President Donald Trump confirmed Thursday that he plans to reimplement the original “Liberation Day” tariff rates he placed on U.S. trading partners if deals are not reached at the conclusion of the 90-day pause he put in place Wednesday.
The president spoke to reporters for over an hour during his Thursday Cabinet meeting, where he and his top aides faced a number of questions on his trade policy that has rattled markets and upended U.S. foreign policy.
THE REPUBLICANS WHO SUPPORT MEASURES THAT COULD OVERTURN TRUMP TARIFFS
“I think it’s very close, but, you know, we have to have a deal that we like,” the president said when asked when the first bilateral trade deals would be announced. “I could make every deal in one day if I wanted to. I could do this all in one day.”
“If we can’t make the deal that we want to make, or we have to make, or that’s, good for both parties — it’s got to be good for both parties — and then we go back to where we were,” he continued when asked what would happen if countries can’t broker an approved deal at the end of the 90-day pause.
The 90-day deadline to strike one deal, let alone dozens, is an ambitious feat. Negotiated trade deals between nations often take months, if not years. Trump’s marquee trade agreement from his first term, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement came three years into his presidency.
Though Trump’s pause on the retaliatory tariffs sent stocks soaring on Wednesday, roughly half of those gains were wiped out after markets opened on Thursday.
Trump told reporters that he was not following the stock losses, as he said the Cabinet meeting had stretched close to 2 1/2 hours, before punting to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to make sense of the news.
“Up 2, down 1 is not a bad ratio, or up 10, down 5,” Bessent said. “As we go through the queue and settle with these countries who are going to bring us their best offers, we will end up in a place of great certainty over the next 90 days on tariffs. But we had very good inflation numbers today. Oil’s down. We had a very successful bond market, so I don’t see anything unusual today.”
Unlike virtually every other U.S. trading partner, China did not get its tariff rate lowered by the president Wednesday. Instead, Trump put a whopping 145% tariff on all Chinese exports to the U.S. — 125% stemming from China’s own reciprocal measures announced over the weekend stacked with two 10% tariffs levied in relation to the flow of fentanyl into the U.S.
WHITE HOUSE CLARIFIES NEW CHINA TARIFF RATE OF 145%, NOT 125%
The president declined to say if Chinese President Xi Jinping had reached out on trade but said U.S. officials had been communicating with their counterparts in Beijing.
“We’ll see what happens with China,” Trump said. “We would love to be able to work a deal. They’ve really taken advantage of our country for a long period of time. They’ve ripped us off beyond anybody.”
