When you’ll take anything, you’ll get nothing.

Donald Trump said yesterday that he has “no intention” of firing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, telling an Oval Office gaggle, “None whatsoever. . . . Never did.” Trump also signaled that he is looking for a deal that will exit his trade war with China, such that his punitive tariff on Chinese goods will “come down substantially, but it won’t be zero.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has gone further:

[Bessent] told investors in a closed-door meeting Tuesday he expects “there will be a de-escalation” in President Donald Trump’s trade war with China in the “very near future,” a person in the room told CNBC. “No one thinks the current status quo is sustainable” with tariff rates at their current levels, Bessent said at a private investor summit in Washington, D.C., hosted by JPMorgan Chase. Stocks, already recovering from the prior day’s sell-off, soared higher after Bessent’s remarks were first reported.

Bessent said he believes that the prospect of de-escalation between the economic superpowers “should give the world, the markets, a sigh of relief,” according to the person in the room who was granted anonymity in order to describe a private event. “We have an embargo now, on both sides, right?” he said…Bessent also insisted that, despite the U.S. ratcheting up tariffs on Chinese imports to 145% and China retaliating with 125% duties on American goods, the goal of Trump’s policy “isn’t to decouple.”

Sending out both of these messages simultaneously is no accident: Volatility in the markets and weakness in Trump’s public polling seems finally to have the White House spooked. The reaction shows how ill-considered this whole effort was from the outset.

There is a real case for a trade fight with China, and to some extent for the decoupling approach that is now getting tossed under the bus. But my argument from the beginning was that Trump was taking on a fight without regard for the limits on American power in general and the president’s unilateral power in particular. Fighting every country in the world at once on tariffs is a terrible idea if the goal is to cut us off from allies and trade, and if it’s just a strategic step toward negotiating better deals, it completely misunderstands how much more leverage we would have if we isolated China or a small number of targets. While there is some benefit in negotiations to keeping the other side in the dark about your ends and how far you are willing to push things, that doesn’t work if you simultaneously have to reassure businesspeople and jittery markets in ways that give away the game. All of this was completely foreseeable, and foreseen at the time by just about everyone outside of Trump’s circle.

Climbing down from the fight with Powell is good; there was nothing to be gained but a convenient scapegoat by threatening him. But what exactly, now, is Trump’s leverage over the Chinese regime? Waiting out the enemy is the natural and instinctive response from any Chinese regime in any situation, and here, we do not see Xi Jinping sending out the same sorts of signals of desperation to make a deal. He doesn’t have to. Trump may as well be wearing a sandwich board now that says “will take any deal.” And when you’ll take anything, you’ll get nothing.