Ask President Donald Trump’s aides and allies, and they’ll tell you that the proclamation that jolted the stock market this afternoon was all part of the president’s grand plan to reset America’s trade imbalance. An aggressive push on tariffs had prompted dozens of countries to come begging Trump for mercy. Once they did, he offered them a 90-day reprieve while escalating the pressure on China. The decision sent the markets into a celebratory frenzy. “This was brilliantly executed by @realDonaldTrump,” the financier Bill Ackman cheered, after several days of public panicking. “Textbook, Art of the Deal.”
Yet when reporters asked the president himself what caused him to retreat from his long-promised global trade war, Trump quickly gave away the game. The president borrowed a term from golf parlance for frazzled nerves to acknowledge that he had been hearing from people who were getting “a little yippy.”
Indeed, ominous moves in the bond market overnight rattled the West Wing and pushed the president to change course, according to a White House official and an outside adviser not authorized to speak publicly about internal deliberations. Growing pressure from anxious Republicans and the threat of a bond-market crash gave fresh ammunition to those in the administration, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who have wanted Trump to take a more targeted approach to tariffs, the two people told me.
After a meeting with Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Trump announced the dramatic pivot in a social-media post that sent the stock market surging. Aides in the White House and outside Trump boosters tried to present the about-face not as a cave but rather as a master class in negotiating from the man who wrote The Art of the Deal. But Trump himself acknowledged that economic reality forced the new approach.
“I was watching the bond market. The bond market is very tricky,” he told reporters at a White House event this afternoon. “The bond market right now is beautiful. But yeah, I saw last night where people were getting a little queasy.”
Trump added that others had gotten anxious about the markets and urged him to pause the tariffs. Other normally Trump-friendly voices agreed.
“I want to tell you right now that Donald Trump outsmarted the world. Trust me, I’m an American. I support my president—but that’s not really what happened here,” Charles Gasparino, an economic pundit whose words are closely watched in the White House, said on Fox News. “People focus on the stock market all the time, but it’s the bond market and the sort of lending markets that’s the plumbing of the economy. And those markets were imploding last night, and that’s why we have a 90-day freeze.”
The president and his allies tried to claim a victory this way: that the tariffs were punishing China while prompting dozens of other countries to ask for renegotiated trade deals. The mere promise of talks, the White House argued, is a sign of progress, even though no actual negotiations have begun and the United States has not received any concessions. Trump also touted the stock-market surge, though it has yet to fully recoup the losses since his so-called Liberation Day announcing the tariffs last week.
In the hours before the sudden reversal, Trump gave no outward sign of budging. He appeared last night at a fundraiser for House Republicans, where he urged members of his party to simply “close their eyes” and endorse his budget and agenda. He followed that with a series of social-media posts this morning endorsing his tariff plan and urging patience with the process. “BE COOL!” he wrote.
Publicly, Republican leaders have largely stood behind Trump’s trade war even while acknowledging that it goes against their own free-trade orthodoxy. Senate Majority Leader John Thune pointed to Trump’s November victory, saying that voters gave him a mandate to try an approach he’d clearly outlined as a candidate. “Most of us are giving him the space with which to do that and hope that he is successful,” Thune told reporters yesterday.
Yet rank-and-file GOP lawmakers had grown uneasy with the tariffs in recent days, forcing the leadership to quell a possible revolt. Several Republicans in the narrowly divided House and Senate signed on to legislation that would claw back Congress’s power over tariffs. In response, Speaker Mike Johnson inserted language into a House procedural resolution that would block legislation that could stop the trade war from coming up for a vote before September. The House approved the measure on a party-line vote late yesterday afternoon.
Whether it would have succeeded otherwise is unclear. Even some of those Republicans who urged a change in strategy, such as Senator John Kennedy, acknowledged that there simply were not enough GOP votes to defy Trump. But he pushed Trump to abandon the universal tariffs in favor of striking new deals with allies and targeting China, which had already retaliated with tariffs of its own.
“It seems to me, the president actually has proven his point,” Kennedy said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “Maybe he has to keep fighting China for a while, but for our allies, hasn’t the president already sort of made his point? And these people now want to come to him and negotiate.”
Trump, a short time later, reversed course. Many White House aides and outside supporters claimed that this was the plan all along, suggesting that dropping the tariffs against the rest of the world would only further isolate Beijing and weaken the United States’ biggest economic rival. Trump supporters ignored that the European Union had also decided to retaliate against the U.S., though their levies had not yet gone into effect.
Those in the White House also dismissed the idea that the whipsaw tariff announcements would damage global trust in the United States as a place for trade and investment, and ignored the impact of what could be an almost total cessation of trade between the globe’s two largest economies.
“The tariff on China will now go up to 125 percent because China imprudently decided to retaliate against the United States. And as I said at the podium yesterday, when you punch at the United States of America, President Trump is going to punch back harder,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters in the moments after the announcement.
She then scolded reporters who suggested that Trump had blinked.
“Nobody creates leverage for himself like President Trump,” Leavitt said. “Many of you in the media missed The Art of the Deal.”
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