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What President Trump is really up to with high-stakes tariff gambit

Let us be honest: When most people hear “tariffs,” they think about price hikes and trade wars. But the Trump administration’s latest tariff rollout is not merely a knee-jerk protectionist move—it is part of a far broader strategy.

What is actually in play here is a high-stakes effort to build up leverage and resources to manage America’s debt, reset its industrial base, and renegotiate its standing in the global order.

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And it all begins with a problem most people have not been told enough about.

In 2025, the U.S. government must refinance $9.2 trillion in maturing debt. Some $6.5 trillion of that comes due by June. That is not a typo—that is a debt wall the size of a small continent.

Now, here is the math: According to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, each basis-point (one one-hundredth of a percent) drop in interest rates saves the government roughly $1 billion per year. Since the announcement of tariffs on April 2, 10-year Treasury yields have fallen from 4.2 percent to 3.9 percent—a 30 basis point drop. If that holds, it translates to $30 billion in savings.

So, keeping yields low is not just sound policy—it is a fiscal necessity.

But we are in a difficult environment. Inflation has not fully cooled, and the Federal Reserve remains wary of cutting rates too quickly. So the question becomes: How does one bring yields down without the Fed’s help?

Here is where the strategy becomes interesting.

By introducing sweeping tariffs, the administration is creating precisely the kind of economic uncertainty that drives investors toward safer assets such as long-term U.S. Treasuries. When markets are spooked, capital exits risk and equity assets (as we see with the stock market collapse) and piles into safe assets, primarily the 10-year U.S. treasury bond. That demand pushes yields lower.

It is a counter-intuitive move, but a calculated one. Some have called it a “detox” for the overheated financial system. And it appears to be working.

However, even cheaper debt does not solve everything. The deficit remains massive—and that is where spending cuts come in.

Backed by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and Elon Musk, the administration is reportedly targeting $4 billion in daily spending cuts. If their recommendations translate to cuts and get ratified by Congress, that could amount to a trillion dollars off the deficit by late 2025.

At this point, we have two pillars: lower borrowing costs and tighter spending. But there remains a third—and arguably most important—pillar: growth.

Tariffs serve as the ignition switch. By making imports more expensive, they create space for American producers to step back in. The objective is not to punish trade partners—it is to make domestic industry viable again, even if only long enough to rebuild critical capacity.

Yes, prices will rise. But the administration is fully aware of that. In fact, it is front-loading the pain now, hoping to deliver visible job growth and factory activity before the November 2026 midterm elections.

In the meantime, tariffs themselves will generate revenue—an estimated $700 billion or more in the first year. That creates more fiscal room for the administration to enable tax cuts and keep spending on Social Security, Medicaid and other programs.

Where the picture becomes even more interesting is on the geopolitical front.

These tariffs do not exist in a vacuum. They are being deployed alongside a deliberate reshaping of global alliances. The U.S. is quietly distancing itself from NATO, recalibrating ties with Europe, and opening previously frozen diplomatic channels with the Gulf nations and Russia.

Why? Because the post-Cold War trade order no longer serves U.S. interests. It enabled deficits, offshoring, and strategic dependency. Now, tariffs become leverage. Allies who align with U.S. priorities receive relief; others face higher costs.

China, naturally, is the central player. For years, economists have argued that its artificially weak currency and industrial overcapacity have distorted global trade. Tariffs are one way to force a reckoning—and potentially, a revaluation of the yuan.

Other countries will not be spared. Europe could be asked for terms on Ukraine. India may be pressured for deep tariff cuts. Canada and Mexico will likely face demands related to fentanyl and border enforcement.

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This is not random. It is trade policy as a means to force countries to the negotiating table.

Domestically, the political logic is equally clear. The sectors most likely to benefit—steel, automobiles, textiles—are concentrated in battleground states. The administration is betting that visible wins in those regions will outweigh short-term pain in sectors dependent on cheap imports.

