- President Donald Trump is willing to sign a sweeping Russia sanctions bill targeting nations that buy Russian oil, gas and uranium, but only if he retains full control over how and when sanctions are applied.
- The White House is pushing to remove congressional oversight from the bill, arguing that the president’s foreign policy decisions shouldn’t be subject to legislative “micromanagement.”
- Sen. Lindsey Graham, who introduced the legislation, has agreed to allow a second 180-day waiver in the bill, but with congressional review, a provision Trump’s team wants to eliminate entirely.
- Trump’s shift toward supporting the bill is driven by personal frustration with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he believes has disrespected his efforts to broker peace in Ukraine.
- Trump’s insistence on unchecked authority could undercut bipartisan support for the bill and trigger a broader clash over the separation of powers in U.S. foreign policy.
(Natural News)—President Donald Trump is prepared to sign sweeping legislation that would cripple Russia’s global trade, provided he retains full authority over how the sanctions are applied.
According to a senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, Trump is “conceptually open” to the bill, introduced by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). The legislation seeks to impose crippling economic penalties on countries that continue to purchase Russian oil, gas, uranium and other goods, including a striking 500 percent tariff.
However, Trump’s team is pushing for changes that would ensure the White House maintains unilateral authority over when and how those penalties are enforced.
“The current version would subject the president’s foreign policy decisions to micromanagement by Congress through a joint resolution of disapproval process. … That’s a nonstarter for us,” said the official. “The administration is not going to be micromanaged by Congress on the president’s foreign policy. The bill needs a waiver authority that is complete.”
Under the current draft, the president would be allowed to waive the tariffs for up to 180 days. After discussions with the White House, Graham said on Tuesday, July 8, that he’s agreed to amend the bill to allow a second 180-day waiver, though that second waiver would require congressional oversight.
Trump’s team, however, is pushing for even broader waiver powers.
In essence, the changes would enable Trump to lift or withhold sanctions without any formal check from Congress – a dramatic shift that could undercut the bill’s bipartisan appeal and potentially trigger a showdown over the balance of power in U.S. foreign policy.
Trump’s frustration with Putin fuels shift on Russia sanctions bill
Trump is showing a new willingness to work with Congress on the bill due to his growing personal frustration with Russian President Vladimir Putin and the stalled efforts to end the war in Ukraine.
After long resisting congressional pressure to take a harder line, Trump now appears to be leaning into a sanctions push that has gained traction among Republicans on Capitol Hill. Behind the change, insiders said, is a deepening sense of betrayal and embarrassment over Putin’s refusal to engage seriously in peace talks.
“For the president now, he has invested his own reputation of being able to negotiate anything anywhere, and Putin has made him look foolish,” said one Republican operative close to the White House. (Related: More Russian sanction = World War III.)
Trump himself did not mince words this week. “Putin is throwing a lot of bullshit at me,” he told reporters Tuesday, adding that he was “looking very strongly” at supporting the Russia sanctions bill.
But Trump has also insisted that any new sanctions must come with broad waiver authority that leaves ultimate enforcement up to him.
Visit Trump.news for more stories like this. Watch this clip from “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Fox News as host Tucker Carlson discusses how anti-Russian sanctions have not negatively affected the country at all.
More related stories:
- Hungary says no to EU’s Russian oil embargo sanction.
- G7 and EU to track and sanction trade of Russian diamonds.
- US-EU price cap on Russian oil threatens India’s crude imports and economic growth.
- Russia to cut oil output by 500,000 barrels per day in response to Western price cap.
- EU undermining its own sanctions against Russia by buying as much Russian diesel as it can before ban begins.
Sources include:
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
