Trump explains his 90-day pause for most countries — with the exception of China
President Donald Trump said Wednesday he was open to providing exemptions for certain U.S. companies hit especially hard by tariffs through no fault of their own.
The president and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent spoke to reporters Wednesday afternoon and were asked repeatedly about the effect their tariff moves have had on financial markets and whether they will let their recent declines affect future trade decisions.
Trump was asked specifically if he would consider “exempting” some larger U.S. companies that have been hit especially hard by the new tariffs, and the president said he would consider it.
“I’ll take a look at it as time goes by. We’re going to take a look at it,” Trump responded. “There are some that have been hard — there are some that, by the nature of the company, get hit a little bit harder, and we’ll take a look at that.”
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When asked how he would determine which companies might receive such an exemption, Trump responded, “Instinctively.”
“You almost can’t take a pencil to paper. It’s really more of an instinct than anything else,” Trump added. “Some companies, through no fault of their own, they happen to be in an industry that is more affected by these things than others. You have to be able to show a little flexibility, and I’m able to do that.
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“You have to have flexibility,” Trump said Wednesday. “I could say, ‘Here’s a wall, and I’m going to go through that wall. I’m going to go through it, no matter what. Keep going, and you can’t go through the wall. Sometimes you have to be able to go under the wall, around the wall or over the wall.”
After the president’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcements, which included a 10% universal tariff on all imported goods and higher “reciprocal” tariffs targeting other countries like China and the European Union, the Trump administration did release a list of carve-outs related to roughly $644 billion in imports, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
The exemptions include $185 billion in goods from Canada and Mexico, but the countries remain subject to other tariffs, according to the report.
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Additionally, the Trump administration has exempted certain industries, such as the pharmaceutical and semiconductor industries, from new tariffs, but the president has signaled that could change. These sectors and others are facing an ongoing probe, called a Section 232 investigation, according to Market Watch, to assess the need for imposing tariffs.
No matter the outcome of the investigation, it appears Trump has his sights set on placing higher tariffs on the pharmaceutical industry. He told an audience at a dinner hosted by the National Republican Congressional Committee Tuesday night that “a major tariff on pharmaceuticals” would be announced very soon.
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The White House declined to comment for this article.
GOP senator flips the script on Dems over Social Security, Medicare
EXCLUSIVE: Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., is clapping back against accusations from Democrats that Republicans are trying to make cuts to Social Security and Medicare benefits for seniors.
“The message to seniors is really pretty simple. We are going to strengthen Social Security. That is our goal. And one of the ways we’re doing that is by rooting out waste, fraud, abuse,” she told Fox News Digital in an exclusive interview, saying the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been an effective tool for doing so.
The senator is touting the RETIREES FIRST Act, which would raise the income bar for somebody to be required to pay federal taxes on their Social Security payouts.
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“Now, there’s also legislation I have — and the president’s talked about this a lot — and it’s removing a federal income tax from Social Security benefits. And as we work on the tax package, you’re going to see this in one of those reconciliation packages,” she said.
“The left and the mainstream media continues to talk a lot about cutting Social Security, and we are not doing that,” she said. Blackburn’s office is circulating a memo highlighting a quote from President Donald Trump on “Sunday Morning Futures” last month saying he’s “not going to touch Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. Now, we’re going to get fraud out of there.”
“What we’re doing is strengthening. We are not cutting. What we are doing is making certain that people that are defrauding the system, people who are abusing the system, are no longer going to be able to do that. People that have paid into Social Security deserve to get every penny that they are in line to receive as a benefit, and we want to make certain that that happens,” the Republican said.
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Blackburn also took aim at the state of California, which made it a state law in 2024 to provide Medicaid, known in the state as Medi-Cal, to illegal immigrants. The program is now being partially blamed for the state going nearly $3.5 billion over budget for Medi-Cal, and the governor’s office has had to ask for billions in loans to cover the costs.
“So it’s all taxpayer money, and when you hear of a state like California who decided — they made a conscious decision, a very intentional decision — that they wanted to provide healthcare for those that were illegally entering the country, and they wanted the taxpayers to pay for it. And Tennesseans will say, ‘Well, we don’t want to shoulder that burden because that’s a policy we don’t agree with,'” Blackburn said.
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Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and other Democrats in Congress have raised alarms about cuts made to the Social Security Administration, including 7,000 staff layoffs.
“Make no mistake: What Elon Musk is doing at Social Security is cutting benefits. And Senate Republicans are standing with him. They blocked our amendments last week to protect Social Security from DOGE and reverse the Social Security layoffs and office closures,” Schumer tweeted Monday.
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However, Elon Musk said cutting benefits for people actually taking them is not the case.
“The intern running Schumer’s social media account is lying,” Musk said in response to Schumer’s post Tuesday.