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There are serious risks here. If inflation returns or if the reshoring bet fails, the blowback could be severe. But make no mistake: This is not improvisation. It is disruption by design.

Whether one agrees with it or not, this is one of the most ambitious fiscal and industrial resets in a generation.

The only question that remains is—will it work?

Trump admin vows to clean up blue city’s crime-plagued nightmare for commuters

NEW YORK – Days after U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy called on New York City’s leadership to clean up the city’s subway system, Mayor Eric Adams extended an invitation asking Duffy to experience firsthand the issues plaguing the crime-ridden transit hub. 

On Friday, Adams and Duffy went underground, boarding the BQE line in Brooklyn and riding the subway into Manhattan alongside NYPD Chief of Transit Joseph Gulotta as the federal government vows to aid the city with its crime prevention. 

“The mayor has been working on a bipartisan effort to get more law enforcement officers into the system to make people feel safe,” Duffy told reporters inside lower Manhattan’s Broadway-Lafayette station. 

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The high-profile visit comes two weeks after Duffy penned a letter to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), saying the Trump administration is here to “restore order” and requesting the department hand over data on rider assaults, police patrols and fare evasion. 

“I appreciate your prompt attention to this matter to avoid further consequences, up to and including redirecting or withholding funding,” Duffy wrote.

But standing in a busy subway station, Duffy vowed to continue providing the city with federal support and confirmed the administration has not withheld funding. 

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“You’ll find the Trump administration and the Department of Transportation are great partners with New York,” Duffy said. “Let’s make it beautiful for the riders of the subway system.” 

During his trip uptown, Duffy witnessed firsthand the woes plaguing the city’s subway system. 

“We just saw someone who was laying at the top of the stairs,” Duffy told reporters. “I don’t know if [the man] urinated on himself or defecated, but the mayor needs the tools with law enforcement to take care of people – this is not humane.”

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While New York City’s subway system has seen a statistical drop in crime throughout the first few months of 2025, stories of random violence continue to rattle commuters. 

In January, surveillance footage captured the horrifying moment a man was shoved in front of an oncoming train while standing on the platform in Manhattan’s 18th Street station. While the victim survived, authorities later charged Kamel Hawkins, 23, with attempted murder. 

One month earlier, a woman was killed after an illegal immigrant allegedly set her on fire while riding the subway in Brooklyn.

Some commuters have been left to defend themselves in the subways.

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In December, Daniel Penny was acquitted of criminally negligent homicide in the 2023 subway chokehold death of Jordan Neely, a homeless man with schizophrenia who barged onto the train shouting death threats while high on a type of synthetic marijuana known as K2.

In January, a 69-year-old man fought off migrants who tried to rob him on the subway, and in another attack a 71-year-old woman fended off four would-be teen muggers.

WATCH: NYC subway riders express fears, say some are ‘scared to go home’

Adams praised the federal government for its help in cracking down on subway crime, but condemned Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration’s apparent hesitation to roll out new initiatives aimed at the MTA. 

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“I was sharing with the Secretary [that] the cause we’re having in Albany [is] involuntary movement,” said Adams, a Democrat who announced his intention this week to seek re-election as an independent. “Homeless individuals who need care, or the support we need from our state lawmakers to see [police] carry out on the ground.” 

The Hochul administration and the MTA did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment. 

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Duffy and Adams signaled their administrations would continue to work together to combat crime within the city, essentially removing the governor as the middleman between the city and federal government. 

“I think Albany has to think deeply about how far we have to go in order to stop [crime],” Duffy said. “That’s more resources, that’s more tools that Albany has to give [the NYPD] to arrest people. [The federal government] gives a lot of money, and for us, we’re partners in the process.”  

Democrats slam Elon Musk, Melania Trump with xenophobic attacks

Since President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Democrats have made xenophobic comments about DOGE chief Elon Musk and first lady Melania Trump.

