Donald Trump’s Commander-in-Chief of Tariffs | New Yorker

Later that night, Trump called Lutnik in anger, wondering how to determine the amount of the tariff. Lutnik himself is not sure. Trump told Lutnik to be on TV anyway and defend them. Lutnick would fall, even if he really didn’t know what was going on.

In 1981, David Stockman, the budget director for President Ronald Reagan, admitted: “No one of us really knows what all these numbers are like.” He was talking about the “internal secrets” of government budgets. The tariff rates announced on Liberation Day led to a series of similar shrugs in hospital admission. Some commentators pointed out that you can generate the same tariff amount by asking Chatgpt to design a global tariff policy. The guess has appeared Doge This is what the engineers actually do. The White House said the Economic Advisory Board had calculated the numbers, but then Hassett said it was U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer. Others blamed Peter Navarro, a long-time Trump adviser and Trade Hawks. A person involved in the deliberation told me that he was still unsure where the final number originated, and would calculate similar to “ninth grade mathematics.”

On the second day of the Rose Garden event, Sean Hannity asked Lutnick, what U.S. consumers expect from new tariffs. Lutnick complains about the EU. “They won’t take lobsters from the United States,” he said. “They hate our beef because our beef is beautiful and their beef is weak.” On the same day, he told another Fox News host Jesse Watters that the tariffs meant that “robot technology will replace the cheap labor we see around the world.” Three days later, he asked for clarification on CBS News, saying, “The army of millions of humans tightened small screws to make iPhones? This kind of thing will come to the United States.”

Lutnick’s chaotic riffing, and a person close to his team called “the optimism that he can sell anything” is seen as responsibility in some ways. “Generally speaking, he needs to keep him out,” said an experienced Trump adviser. Magazine The surgical staff described Lutnik as a “carnival buck.” Steve Bannon called his appearance “an infinite disaster.” When I recently asked senior White House officials about Lutnick, they proposed a unified front. “Howard is a natural salesman,” said Vice President JD Vance. “Howard has a high energy level,” said Hassett. “No one works harder than Howard.” Still, a person close to the administration told me that many in the White House think Lutnik is “unhonest, so when you need a bad guy, people blame him. He is not seen as a real actor. He is a boy with an errand.”

In late April, Lutnick participated in the Hill and Valley Forum, an annual event for “Technical Builders” and decision makers held at DC. After a day of panels gathered on Capitol Hill, such as “Arsenal Reimagining: Designing the Ministry of Defense for the 21st Century Battlefield,” the selected attendees retired to a banquet at Union Station. Venture capitalists mixed themed cocktails with defense contractors, business executives and congressmen; Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman wandered around in his sweatshirt. Lutnick provided the keynote speech. He first cites some simple examples of trade deficits that seem to guide the audience through the economic reset the government pursues, as if school children are everywhere. “My barber has a trade deficit,” he said. This means it’s unfair and the barber should compensate Lutnik for the situation. “I have a trade deficit in the grocery store. Right? I just buy things from them. It’s ridiculous.”

Jacob Helberg, the nominee for Trump’s deputy secretary for economic growth, energy and environment, who co-founded the forum, told me that he invited Lutnick because “he understood how to turn big ideas into reality and fit the purpose of the country.” But in Lutnick’s speech, the crowd was clearly confused and uncomfortable. “His analogies and anecdotes seem to misunderstand the rooms of mature technology and financial participants,” someone with a government contact told me that they came to the event with several outstanding venture-invested contacts. “It’s obvious why Lutnik’s influence has attracted Trump’s appeal. But Becente’s presence in the administration reassures us that someone is looking for us.”

Finance Minister Bessent flew to Mar-a-Lago after Liberation Day to encourage the president to suspend tariffs. Both he and Lutnik defended the president’s pet cause, but Bessent seemed to have a more realistic feel about the limits of devotion. Or, as one close to the administration puts it, “Bessent is someone who tries to adjust Trump’s protectionist impulses and interpret them in a clever way. Lutnick is a strange, real believer who encourages people to think of people as the worst policy instincts of the president.”