Michelle Obama addresses divorce rumors after skipping recent high-profile events
Former first lady Michelle Obama dismissed divorce rumors about her and former President Barack Obama during a podcast interview published Wednesday.
Michelle Obama had attracted attention and even prompted questions about her marriage after skipping recent high-profile events like President Donald Trump’s inauguration and the late President Jimmy Carter’s funeral, leaving her husband to attend on his own.
“But the interesting thing is that when I say no, for the most part, people are like, ‘I get it, and I’m okay,’ right?” she told podcast host Sophia Bush of how she spends her time. “And that’s the thing that we as women, I think we struggle with, like disappointing people. I mean so much so that this year people were, they couldn’t even fathom that I was making a choice for myself, that they had to assume that my husband and I are divorcing, you know? This couldn’t be a grown woman just making a set of decisions herself, right? But that’s what society does to us.”
The former first lady discussed how she has more opportunities now to do things that she really wants to do during the conversation on Bush’s “Work in Progress” podcast.
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“If it doesn’t fit into the sort of stereotype of what people think we should do, then it gets labeled as something negative and horrible,” Obama continued.
She said she chose to do what “was best for me,” while saying she operated from “guilt” as a woman.
Obama also talked about how she’s been making more decisions for herself lately during the podcast conversation.
“Now is the time for me to start asking myself these hard questions of, ‘Who do I truly want to be every day?’ And that changes,” she said. “So, who do I want to have a lunch with? How long do I want to stay in a place? Do I want to travel? If a girlfriend calls and says, ‘Let’s go here,’ I can say, ‘Yes, I can.’ And I’m trying to do that more and more.”
Obama said she still had time for her own projects and issues like education and her husband’s presidential library.
She started her own podcast, “IMO,” alongside her brother Craig Robinson in March.
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During the first episode, Obama said her husband needed to adjust to leaving the house on time and being punctual.
“Well, Barack, you know, he had to adjust to what ‘on time’ was,” she told Robinson. “I’ve got this husband who’s like, when it’s time to leave — it’s 3:00 — he’s getting up and going to the bathroom. And I was like, dude, dude, 3:00 departure means you’ve done all that, you know?”
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“Don’t start looking for your glasses at the 3:00 departure,” the former first lady said. “But he’s improved over 30 years of marriage, but that was a ‘you must adjust.’”
Former Meta employee tells Congress what social media giant did to help China
A whistleblower on Wednesday told congressional lawmakers that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and other executives lied to Congress as Meta actively tried to help China develop artificial intelligence in an effort to win favor with Beijing.
Sarah Wynn-Williams, who detailed her experience at Meta in the scathing memoir “Careless People,” testified before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism that she witnessed Zuckerberg and other executives “repeatedly undermine US national security and betray American values,” the New York Post reported.
Wynn-Williams served as the director of Global Public Policy at Facebook, now Meta, for nearly seven years starting in 2011. She said company executives “did these things in secret to win favor with Beijing and build an $18 billion dollar business in China.”
Meta allegedly helped China develop advanced artificial intelligence to help outcompete American companies, she said.
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“We are engaged in a high-stakes AI arms race against China, and during my time at Meta, company executives lied about what they were doing with the Chinese Communist Party to employees, shareholders, Congress, and the American public,” Wynn-Williams will said in her opening statement.
Despite attempts by Meta to discredit her work and stop her from talking, Wynn-Williams’ book shot to the top 10 on Amazon’s best-seller list.
In a statement to Fox News Digital, a Meta spokesperson said Wynn-Williams’ testimony was “divorced from reality and riddled with false claims.”
“While Mark Zuckerberg himself was public about our interest in offering our services in China and details were widely reported beginning over a decade ago, the fact is this: we do not operate our services in China today,” the statement said.
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Among her allegations, Wynn-Williams said Meta’s AI model “has contributed significantly to Chinese advances in AI technologies like DeepSeek.” In addition, Wynn-Williams also said Meta deleted the Facebook account of a prominent Chinese dissident living in the U.S., amid pressure from Beijing.
The account belonged to billionaire Guo Wengui. Meta said it was removed because it violated Facebook’s rules by sharing sensitive information about other people.
“The greatest trick Mark Zuckerberg ever pulled was wrapping the American flag around himself and calling himself a patriot and saying he didn’t offer services in China while he spent the last decade building an $18 billion business there,” Wynn-Williams said.
Her statement argues that “Meta started briefing the Chinese Communist Party as early as 2015” and those “briefings focused on critical emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence.”
“And he continues to wrap the flag around himself as we move into the next era of artificial intelligence.”
In addition to allegedly trying to cozy up with China, Zuckerberg and other tech executives have tried improve their relationship with President Donald Trump, following his election victory last November.
