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Noting that Donald Trump appears to have retreated from talking about his unpopular trade plans, the panel on MSNBC's "The Weekend" were baffled by his one high-profile mention of negotiations with China on tariffs.

On Sunday morning the hosts and their guests were hard pressed to recall any trade deals the Trump administration has successfully brought to closure, with contributor Molly Jong-Fast joking, "I was promised 90 deals in 90- days."

That led co-host Elise Jordan to point to a Trump pronouncement on potential deals on Thursday where he vaguely rambled "We just signed with China. We have everybody. We're not going to make deals with everybody, some were just going to send them a letter, say thank you very much, you're going to pay 25, 35, 45 percent. We have one coming up, maybe with India –– very big one. We're going to open up India in the China deal. We're starting to open up China."

That led co-host Jonathan Capehart to exclaim, "Make it make sense. What's he talking about?"

Conservative Brendan Buck laughed and observed, "Okay, I worked on trade policy when I was in Congress. Look, trade deals are not just 'What's your tariff rate?' There's a reason that trade deals usually take a year, two years, sometimes like five years to negotiate because you're going literally line by line, product by product, 'What is the rate on this? What is our quota on that?'"

"Each one is a negotiation," he added. "He's just talking these big broad terms of like how much we're going to pay and he seems to think that us slapping a tariff on somebody is good for us in some way. We have this sort of quasi-deal with China. He's celebrating that we are going to have a higher tariff than they are. That just means we're paying more. And so there's a reason none of these things have come to fruition, because, I don't know, it's like, he doesn't appreciate what an actual trade agreement is."

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Longtime D.C. government workers are feeling a chill in the air as Donald Trump's administration is going to extreme lengths to not leave any paper trails as the new regime disrupts and revamps government operations.

According to a report from the Washington Post's Hannah Natanson, department heads and staffers are discouraged from writing anything down, are forced to sign non-disclosure agreements before seeing proposals, with communications have been "increasingly shifted to the encrypted messaging app Signal, with messages set to auto-delete."

Noting what is occurring during Trump's second term has all the hallmarks of a "a creeping culture of secrecy," one staffer who left their job stated, "What’s particularly weird for me is that, as a regulatory agency, we tend to operate with the idea that ‘if it’s not in writing, it didn’t happen.'"

According to the Post, "It’s not just career staffers who are clamming up, fearful they will be tagged as rebellious or resistant to Trump’s policies and dismissed amid the administration’s push to trim the workforce, fulfilling the president’s promise to eradicate waste, fraud and abuse. Trump’s own political appointees are also resistant to writing things down, worried that their agency’s deliberations will appear in news coverage and inspire a hunt for leakers, federal workers said."

“I’ve never seen this much secrecy and lack of transparency from any leadership, including in the military. We don’t know anything until it happens,” explained a 10-year veteran of the GSA.

Fear of the Trump administration's crackdown has also affected workers' personal lives.

"At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, workers in one office no longer use Microsoft Teams but instead talk through Signal to discuss anything personal or that could be read as criticism of the Trump administration, said a staffer there," the report states. " In part of the Justice Department, attorneys who are friends outside of work have shifted all their text message conversations to Signal, said a staffer there."

You can read more here.