Trump's moving goalposts on tariffs show how hard it will be to win his trade war

Independent

07-07-2025

President Donald Trump finally got the first part of his agenda through when he signed his sprawling 'One Big, Beautiful Bill' on the July 4 holiday as he wanted.
His tariffs haven't proved as easy.
For his spending bill, Trump somehow tamed the warring factions of Congressional Republicans from populists worried about Medicaid cuts to moderates such as Alaska's Sen. Lisa Murkowski who got a sweetheart deal for her state to the fiscal conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus who folded like lawn chairs used to watch the fireworks on the National Mall during the holiday.
But if Trump brought the GOP together to pass his tax cuts and increase spending on immigration enforcement, paid for by significant slashes to Medicaid, he faces a much less pliable adversary: the rest of the world, opposed to his trade war.
On Monday, Trump sent letters to Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba and South Korean President Lee Jae-myung saying that he would enforce a 25 percent tariff on imports from their countries starting August 1. Trump called the threats an invitation to 'participate in the extraordinary Economy of the United States, the Number One Market in the World, by far.'
This came after Trump threatened that any country that worked with BRICS – the group including Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – 'will be charged an additional 10 percent tariff' and that 'There will be no exceptions to this policy.'
The letters and his stern remarks to other countries embody a Trump tariff deja vu, where he threatens to levy tariffs, fires off harsh words about impending consequences, only for him to ultimately fold and let supposedly hard deadlines pass, while declaring victory without making any substantial gains and putting him on a weaker footing than when he started.
Just this week, Trump gave a jumbled response when reporters asked him about resuming the tariffs that he said would return after he had paused many of them in April.
'They're going to be tariffs. The tariffs are going to be the tariffs. I think we'll have most countries done by July 9. Either a letter or a deal,' Trump said.
Of course, letters are a far cry from an actual deal. And it's certainly not the ' 90 deals in 90 days ' that his adviser Peter Navarro pledged. Aside from micro-deals with the United Kingdom and China, along with a deal with Vietnam, Trump has not come close to 90 deals.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick only added to the cloudiness of the future for trade, when he said 'But they go into effect August 1. Tariffs go into effect August 1' and that 'But the president is setting the rates and the deals right now.'
It's been more than three months since Trump announced his 'Liberation Day' tariffs, which he pledged would reorient the world economy after a series of perceived slights toward American workers. Of course, most of those never fully came to fruition after Trump hit the pause button on most, but by no means all, of the tariffs. He pushed his deadline for them to start to July 9 after markets reacted poorly to his plan. Now, he is extending again, this time to August 1.
The administration seems to recognize that people do not believe Trump is serious about the tariffs. On Sunday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appeared on CNN's State of the Union where host Dana Bash asked Bessent why trade deals Trump promised have not materialized.
'Again, he didn't promise this,' he said, despite the fact Navarro pledged this, presumably speaking on behalf of the president. 'And when we send out the 100 letters to these countries, that will set their tariff rate. So we're going to have 100 done in the next few.'
But a letter is not a deal, and the 100 hundred countries have no reason to do any more negotiations if that would be the extent of any trade negotiations.
Trump's inability to actualize full-fledged trade agreements would be a stunning failure in terms of fulfilling his campaign promises.
Alongside conducting mass deportations of immigrants in the country illegally, the tariffs, the revenue collected from them and the resultant resurgence in manufacturing was the core pillar of his 2024 presidential campaign. By contrast, his Democratic opponents warned about the ensuing chaos of a second Trump term or that consumers would pay the cost of the tariffs.
It turns out that bending the entire economic order is much harder than making almost every elected official in the Republican Party fold to your commands for the exact opposite reason: domestically, Republicans stand to lose voters if they cross Trump; but abroad, world leaders gain credibility when they stand up to a declaration of a trade war.