“This is a man who wears many different costumes,” Wynn-Williams said of Zuckerberg during her testimony. “When I was there, he wanted the president of China to name his first child, he was learning Mandarin, he was censoring to his heart’s content.”
She added that Zuckerberg is now focused on accumulating important contacts.
“We don’t know what the next costume is gonna be, but it will be something different,” she said. “It’s whatever gets him closest to power.”
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Wednesday’s hearing came days before Meta is slated to go on trial for alleged antitrust violations.
Georgia doctor’s $30 million defamation suit against NBC settled in court
NBCUniversal has finalized its defamation settlement with a Georgia doctor who was repeatedly called a “uterus collector” by MSNBC.
NBCUniversal, the parent company of NBC News and MSNBC (the latter is currently being spun off as a separate company), settled the $30 million lawsuit filed by Georgia gynecologist Dr. Mahendra Amin. Amin who was the subject of a report claiming he performed unnecessary hysterectomies at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) center.
Both parties struck the settlement in February, but the lawsuit was officially dismissed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia. The terms of the settlement were not publicly disclosed.
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“We are pleased that Dr. Amin is able to move on from his years-long litigation against NBCUniversal,” Amin’s attorneys, Stacey Evans and Scott Grubman, told Fox News Digital. “It is unfortunate that he had to sue to get confirmation of what was known all along—that he did not perform mass hysterectomies on women detained at Irwin County Detention Center. We are glad that the judge found those statements false as a matter of law because, in fact, Dr. Amin performed only two hysterectomies, both of which were medically necessary and consented to by the patients.”
“Dr. Amin is a dedicated physician who has dedicated his entire career to serving underserved communities. The recklessness of NBCUniversal to try to paint him as an evil doctor was disgusting and we are glad they finally settled the case,” they added.
Representatives from NBCUniversal and MSNBC did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
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Amin was the subject of an NBC News article in September 2020, which cited a whistleblower’s claim that he was performing unneeded hysterectomies while providing medical care to women detained at the Irwin County Detention Center.
MSNBC quickly followed with a series of on-air reports on “Deadline: White House,” “All In with Chris Hayes” and “The Rachel Maddow Show,” all running with the “uterus collector” label for Amin.
Amin filed a lawsuit against parent company NBCUniversal, alleging he was falsely portrayed as “an abusive, unethical, and dishonest physician who treated and operated on immigrant women in an abusive fashion, without consent, and motivated by profit instead of quality healthcare.”
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Judge Lisa Godbey Wood of the Southern District of Georgia previously ruled that a jury could reasonably find actual malice and the trial was set to begin April 22, in Waycross, Georgia. In light of the settlement agreement, the court canceled the scheduled trial.
“NBC investigated the whistleblower letter’s accusations; that investigation did not corroborate the accusations and even undermined some; NBC republished the letter’s accusations anyway,” Judge Wood wrote last year in a 108-page summary.
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Amin believed “false and defamatory” statements published with actual malice that caused him significant damage were said six times on “Deadline: White House,” seven times on “All in with Chris Hayes” and 10 times on “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
MSNBC hosts Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes and Nicolle Wallace were among potential witnesses if it reached trial, along with NBC News reporters Jacob Soboroff and Julia Ainsley, MSNBC producer Denis Horgan, senior director of stands and practices Mary Lockhart, deputy head of standards Chris Scholl and others.
Judge Wood previously ruled that multiple statements were proven false, noting “undisputed evidence has established” that “there were no mass hysterectomies or high numbers of hysterectomies at the facility,” “Dr. Amin performed only two hysterectomies on female detainees from the ICDC,” and the doctor is not a “uterus collector.”
Cause of death revealed for American found dead on tropical beach
Bahamas authorities have released autopsy report findings for an American man who briefly disappeared during a vacation to Paradise Island with his parents and was found dead on a beach the next morning.
Authorities found 23-year-old Dinari McAlmont, of Maryland, dead on Paradise Island in Nassau on April 6, just 12 hours after he landed on the island with his parents.
“A post-mortem examination was performed, and the pathologist’s findings revealed that the deceased died as a result of drowning,” the Royal Bahamas Police Force said in a Wednesday news conference, adding that police are still awaiting the results of a toxicology exam.
“Foul play is not suspected at this time,” the police force said, following comments from Michelle McAlmont, McAlmont’s mother, to Eyewitness News Bahamas expressing her belief that her son had been beaten.
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The McAlmont family was staying at a resort called The Reef at Atlantis on Paradise Island, Bahamas.
Dinari apparently left his parents during dinner to retrieve a jacket, when he disappeared, and his parents filed a missing person report when they could not track him using cellphone location data.
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“We are deeply saddened by the passing of one of our guests,” the resort told Fox News Digital in a statement. “Our thoughts are with his family during this difficult time. We are fully cooperating with the authorities as they conduct their investigation.”
