THE WASHINGTON POST: The 18 hours that changed Trump’s mind on trade

Washington woke up Wednesday, local time, to the highest tariffs on foreign goods in a century and to bond markets flashing warning signs that President Donald Trump’s bid to remake global trade could spark a far bigger crisis.

Mr Trump’s advisers were still projecting confidence that his effort to restructure the world’s economy and sweep away generations of globalisation was foolproof despite the S&P 500 wiping away 12 percent of its value in a week. One senior White House official said that Wall Street didn’t understand Main Street - and that Main Street was still backing the president.

But hours later, Mr Trump partially backed down - escalating his trade war with China but lowering many of the tariffs he had just imposed on the rest of the world. Stock markets soared.

“I guess they say it was the biggest day in financial history,” Mr Trump revelled, less than 90 minutes after his Truth Social post that upended his week-old policy.

It was a shocking turnabout coming after days of Mr Trump’s aides arguing that he was seeking to remake the global economy.

But from Tuesday evening to Wednesday afternoon, Mr Trump and his trade advisers spoke to several Republican lawmakers and top foreign leaders who raised concerns about the faltering global markets and the growing concerns of a worldwide recession, urging him to do something.

By late Wednesday afternoon, Mr Trump was saying he had been thinking about switching course “over the last few days.”

The final decision, he said, “probably came together early this morning, fairly early this morning. Just wrote it up. We didn’t have the use of, we didn’t have access to lawyers,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. “We wrote it up from our hearts.”

“But this was something certainly we’ve been talking about for a period of time, and we decided to pull the trigger, and we did it today, and we’re happy about it,” he added.

Late Tuesday night - after Sean Hannity’s 9pm show ended on Fox News - Mr Trump had an extensive, more than hour-long phone call with a group of Republican senators who had appeared on the episode, according to a person with knowledge of the conversation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail a private call. Some of the senators had expressed concern about the tariffs. That evening, Mr Trump was also watching bond markets, “where people were getting a little queasy,” he said Wednesday.

On Wednesday morning, Mr Trump met in the White House with Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune and spoke on the phone with Swiss President Karin Keller-Sutter, whose nation’s Rolexes and chocolates were hit with a 31 percent tariff overnight and who pushed him to relent on a measure that was bashing her economy. Over the course of her 25-minute call, she underlined the role that Swiss businesses play in generating US jobs and noted that her country last year abolished tariffs on imports of US industrial goods, a spokesman for the Swiss Finance Ministry said.

Mr Trump watched Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of banking giant JPMorgan Chase, give an interview on Fox News at about 8am. The executive cautioned that a recession was a “likely outcome” given the economic uncertainty, explaining that he was hearing from most everyone he spoke to that they were “cutting back” as a result.

“I’m taking a calm view, but I think it could get worse if we don’t make some progress here,” Mr Dimon said in the interview, which aired several hours before Mr Trump’s announcement.

“BE COOL!” Mr Trump told the public in a Wednesday morning post on Truth Social, telling Americans not to worry about what was happening. A few minutes later, he posted, “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY.”

Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, meanwhile, fielded a call from the top European Union trade official, Maros Sefcovic, whose bloc on Wednesday approved countermeasures on US steel and aluminium tariffs that were tailored to hit a range of Trump voters, from soybean farmers to plastics manufacturers. EU leaders - who represent the biggest foreign market for US goods and services - were readying a bigger retaliation, even as they sought a deal to sweep away as many trade barriers as possible with Washington.

By midday, Mr Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent were sitting in the Oval Office with Mr Trump, hashing out a reversal that would take even some of his own team by surprise. The two men sat with Mr Trump as he crafted the language for “one of the most extraordinary Truth posts of his Presidency,” Mr Lutnick posted on X at 130pm, local time, 12 minutes after Mr Trump sent his missive out into the world.

“I thought that people were jumping a little bit out of line. They were getting yippy,” Mr Trump said, speaking on the South Lawn of the White House in front of race car champions, a little more than an hour after he announced the partial tariff reversal. “Nothing’s over yet, but we have a tremendous amount of spirit from other countries.

“We’re going to have something that nobody would have even dreamt possible,” Mr Trump said.

After the announcement, Trump aides raced to declare that it had been the strategy all along.

“President Trump’s master strategy, bold statesmanship and brilliant tactical planning has done more to reform broken international trade in days than anyone has achieved in decades while economically and politically isolating the global architect of economic aggression: China,” Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller wrote on X.

But inside the White House, even some senior-level officials appeared to be blindsided by the reversal. Moments after Mr Trump’s Truth Social post about the “pause,” aides sprang up to confer about how to proceed, moving quickly to call an outdoor press gaggle with Mr Bessent and Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary.

A senior foreign diplomat who has been deeply involved in trade discussions learned of the policy reversal from a reporter’s text message, moments after Mr Trump posted the announcement. The diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly about sensitive negotiations, scrambled to find out more details.

After the post, White House aides huddled to discuss the facts and talking points of Mr Trump’s newly conceived plan. But key details of the new arrangement remained unclear to White House staff in the aftermath, as reporters sought to clarify basic questions, such as whether Canada and Mexico would also be subject to the new 10 percent tariffs, as Mr Bessent had said in the presser, despite their not having been part of Mr Trump’s initial “Liberation Day” plan last week.

Before Mr Trump’s social media announcement Wednesday, the White House’s main orders of business for the day were Mr Trump greeting NASCAR champions and signing executive orders in the afternoon.

But as worrisome economic news flickered across televisions in the West Wing, Mr Bessent and Mr Lutnick joined Trump in the Oval Office to hammer out the wording of his announcement.

Peter Navarro, Mr Trump’s longtime trade adviser who had urged Mr Trump to pursue an aggressive tariff policy, didn’t take part in the Oval Office conversation, a potential sign his viewpoint was losing out. He also received no mention by Mr Bessent and Ms Leavitt when the pair discussed Mr Trump working with Mr Lutnick on a path forward. Mr Bessent and Mr Navarro were widely seen as coming from opposite perspectives during tariff deliberations, though Mr Trump’s advisers have repeatedly said they are operating in unison in supporting all of Mr Trump’s decisions on the matter.

Mr Navarro, who was seen inside the West Wing on Wednesday, took part in a Fox Business interview outside the White House soon after Mr Trump’s announcement, describing the matter as a “beautiful negotiation.” He avoided reporters lingering to ask follow-up questions, though during his Fox interview insisted he was not being sidelined.

“We work together beautifully,” Mr Navarro said. “Scotty’s one of my best friends, we’ve worked together for years now … We’re all doing our job for the president, and this is the result.”

“One band, one sound, my brother,” Mr Navarro said as he ended the interview.

Later, as Mr Trump talked to reporters in the Oval Office, he laid bare his broader strategy as the massive tariffs of last week gave way to Wednesday’s partial reprieve.

“A lot of times it’s not a negotiation until it is,” Mr Trump said. “And that happens.”

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