Trump Sends Desperate Message to Farmers as Tariffs War Gets Worse (2025)

Donald Trump’s administration is planning to shutter U.S. embassies around the world, continuing to dilute American soft power in its latest effort to shrink the federal workforce.

A memorandum that was part of a broader budget for 2026 that is due to the Office of Budget Management Tuesday outlined a plan to close 10 embassies and 17 consulates, according to Punchbowl News. This includes U.S. missions in Eritrea, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Scotland, and South Sudan, as well as five outposts in France and two in Germany.

In Canada, U.S. consulates in Halifax and Montreal would be significantly downsized, according to the document. The consolidation of U.S. embassies in Canada comes as relations have rapidly deteriorated after Trump announced steep tariffs on aluminum, steel, cars, and autoparts.

The memo stated that the targets for downsizing “were evaluated based on feedback from regional bureaus and the interagency, consular workload, cost per [U.S. direct hire] billet, condition of facilities, and security ratings.”

The State Department is also planning to “reduce or eliminate” its footprint in Mogadishu, Somalia, due to a “non-permissive environment,” according to the memo. Trump claimed in a post on Truth Social Monday that the U.S. would continue to “support the Somali People” against the Houthis attempting to “embed” there. The American mission in Mogadishu is the only U.S. outpost in the country.

State Department officials also pitched closing the America’s Diplomatic Support Center in Baghdad because it was “by far” the most expensive.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has yet to sign off on the reductions, but the recommendations were reportedly made by José Cunningham, who has served as the undersecretary for management at the State Department since April 5.

Last month, Politico reported that the Trump administration was planning to cut the State Department’s budget by nearly half, zeroing out the funding for programs to promote democratic processes and counter drug trafficking, and shuttering up to three dozen embassies. This proposal would shrink the department’s budget from $54.4 billion in 2025 to $28.4 billion in 2026.

At a rally in Nampa, Idaho, on Monday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had a message for her colleague, Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene.

“How can anyone possibly make an objective vote on health care, energy, or war when their own money is tied up in pharmaceutical, oil and gas, or defense company stocks? You can’t. And we saw it just happen with Trump’s corrupt and disastrous and rushed tariff scheme, Ocasio-Cortez told the crowd at the Fighting Oligarchy rally with Senator Bernie Sanders.

“We saw Marjorie Taylor Greene buy that dip,” Ocasio-Cortez added to boos from the audience. “I got one question for her: How much did you make? How much did you make off of people’s despair? How much did you make off that panic? How much did you make off of that suffering?”

According to a public disclosure Monday, Greene bought between $21,000 and $315,000 in stocks last Tuesday and Wednesday in 17 companies including Apple, Tesla, Nvidia, and Palantir, just hours before President Trump announced he was partially pausing some of his tariffs and deepening a possible ethics violation. Trump later bragged about how much money his friends made off of the pause, blatantly admitting to market manipulation.

“I hope we see now that it was all about manipulating the markets so that he could quietly enrich his friends who bought the dip before reversing it all in the morning,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

A Department of Homeland Security official on Monday compared Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran immigrant whom the Trump administration admitted it deported in error, to Osama bin Laden.

Speaking to Fox News, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said Monday that “this illegal alien is exactly where he belongs, home in El Salvador,” referring to Abrego Garcia’s detention in El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, a prison known for human rights abuses.

“He was in our country illegally, he’s from El Salvador, was born in El Salvador, and oh, the media forgot to mention, he is an MS-13 gang member,” McLaughlin said. “The media would love for you to believe that this is a media darling, he’s just some Maryland father. Well, Osama bin Laden was also a father, and yet he wasn’t a good guy, and they actually are both terrorists.”

Abrego Garcia is neither a terrorist nor a member of MS-13. In fact, an immigration judge ruled in 2019 that his life would be in danger if he were to return to El Salvador. In contrast, bin Laden co-founded Al Qaeda, responsible for several terrorist attacks around the world and thousands of deaths, including 2,996 people in the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

The fact that the Trump administration continues to lie and call Abrego Garcia a gang member and terrorist with no evidence to justify its defiance of a Supreme Court ruling to facilitate his return, is an egregious miscarriage of justice and slander of an innocent man. Abrego Garcia has no criminal record, is married to a U.S. citizen, and is the father of an autistic child. He deserves to return to the U.S., but the Trump administration doesn’t want to admit that it’s wrong.