Throughout the spring, Trump issued many tariff-related threats and reversals, and critics created a title to describe his actions: TacosTrump is always the abbreviation of chicken. Even the reasons for tariffs are shifting: they intend to punish U.S. trading partners for “cheating”, or their purpose is to slow down fentanyl flows into the country, or they should raise billions, or even “trillions of billions” of revenue. Lutnick is often around Washington, assuming people were in a rainy day in the product they didn’t want in May, and I was in the District of Columbia’s new waterfront development, and I joined the event he co-hosted with Axios in the company’s banquet hall, which was made up of AI, trade and “new rules.” When Lutnick came to power, his interlocutor asked Trump what was at the heart of it. Financial Times Described as “the joy of someone now threatening to cut off your toes, not the whole leg.” But what about other countries? Lutnick told the crowd: “Every product in the world is now ten percent, but there are no exceptions…I want you to understand that in May, the United States of America will need $3.1 billion in tariff revenue.” As for the negative impact, he asked, “What are you? Serious?” The audience roared, and many attendees shouted, “Yes!”

After Trump suspended tariffs, he promised to reach 90 deals within 90 days. Lutnik will take the lead. By early June, the deadline was one month, and the government had no agreement and agreed to only one framework. During the congressional hearing, Lutnick was urged by Pennsylvania Democratic Representative Madeleine Dean, the rest were eighty-nine. “I’m doing this,” Lutnik slammed. He explained that countries could simply encourage companies to move factories to the United States, “the concept is very, very clear,” he said. (Dean lifted the banana. “We can’t build bananas in the United States,” she said.) The single agreement reached by the government was made with the United Kingdom. It will expand market access to the UK market, such as animal feed, shellfish and textiles, while reducing tariffs on steel and aluminum produced in the UK. On June 16, British Prime Minister Trump and Keir Starmer signed the deal at the G-7 summit in Alberta, Canada. The documents were blown away when Trump held a final deal. Starmer squatted down and picked them up.

A few days ago, the British Embassy in Washington held a summer garden party to mark the birthday of Charles III. British Ambassador Peter Mandelson toasted Trump, Charles and the United States for the upcoming half-anniversary. In his speech, he gently implies that the trade agreement is a way to house the president. “Our balanced trading relationship, now Enhanced” – He paused to make the crowd laugh – “By transaction agreement, a beautiful trade agreement. Literally, we are the golden corridor of trade and investment. “The historic Land Rover model parked outside the grass (according to the transaction, limited British cars can be imported at ten percent tariffs instead of twenty-five.

During negotiations with the UK, Lutnik met with Varun Chandra, an advisor to Varun Chandra, who has no formal trade background but has been described as an “arches network worker” and is from the private sector. “They knew they couldn’t have Howard with some stiff trade negotiators, and their work was working for two years,” someone on Lutnick’s team told me. “They did a docking game.” Chandra and Lutnick ended up having three dishes together at Lutnick’s house, after Chandra flew to Washington. They will start the first of many meetings the next day. “Howard is an unorthodox trade negotiator,” Chandra said. “I would describe him more as a classic trader – direct, straight, tough, creative – that reflects our interactions with the administration.” Another negotiator who deals with Lutnik told me, “You basically listen to him and talk about how Trump sees the world and how we do everything wrong. He waves his gun, he talks, talks and talks, and he never stops talking.”

Trade deals usually take years to complete – the average negotiation lasts nine hundred and seventy days. The general agreement on tariffs and trade signed in 1947 is a major multilateral agreement for international trade for decades. Its main purpose is to reduce tariffs and promote free trade. Member States have been renegotiating it. The last round, which began in the mid-1980s, lasted for more than seven years, resulting in nearly three hundred thousand pages of legal text. It covers from toothbrushes to AIDS Treatment and eventually led to the establishment of new rules in the World Trade Organization in 1995. Trump has long complained about the WTO, and his Liberation Day deal represents an attempt to avoid it.

Like others still in progress, the UK deal is more like the basis for ongoing negotiations than actual commitments. These terms are vague and unenforceable, reversible and uncombined. “To some extent, you have to ask, does Trump really want a deal?” said Obsffeld of Peterson College. “Or he just wanted to create a constant bubble to keep everyone in balance but ultimately not reshaping the trade in a way that would be more beneficial to the United States?”

Negotiators from another major trading partner told me that “changing gate posts” complicated the deal. On the one hand, he said: “You don’t know if the tariffs are legal.” Many states and businesses have sued the president for their invocations of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the authorities where he imposes tariffs, are unconstitutional. It is difficult to parse the meaning when Trump issues tariff-related laws through social media. In May, he posted on Truth Social that “All movies and all movies produced abroad” will be subject to a one hundred cent tariff. “When you talk about tariff movies, do you mean movies or streaming?” the negotiator said. The fundamental acceleration timeline for conducting negotiations makes the transaction feel “more like the one you do in a private business, more like the one of the gentlemen. But if then you find out how the gentleman’s agreement goes into the weekend, is it a sudden change of a truth social position based on the steel tariffs?”