Secretary Bessent says the deadline for countries to make new trade agreements with the United States is now August 1 — a reversal of the president’s 90-day pause on his “Liberation Day” tariffs. Mr. Bessent says countries will face much higher tariff rates at the beginning of next month if they don’t make deals with the administration in the coming weeks.
President Trump first imposed his tariff regime in early April, arguing that every country that has a trade surplus with the United States had to come to the table not only to reduce tariffs, but non-tariff barriers as well. Just days later, after days of turmoil in financial markets, he announced that countries would only face a ten percent tariff for the next 90 days as the White House tried to negotiate new trade agreements.
Mr. Trump said later that he backed off of his new tariffs because he was worried about the bond market.
Mr. Bessent said on Sunday during an interview with CNN’s “State of the Union” that it is up to foreign nations to decide what their tariff rate will be, based on how conciliatory they are during trade negotiations.
“I’m not gonna give away the playbook because we’re gonna be very busy over the next 72 hours,” Mr. Bessent said. “President Trump is going to be sending letters to some of our trading partners saying, ‘If you don’t move things along, then on August 1, you will boomerang back to your April 2 tariff level, so I think we’re gonna see a lot of deals very quickly.”
He added that the president plans to send letters to around 100 “small countries” which don’t have much of a trading relationship with the United States to try to get them to come to the table.
“Many of these countries never even contacted us, so that’s the thing about being the ‘deficit country,’” the treasury secretary said, referring to America’s trade deficit with other nations. “When you are the deficit country, you have the leverage.”
Mr. Trump, however, said just back in April that countries were lining up to meet with him. “I am telling you, these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass,” Mr. Trump said in a speech to Republican members of Congress. “They are dying to make a deal. ‘Please, please sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything sir.’”
The director of the National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett, echoed Mr. Bessent’s comments during an interview with CBS News’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. He said that ultimately, the decision lies with the president himself on what to do with respect to tariffs. Mr. Hassett says the president could even move the August 1 deadline to a new date.
“There are deadlines and there are things that are close, so maybe things will push past the deadline, maybe they won’t. The president is going to make that judgement,” Mr. Hassett said Sunday. “Until we see everything that plays out, I think that we need to just hold our fire and watch for the news this week.”
The messages from the White House on the tariff issue has been mixed. The president’s top trade advisor, Peter Navarro, said it was possible that 90 deals could be done in 90 days, though he also insisted that the purpose of tariffs was not to make deals, but rather encourage domestic manufacturing.
The commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, has insisted that deals are coming, though he similarly said that a ten percent baseline tariff was likely to stay.
The deals that some in the administration — and on Wall Street — have hoped for have so far failed to materialize. The president came to an agreement with Communist China to lower tariffs between the two countries until August, though even those tariffs are higher now than they were before Liberation Day. The United States and the United Kingdom came to an agreement, though only on a limited number of industries, including car parts and agriculture.
The one negotiation that has been successful is with Vietnam. Mr. Trump announced a trade deal last week that includes zero percent tariffs on American goods being shipped to Vietnam, while businesses in the United States will pay a 20 percent tariff on imports from the southeast Asian country.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
