TRUMP’S BIG MOVE: IT WASN’T BUNGLING. IT WASN’T 4D CHESS. IT WAS BEING FLEXIBLE ENOUGH TO GET WHAT HE WANTED. As a week of intense tariff mania ends and a new period of negotiations begins, President Donald Trump has 1) started a trade war with China, imposing a 125% tariff on all imports from that country; 2) imposed a 10% global baseline tariff on the world; 3) imposed tariffs on steel, aluminum, some autos, and auto parts; and 4) paused for 90 days a long list of higher “reciprocal” tariffs on many countries.
And here’s the kicker: After all that, the world, in the words of many analysts, is “breathing a sigh of relief.” Trump has imposed a tariff regime that would have horrified much of the political and financial establishment just a few months ago, and now, they are happy that he did not do more.
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Both Trump’s detractors and his supporters are trying to figure out how he did it. “I’m not sure this was gamed out,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), who is not a big fan. “Whether or not this was in the playbook or a reaction, I don’t know.”
Of course, Trump opponents will say he bungled every step of the way and nearly blew up the world economy in the process. On the other side, some of Trump’s most loyal supporters, as well as the people who work for him, will say the president carefully planned every move in a classic example of four-dimensional chess. “After his reversal on social media, Mr. Trump’s team was put in the unenviable position of trying to spin the media that this was the plan all along,” the New York Times reported, “a brilliant strategy straight out of the pages of the president’s best-selling book, ‘The Art of the Deal.’”
But Trump explained himself better than any of his aides. The short version of his story is: I did this, people were getting too nervous about it, so I pulled back a little.
You know how much the markets fell after Trump’s “Liberation Day” appearance on April 2. Maybe the market furor was subsiding a little bit before Trump ordered the 90-day pause on “reciprocal” tariffs, but what appears really to have changed his mind, and rattled some of his top advisers, was bumpiness in the bond market, where a sell-off of U.S. Treasury bonds caused fears that anxiety about Trump’s tariffs was spreading, “raising questions about what is typically seen as the safest corner for investors during times of turmoil,” in the words of the New York Times.
So Trump pulled back, ordering the 90-day pause for every country except China and simultaneously raising the U.S. tariff on China to a stratospheric 125%. Why had he abandoned one path to take another? His explanation was simple: “You have to have flexibility,” he told reporters Wednesday. “I could say, here’s a wall, and I’m going to go through that wall, and I’m going to go through it no matter what. And you keep going and you can’t go through the wall. Sometimes, you have to be able to go under the wall, or around the wall, or over the wall. … I think the word would be flexible. You have to be flexible.”
What was it that caused Trump to realize he could not go through the wall? The markets “were getting a little bit yippy, a little bit afraid,” he said. Was it specifically the bond market? After all, the stock market had been plunging for nearly a week, and Trump stuck with his plan. “I was watching the bond market,” Trump said. “It’s very tricky. If you look at it now, it’s beautiful. … But I saw last night where people were getting a little queasy.”
Make of it what you will. But it does not matter if this was bungling or 4D chess. Look at what Trump has gotten. Starting from zero, he has imposed the tariffs he wanted on the entire world. He says 75 countries now want to negotiate new trade agreements with the United States. He gave them some relief with the 90-day pause, but the remaining 10% tariff will cause them enough pain to motivate them to negotiate. If Trump had paused all the tariffs, countries would have assumed he was weak and felt no need to bargain. Now, they have the 10% tariff still bothering them. It’s almost as if Trump planned it that way.
As for China, in the past week, we have seen many critics say that Trump, rather than impose tariffs worldwide, should have focused on America’s greatest trade adversary. Tariffs on China, they suggested, would be politically popular and, while economically significant, would not have caused the hair-on-fire market craziness that Trump set off.
In addition, Trump knows that many Democrats favor, or say they favor, getting tough with China. Not long before Trump announced the big change Wednesday, Rahm Emanuel, a leading party insider and possible 2028 presidential candidate, said, “China — in my view, you can’t raise tariffs high enough on them.” If they want to bash Trump, Democrats who share that view will be reduced to criticizing the president’s process instead of the substance, which will end up making them look small and him look big.
So, in analyzing the wildness of the last week, keep an eye on where Trump ended up. For better or for worse, he imposed more tariffs than any president in a very long time, set off a firestorm, and then made people happy even as he kept many of the tariffs he wanted. Of course, he improvised. Of course, he did not plan every move from the very beginning. But what Trump did showed remarkable flexibility and an ability to extricate himself from a mess of his own creation.