Some of the party’s leaders have repeatedly complained about Musk’s country of birth being South Africa and told Trump to look into deporting his wife, who was born in the former Yugoslavia.  

Speaking at an anti-DOGE protest in Los Angeles March 22, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., suggested Trump should investigate and potentially deport the first lady.

“When he [Trump] talks about birthright, and he’s going to undo the fact that the Constitution allows those who are born here, even if the parents are undocumented, they have a right to stay in America. If he wants to start looking so closely to find those who were born here and their parents were undocumented, maybe he ought to first look at Melania,” Waters said on stage at a rally in Los Angeles, various videos posted to social media show. 

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“We don’t know whether or not her parents were documented. And maybe we better just take a look.” 

The first lady became a U.S. citizen in 2006, according to official government biographies. She is the first U.S. first lady to become a naturalized citizen and the second first lady to be born outside the U.S., following President John Quincy Adams’ wife, Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams, who was born in London in 1775. 

Democrats, however, have reserved some of their most vitriolic attacks for Musk, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1995 and became a citizen in 2002.

Speaking at a congressional Democratic rally protesting musk’s access to the Treasury Department Feb. 4, Rep. Janelle Bynum, D-Ore., compared Musk to the British burning the city of Washington, D.C., during the War of 1812.

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“They always told us the British had come to storm the city. They always reminded us the British had come, and they burned everything down, and we could never let that happen again. They told us, and here we are, Trump and his billionaire boy band. They are not British this time. This one is South African. But they came back,” said Bynum.

Rep. Nydia Velázquez, D-N.Y., did not use allegories, but simply called for Musk to “go back to South Africa.”

“It was interesting yesterday. I was watching a video of an interview of Elon Musk with someone where he said that the Italians should stay in Italy and the Chinese should stay in China. My question to Elon Musk is, what the hell are you doing here in America?” Velazquez said while speaking at an event outside the HUD Department.

Even before Musk took the helm at DOGE, far-left Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, slammed him during a Jan. 20 interview for not being born in the U.S. while suggesting he supported apartheid.

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“[Musk] went from being the dork that was jumping around on stage to allegedly being this amazing genius that’s going to save this entire country, the country he wasn’t born in and a country that maybe he doesn’t agree with, the idea of a Democratic Republic, considering the fact that he may have been more so on the side of apartheid,” said Crockett.

Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., piled on further, suggesting in a February interview that Musk was reverting to a fascist state of mind due to his South African heritage.

“I think that’s a leftover from Elon Musk’s South African heritage, and maybe he’s falling too far back on the apartheid system of government that was a fascist form of government,” said Connolly.

“Here in the United States, Mr. Musk,” he added, “we have three branches of government, each of them separate but coequal, and, ultimately, the judicial branch is the deciding factor when there is a dispute between the other two branches of government. That’s how our system works here.”

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Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., accused Musk’s parents of trying to deny Black people their rights in South Africa, comparing them to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

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“Why can’t you understand? The Ukranians [sic] are fighting for the same thing which his parents tried to deny black South Africans,” Cohen wrote in a February X post.  

“Squad” member Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., also suggested Musk did not care for democracy because he came from South Africa.

“Elon Musk, who grew up in apartheid, Trump who worships dictators around the country, and strong men, are not interested in our constitutional republic,” Omar said.

Despite these claims, a Snopes fact-check found the reason Musk left his birth country in the first place was to avoid military service because he did not want to fight for an apartheid state.

Teacher breaks down during arrest for alleged inappropriate relationship with student

Newly released bodycam footage shows the shock and emotional unraveling of an Illinois school teacher who was arrested for allegedly molesting a 15-year-old student last month. 

The video shows Christina Formella, 30, being pulled over during a traffic stop last week and being taken into custody where she’s been charged with various sex crimes for having an inappropriate sexual relationship with a student two years ago. 

