said one former Trump USTR official, who, like others interviewed by POLITICO, was granted anonymity to discuss the agency’s inner workings. USTR officials are getting “crushed” under the administration’s workload, the person said.

The brain drain at the agency, including the departures of senior officials responsible for leading trade talks with key allies, is continuing even as U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer has pushed to expand the budget and stepped up hiring efforts.

A USTR spokesperson said that under Greer’s leadership, the agency has “delivered an unprecedented volume of work on behalf of the American people that is thorough and outcomes-based.”

Greer inherited an agency that was already shorthanded, and the Trump administration wasted no time in rolling out its new tariff-focused trade agenda. In the opening months of the administration, the president unveiled new tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China, before rolling out sweeping new duties on almost every U.S. trading partner on April 2, 2025 — what the president dubbed “Liberation Day.”

But the Liberation Day rollout was filled with errors. In addition to slapping tariffs on an uninhabited island filled only with penguins, which was roundly mocked in the media, the administration sent letters informing countries of their new tariff rates that contained the wrong genders and titles for foreign officials, said the first former official. The calculation for assessing the tariff rates, which USTR eventually published on its website, showed a simple back-of-the-envelope formula based on countries’ trade surpluses with the U.S., an embarrassment for an agency that prides itself on its data-driven, reasoned trade analysis and deep technical knowledge.

The episode “made USTR look like a joke,” the former official said.

The Supreme Court in February struck down Trump’s Liberation Day tariff regime, leaving USTR to come up with alternative legal justifications for imposing sweeping duties. More serious than the embarrassing mistakes, former officials said, is that the agency has been rushing out the reports and announcements that are used to create those justifications, potentially handing tariff challengers legal ammunition.

A March announcement of a probe into countries’ manufacturing overcapacity did not initially identify any specific policies from trading partners that qualify as an unfair trade practice, said Ed Gresser, a former assistant USTR for trade policy and economics, who left the agency during the Biden administration. The omission could leave the probe more vulnerable to a legal challenge, he said.

Countries also pushed back against inaccurate information in that announcement. An initial version referred to Singapore — one of the investigation’s targets — as having a bilateral trade surplus with the U.S. of $27 billion in 2024. But that language was quietly removed from a later version after the Singaporean government pointed out publicly that it was, in fact, the U.S. that had a trade surplus of $27 billion with Singapore. USTR also quietly corrected the numbers it cited for both Indonesia and Cambodia’s trade surpluses with the U.S.

Tariff challengers are already filing court documents citing omissions in the USTR investigation into efforts to curb imports made with forced labor. The July report into countries’ forced labor practices, initiated under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 and produced in just four months, lacked the depth featured in comparable reports from previous administrations, three former officials noted.

“It strikes me a lot more vulnerable to legal challenge than previous 301 reports have been,” said Gresser, who is now the vice president and director for trade at the Progressive Policy Institute.

Democratic attorneys general filed a suit earlier this month seeking to overturn the proposed duties tied to forced labor. “The USTR made no effort to link the scope of the tariffs to the scope of harm,” they wrote in their filing.

Burlap and Barrel, a vendor of imported spices that is also suing, noted that the USTR failed to provide a “reasoned, record-based explanation” for its tariff findings.

“You can tell they’re stretched,” said Peter Harrell, a former Biden administration economic official who is now a trade law professor at Georgetown Law. Officials are “not able to put in or do the level of detail that they’ve been able to do in the past.”

USTR’s staff of less than 300 people has always punched above its weight, almost all of the former officials noted. The Commerce and Treasury Departments, by comparison, count workforces of around 40,000 and 80,000 employees, respectively.

From 2023 to 2026, however, the number of USTR employees fell almost 20 percent, from 269 workers to 220, leaving it with the smallest workforce since 2005, according to data from the White House Office of Personnel Management.

The agency’s lowest staffing in more than 20 years continues a decline that began in the latter half of the Biden administration when the agency faced a staff exodus driven by frustration with the former president’s dormant trade agenda.

USTR’s in-house expertise has only continued to dwindle in the second Trump administration.

The agency’s most senior official responsible for North American trade, Daniel Watson, retired just days before the White House formally launched a review of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement on July 1. Meanwhile, Bryant Trick, the top trade official for Europe and the Middle East is also set to retire in the coming months at a time when U.S. talks with Europe over its digital trade practices, pharmaceutical pricing and implementation of a bilateral trade pact are in full swing.

Officials that left the agency during Trump’s second term did not agree on a single driving factor behind the recent departures. The first former USTR official cited their dismay over Trump’s ties to the late disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein as a reason for their own departure. Others noted there was a cohort of staff nearing retirement age.

“I don’t sense that one can point to a morale problem or something like that,” a second former official said.

Greer, who served as chief of staff to Trump’s first-term trade representative, Bob Lighthizer, is widely respected at the agency, former officials said, and built up goodwill among staff for his handling of the administration-wide effort to cut the size of the government last year. USTR was spared from those cuts, which several former officials attributed to Greer’s assertiveness on personnel matters.

There is money available for USTR to staff up. The agency received $88 million in fiscal 2026, which should accommodate 274 employees, according to USTR’s budget documents. Greer is also asking for $95 million in fiscal 2027 to beef up trade enforcement activities. The agency says the funding increase would allow for 301 full-time employees.

But it hasn’t been easy to hire.

Since Trump returned to office, the private sector has scrambled to bring on trade experts to help companies navigate the more complex tariff landscape, offering higher salaries than candidates and sitting officials can earn in government.

“It is no surprise that the private sector is eager to hire the well-regarded experts at USTR during this period of historic change in U.S. trade policy,” the USTR spokesperson added in a statement.

Three of the former officials said it is common for jobs to sit vacant for more than a year. One said they have seen the recruitment process drag on for two years, as the Executive Office of the President, which handles USTR’s hiring, prioritizes recruitment in other executive offices.

Shifts in human resources policies under Trump have also hurt recruitment efforts, two of the former USTR officials said, citing, in particular, new limits on remote work.

A flexible working environment “is one of the ways that you compete with better salaries and more certainty in other sectors,” one of the people said.

USTR is supposed to be a “nimble” agency, the person stressed — particularly so under Trump, where trade negotiations, investigations and new tariffs are rolled out on shortened timelines and responding to fast-moving developments in bilateral trade relationships.

“They’re being asked to do a lot,” the person said, but the hiring “system is just not set up to be nimble or to get results on any quick timeline.”