Trump wanted ‘90 deals in 90 days.' Instead, he's finding wins where he can.

Yahoo

19 hours ago

President Donald Trump is touting this week's trade agreement with China as the latest triumph of his dealmaking acumen.
But his celebratory tone belies an uncomfortable reality: For all his optimistic talk on trade, Trump has made little tangible progress since this spring's tariff spree, so far only securing frameworks of agreements with the U.K. and China and leaving American businesses grappling with continued economic uncertainty.
Critics and allies alike say Trump's talk about the China 'deal' signals how eager he is to telegraph progress ahead of the White House's July 8 self-imposed deadline to hash out agreements with trading partners.
'We were promised '90 deals in 90 days.' What we have at this point are 'general frameworks' for the U.K. and China,' said Marc Short, who served as Trump's legislative affairs director and Vice President Mike Pence's chief of staff during the president's first term, referencing Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro's vow.
The administration will 'present it as if they're making significant progress and hail these general frameworks as really significant breakthrough deals,' Short added. But 'other countries are seeing that, if I wait this out, he's going to be overly sensitive to bond market yields, or he's going to get himself into trouble, and then he's going to need to get out of it with a deal.'
The White House, however, sees the agreement with China as a true win — proof that it went toe-to-toe with its biggest economic adversary and held its own.
'We're in a solid place going forward in these negotiations, because the country that could most push back here, tried to push back and it didn't really go well for them,' said a White House official, granted anonymity to share the administration's thinking. 'We feel good about negotiations. We're increasingly walking into these discussions being able to demonstrate that we do have the cards.'
But even Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent acknowledged that it was 'highly likely' that the July deadline could be extended for 18 trading partners he said are negotiating in good faith. Trump downplayed those comments when asked about them Wednesday night, saying that while he 'would' extend the deadline, he didn't think he'd have to.
This week's tentative deal with China offers Trump a bit of a boost as he prepares to meet with major world leaders at the G7 summit next week in Canada. Representatives from foreign countries view the upcoming confab as the next best vehicle to nail down something concrete on trade, after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Wednesday that there will be 'quite a few bilateral meetings.'
One Canadian official, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said whether progress is made over the next few weeks with any country, 'depends greatly on U.S. bandwidth to respond on tariffs given all other talks.'
'I'd expect if [an agreement] lands, it's much closer to the U.K. document length than 1500+ pages of USMCA,' the official said, referring to the comprehensive North American trade deal known as the U.S.-Mexico Canada Agreement, which Trump negotiated during his first term.
The U.S. announced its first trade 'deal' — which was, in reality, the framework for a more detailed future agreement — with the U.K. in May. But that accord has yet to be enacted, with U.S. levies on U.K. exports, including cars, steel and aluminum, remaining in place and provisions on agriculture and other issues still to be hashed out. And this week, Trump quickly declared mission accomplished on China — subject to final approval from both him and China's leader Xi Jinping — even though top negotiators had reached no more than a handshake agreement to deescalate tensions and advance trade talks, after a meeting in Geneva last month failed to move the ball forward.
Meanwhile, the administration has continued to promise that deals with major trading partners, like Japan, South Korea, India and the European Union, are 'close' ahead of a July 8 deadline, after which Trump's sweeping and massive 'Liberation Day' tariffs are set to go back into effect. But talks with those countries have yet to bear fruit, and smaller countries, eager to negotiate, are having a hard time getting the administration to consider tweaks to proposals the U.S. has put forward.
Even some Trump allies in regular contact with the White House are struggling to understand the administration's approach on trade. If the White House is truly interested in boosting domestic manufacturing, they say, it would move quickly to negotiate deals. That would allow businesses to move forward with some certainty instead of leaving them in limbo.
'You meet with officials at all these agencies, you even meet with Cabinet secretaries, and they all agree that the intent of the tariffs was never to hinder companies who are expanding, or trying to onshore supply chains here,' said one of those allies, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the trade discussions. 'I have no fucking clue what their strategy is.'
A second Trump ally was more optimistic, acknowledging that the deals seem 'elusive' but voicing confidence the administration 'can get them done.'
Talks with South Korea, for instance, appear to be ramping up after the country's new president, Lee Jae-myung, spoke with Trump last week and selected on Tuesday a chief trade negotiator, Yeo Han-koo. While negotiations between the two countries have been ongoing, the South Korean government had made clear it was not possible to make a deal until a new president was in place after its June 3 elections.
Leaders in India, who were negotiating with the administration on trade even before Trump announced its 'Liberation Day' tariffs, appear optimistic that the pace of negotiations is picking up ahead of the July deadline. India's foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar told the French paper Le Figaro earlier this week he was 'hopeful' the country would soon reach an agreement with the U.S.
And conversations with the EU — which had stalled, nearly triggering a trade war last month — have moved into a negotiating stage, though progress still remains elusive. The EU has expressed a willingness to engage on issues that have long irritated the U.S., like energy, semiconductors, steel and aluminum and autos, but the U.S. has indicated it will only make concessions on tariffs implemented since Trump took office, and that its flat 10 percent 'baseline' tariff on all countries is off the table for negotiations.
That's clouded talks, despite a positive readout from U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer after a meeting with E.U. trade czar Maroš Šefčovič in Paris last week.
'The erratic behavior of the Trump administration has to stop if we want to reach a deal,' Italian Member of the European Parliament Brando Benifei said in an interview. Benifei, who chairs the European Parliament's Delegation for relations with the United States, added that the Trump administration's decision to hike tariffs on steel and aluminum in the middle of trade talks 'is damaging the ongoing negotiations, increasing more uncertainty also for the global economy.'
Japanese officials, meanwhile, left Washington empty handed last week following a fifth round of trade talks. The country's trade negotiators said that while talks had 'progressed' Japan had yet to find 'common ground' with the U.S.
Prospects for a deal are slightly better for Mexico. President Claudia Sheinbaum said it was 'very likely' that she would speak with Trump at the G7 summit, which she will attend as a guest of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. The countries are closing in on a narrow deal that could remove the U.S.'s flat 50 percent tariffs on steel, Bloomberg News was first to report.
A person close to the White House, granted anonymity to discuss details of the negotiations, told POLITICO that the countries are weighing a quota-based system, and could reveal more details at next week's G7 summit. Those plans, they said, are not final, and the administration is grappling with pressure from its more protectionist factions that have long requested Trump remain focused on reciprocal tariffs in trade talks.
Both Mexico and Canada are not impacted by so-called reciprocal tariffs, and received some exemptions for sector-specific duties because of the pre-existing North American trade deal. Other tariffs, such as those on steel and aluminum, remain in full force.
Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), a staunch Trump ally, argued the pressure to make deals is on foreign governments, not the White House, at this point.
'There's a lot in the hopper. There's pressure on those other countries because quite frankly it's embarrassing to the EU, it's embarrassing to Japan, it's embarrassing to South Korea that we're making a deal with China first,' Moreno said. 'The reality is that those countries just need to step up, acknowledge that we've had a tilted relationship with them for decades and then they need to fix that and come to the table with a legitimate offer to rebalance our trade."
Even without substantial deals, some on the right continue to point out how U.S. tariffs have already significantly shifted the economic conversation. Baseline reciprocal tariffs of 10 percent remain in effect globally, with tariffs in China at an even higher level of about 55 percent, on average.
'Some, they want to call it 'caving' or 'giving in' or something like that,' said Mark DiPlacido, policy advisor at American Compass, a think tank that embraces economic populism. 'But they're not comparing it to the baseline of where things were at at the beginning of the year.'