Formella is accused of sexually assaulting the boy in a classroom for a tutoring session before class began at Downers Grove South High School in December 2023. The victim’s mother discovered the alleged assault when looking through her son’s text message thread on his cell phone and then contacted police, prosecutors said. 

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In the bodycam footage, Formella seems confused when police ask her to exit her vehicle.

They then arrest her and place her in the back of a police vehicle where she asks questions about her detention.

Formella can be heard sobbing in the back seat of a police vehicle and asking for her husband, her childhood sweetheart whom she married last year, per reports. 

“I feel like I’m gonna throw up,” she said in the March 16 video and continues to cry in the back seat.

Formella, who was also a soccer coach, began tutoring the alleged victim after he broke his collarbone, and they began messaging each other on a school platform, according to court documents obtained by TMZ. The pair then allegedly exchanged provocative texts, followed by FaceTime chats which led to the December 2023 sexual incident.  

“I love you so so much mama,” the boy allegedly sent Formella in one text.

“I love you sooooo much baby… Even though this morning was short, it was perfect,” the teacher, then 28, allegedly responded.

They both later acknowledged to each other that what they did was wrong, and they never had sex again, per the documents. They spoke for the last time in February 2024.

FORMER MIDDLE SCHOOL TEACHER ACCUSED OF SEX ACTS WITH STUDENT AS POLICE BELIEVE THERE ARE MORE VICTIMS

Formella denied having sex with the minor and claimed the student had broken into her phone and used her number to send himself inappropriate text messages to blackmail her, according to the New York Post. 

She reportedly told investigators that “everybody comes after her because she is good-looking and she is just a good person who cared too much about (the boy),” according to court documents obtained by WGN.

 DuPage County State’s Attorney Robert Berlin said the allegations against Formella are “extremely disturbing.”

“It is alleged that she used her position of trust and authority as a tutor and a coach to sexually assault a minor student. The type of abuse and behavior alleged in this case will not be tolerated,” Berlin said. 

“The safety and well-being of our children remain our highest priority, and we will take all necessary actions to ensure that anyone engaging in this type of conduct is held accountable.”

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Formella has been charged with one count of aggravated criminal sexual abuse, one count of criminal sexual assault and one count of aggravated criminal sexual abuse.

She has been released from custody on the condition she does not enter Downers Grove South High School and does not make contact with anyone under the age of 18. She is scheduled to appear in court on April 14.

The state’s attorney’s office said the defendant is presumed innocent and is entitled to a fair trial in which it is the government’s burden to prove his or her guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

At her appearance, the Court denied the state’s motion to detain Formella pre-trial and released her with conditions including no entry into Downers Grove South High School and no contact with anyone under the age of eighteen.  

Beloved sitcom star opens up about painful childhood before reaching Hollywood fame

Before Tina Louise found herself stranded on a tropical island, she was plagued with loneliness as a child in boarding school.

The actress, who found fame as the glamorous Ginger Grant on the sitcom “Gilligan’s Island,” has recently released the audio version of her 1997 book, “Sunday: A Memoir.” The star said that, for the first time, she finally felt free to discuss her painful childhood in depth.

“I didn’t live with my mother until I was 11,” Louise told Fox News Digital. “I had a whole period of life without her… I kept all of that inside of me. And then, I developed anger. By the time I was picked up by my mother, she was with her third husband and had a different life. It was a very sophisticated life that she wanted for herself, so she found a very successful man.”

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“I live in the present,” Louise shared. “But I’ve never dealt with what happened to me. When the book first came out, my mother was alive. She didn’t like it to the point that she said I made it up. I understood that as her not wanting to deal with it… She was the most dominant force in my life.”

When Louise, then Tina Blacker, was born, her mother was 18 and her father was 10 years older. By the time she was 4 years old, they were divorced. At 6 years old, she was sent away to a boarding school in Ardsley, New York, where she wondered if her parents would ever come back for her.