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The State Department has issued a Level 2 Travel Advisory for the Bahamas, as well as Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Netherlands Antilles and Turks and Caicos.
The Level 2 Travel Advisory warns tourists to “be aware of heightened risks to safety and security.”
Democrat dismisses Americans killed by criminal illegal immigrants
Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García, D- Ill., appeared to dismiss illegal immigrants attacking and murdering Americans as simply “immigrants committing a few crimes” Wednesday.
Garcia made his remarks at a House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement where he feigned surprise that Republicans were “scapegoat[ing] immigrants once again.”
“Republicans have lifted up some tragedies that involve immigrants committing a few crimes,” Garcia said, claiming Republicans were being “dishonest and cruel.”
“This is the exception, not the rule,” he added. “I live in an immigrant neighborhood in Chicago. I know what it’s like.”
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Just before García spoke, Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-N.J., called out sanctuary city policies for releasing known violent criminals onto the streets with no clear oversight.
“There have been murders, there have been rapes, there have been disfigurements,” Van Drew said.
He added, “We know what happened to Laken Riley. We know what’s happened to so many people. We’re trying to clean up the chaos that was left behind.”
Also, shortly before García made his comments, Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, gave a series of examples of sanctuary cities ignoring ICE detainers on rapists and killers, many of whom went on to assault and kill again.
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García also argued that sanctuary city polices, such as the ones implemented in Chicago, have produced lower crime and poverty rates.
He concluded that Republicans are “not interested in public safety or crime victims” because of how they’ve embraced President Donald Trump’s deportation policies.
Chicago Flips Red Vice President Danielle Carter-Walters responded to García during her testimony.
“It’s funny that Mr. García is from Chicago, and he cannot tell you what’s happening in our community. If he came into our community, he would see all the gang graffiti, the Tren de Aragua signs, the MS-13. He would see across the street in a park where they’re putting the shelters, all the needles in the park,” Carter-Walters said.
She also attacked sanctuary city policies and claimed, based on her husband’s experience as a former police officer, that crimes by illegal immigrants are often not reported.
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Fox News Digital reached out to Garcia’s press secretary for further comment.
Country singer confronts unruly fans at his concert: ‘Pause this sh–‘
Country singer Braxton Keith called out unruly fans at his concert.
During his show in Gilmer, Texas, Keith, 23, was interrupted by the antics of a few rowdy concertgoers, who threw beer cans at Keith and his band as they performed “Honky Tonk City.” Instead of letting the chaos ruin the vibe, he took control of the situation.
“Hey listen up. Pause this s—,” Keith was seen shouting in a video he shared to TikTok. “I didn’t come here to get beer cans thrown at me, all right? This isn’t a g—— Gavin Adcock concert, OK?”
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The “Chase You Down” crooner referred to his fellow country artist, who’s known for throwing drinks at his concerts.
“Don’t be throwing f—ing beers out here,” Keith continued to scold his fans as he stopped his performance.
“These people at the front are gettin’ wet up here and it’s gonna p— them off and it’s gonna p— me off.”
The singer confronted the crowd and pointed out a young fan who was attending her first country show.
“This little girl right here’s never been to a country concert before, and it’s her first d— time, OK? We’re gonna have a good show for her, OK?”
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The rowdy audience was heard cheering in the background after Keith’s announcement.
When the “Cozy” singer shared the concert disruption on TikTok, he wrote text over his video that read, “Embarrassing behavior and poor concert etiquette on display in 2025.”
His caption read, “This is unacceptable behavior for any concert including my brother @GavinAdcockMusic Nobody likes beer and trash getting thrown at them. I love live music and when given the opportunity to speak up about unruliness in the concert community, I will protect my audience, band, crew, equipment, and most importantly, the integrity of live performance experiences.”
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Keith isn’t the first country star to stop a concert over a disruptive crowd.
WATCH: CARLY PEARCE STOPS CONCERT TO BREAK UP FIGHT BETWEEN ‘ANGRY’ FANS
Last month, “We Don’t Fight Anymore” singer Carly Pearce was seen confronting “angry” fans in a video during a performance at O2 Academy Birmingham in the United Kingdom.
“We’re all here to just have a good night, you know what I mean? We’re all friends at my shows,” Pearce said, as she paused her concert to address fans when a fight broke out.
“Girl, I am sick, and I ain’t got time for it, OK?”
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She continued, “I love you. I’m just saying. Please don’t make everybody around you angry, OK?”
According to the fan who captured the heated moment, the two fans “didn’t stop” fighting following the singer’s “respectful and very professional” remarks and were asked to leave.
Later in the video, fans were heard chanting Pearce’s name. The country star was seen giving a thumbs up as she waved to the “angry fan” being escorted out.
“Ain’t nobody got time for that,” Pearce concluded.
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