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“I didn’t want to be there right from the start,” she explained. “We were all just a bunch of angry little girls. It was like ‘Lord of the Flies’ — nobody wanted to be there. And there were gangs of little girls. You were always going to find someone to pick on. I was told that my job was to hit this little girl. It was ridiculous. I never figured out why they chose me.”

“I remember I kept trying to catch a very bad cold so that I could hardly speak, so I could leave this place,” Louise shared. “They kept giving me hot milk. I was asked to call my mother. I told her I wanted to come to her, but I was told it wasn’t the time to get out. I learned she was with her second husband, and he didn’t want a little girl in the house. He just wanted to be alone with his beautiful wife.”

One student stabbed Louise in the wrist with a pencil. A faint scar is still present, she said. When she was caught chatting with another little girl at night, Louise claimed a teacher made her stand alone in a pitch-black bathroom with spiders crawling on the ceiling. She described being slapped when she struggled to run a bath. Her closest friends were caterpillars she hid in a box under her bed. They were taken away, she said.

“They took everything away,” Louise recalled. “My mother once brought me a doll, and that was immediately taken away in the night. I don’t remember ever getting it back. You don’t remember things like that. You just remember that it was taken away.”

Louise always prayed for Sundays. It was visiting day. She always waited for her parents that day, but they didn’t always come.

“I yearned for hugs,” she said. “I don’t think I knew what was going on. I just knew that it was painful.”

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It wouldn’t be until Louise was 8 years old that she was able to move in with her father and his new wife. She was elated. But her happiness wouldn’t last long. At age 11, her mother, who had married a wealthy doctor, the third of what would be four husbands, wanted her to live with them in a fancy New York City townhouse.

Louise admitted that, for years, she was angry at her father for not being willing to fight for her in court. She wouldn’t see him until right before Hollywood came calling.

“I was very upset,” she said. “I could never even say his name. It couldn’t come out of my mouth… I just expected him to do something about it. When I went to live with my mother, I couldn’t believe that I had to tell him that I couldn’t see him anymore. It’s very strange, a strange thing, to put something like that on me because I wanted to see him.”

At age 22, a grown-up Louise, who had started acting, went out in search of her father. 

“We had to establish a new relationship,” she said. “It wasn’t easy… but we had to rebuild.”

Her relationship with her mother was complicated.

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“She was a vivacious person, but she had lost her mother when she was 3,” Louise explained. “So she had her problems… She couldn’t have imagined that, at age 18, she would have a child. She didn’t have a mother. My grandfather, who I only saw twice, put his children in an orphanage for a while. Then he got a nanny.”

“My mother had her dream world,” she reflected. “She wanted to live a certain way and be surrounded by certain people. She was very beautiful. She loved the arts. But she lost her temper a lot with people… I don’t think she realized it herself… But she did go along with the fact that I wanted to study acting. And that was very exciting.”

Louise would later escape from her past as a castaway. She catapulted to stardom on the ‘60s sitcom “Gilligan’s Island.” Over the years, it would continue to find new viewers, thanks to reruns and streaming platforms.

Louise insisted the show didn’t make the cast rich. She previously told Forbes that she hasn’t received residuals.

“Nobody was getting them at that time — nobody,” she told Fox News Digital. “I read somewhere that [co-star] Dawn [Wells] was able to get something through a lawyer. But that’s just what I read. I don’t remember. But we never did. The people that owned it earned a lot of money, that’s for sure. I’m just amazed that it’s still on!”

In 1996, Louise read another article, one about the drop in students’ ability to read, The New York Times reported. It prompted her to join Learning Leaders, a nonprofit that trained volunteers to tutor public school students throughout New York City. According to the outlet, she quietly worked with students for the next two decades. 

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The outlet noted that after the organization lost its funding a few years ago, Louise began helping out on her own.

It’s something she still does today.

“It gives me so much joy,” she said. “Helping students and giving them hope.”