On Tuesday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick went on Fox Business to reassure nervous allies and even more twitchy investors that the Trump administration was negotiating a deal to avoid tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, and that the president is “gonna work something out with them.”
“It’s not gonna be a pause” for Mr. Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs, he insisted. “None of that pause stuff.”
On Thursday, the world got what the president characterized as more of that pause stuff.
Mr. Trump’s announcement that he had a good conversation with Mexico’s president, and would delay most tariffs until April 2, was only the latest example of the punish-by-whim nature of the second Trump presidency. A few hours after the Mexico announcement, Canada got a break too, even as Mr. Trump on social media accused its departing prime minister, Justin Trudeau, of using “the Tariff problem” to “run again for Prime Minister.”
“So much fun to watch!” he wrote.
Indeed, it appears that Mr. Trump is having enormous fun turning tariffs on and off like tap water. But others are developing a case of Trump-induced whiplash, not least investors, who sent stock prices down again on Thursday amid the uncertainty over what Mr. Trump’s inconstancy means for the global economy. (A later rise in stock futures pointed to rosier expectations for Friday.)
When the White House finally released the text of Mr. Trump’s orders on Thursday evening, it appeared that some of the tariffs — those covered in the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement that Mr. Trump negotiated and celebrated in his first term — were indeed permanently suspended. Other tariffs were merely paused.
Most everyone involved was confused, which may well have been the point.
As Mr. Trump hands down tariff determinations and then pulls them back for a month or so, world leaders call to plead their case, a bit like vassal states appealing to a larger power. Chief executives put in calls as well, making it clear that Mr. Trump is the one you need to deal with if you are bringing in car parts from Canada or chips from China.
And the president responds, as if he is granting reprieves, though not pardons. If, in a usual presidency, tariffs are debated by layers of experts and aides, their potential impact weighed with care, in the Trump White House the determinations are part whim, part weave, part pique. Explanations for what triggered the imposition of tariffs shift, and decisions to delay or suspend them are not accompanied by detailed rationales. Mr. Trump himself says he makes the call based on his latest conversations.
“This was a short-term deal,” he told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday afternoon, when asked about his calls the previous day with top executives of American car makers. “They came back to me yesterday. They said, ‘Could we have some help on the tariffs because of the speed?’ And I said, ‘Look, I’m going to do it, but that’s it.’ They’ll come back to me after the second. April 2.”
He quickly added: “I don’t want to hear from you after April 2.”
Whether he will hold firm is once again an open question. It may depend on the markets, or whether more industry pronouncements come like the one Target’s chief executive, Brian Cornell, made this week, before the latest tariff shift. The retail chain leader said customers looking for avocados and lettuce and other staples were “likely see price increases over the next couple days.”
One chief executive of a major European technology manufacturer, who did not want to be named so his company did not become a target of Mr. Trump’s wrath, said last week he was regularly doing Google searches for “Trump Slump,” figuring that as soon as the term became commonplace, Mr. Trump’s interest in tariffs may wane.
Of course, this is not how tariffs are supposed to be employed, at least in more normal times. They are primarily intended to compensate for a major market distortion — for example, China’s subsidies for solar panels. Though it seems an era ago, it was only last May that President Joseph R. Biden Jr. announced he was increasing tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles from 25 percent to 100 percent, to keep Beijing from wiping out American makers, including Elon Musk’s Tesla.
Mr. Biden argued that he was proceeding carefully, “combining investments in America with tariffs that are strategic and targeted.” Which is, essentially, what Mr. Trump is arguing, as he brings one executive after another through the White House to announce billions of dollars in new investments in advanced semiconductors or commercial ships.
But those are long-term strategies, and Mr. Trump is looking for short-term impact. It could not have escaped his notice that when he imposed tariffs in his first month, markets plummeted, only to rise against when he announced the first of his pauses on them.
Investors may be losing stomach for all the churn. Even after Mr. Trump suspended some tariffs and paused others, the S&P 500 declined 1.8 percent. That brought the week’s decline to 3.6 percent. Sell-offs have wiped out virtually all the gains since Mr. Trump was elected in November.
Harder to measure is the damage done to the fabric of America’s alliances. Canada accounts for a small slice of the fentanyl coming into the United States, yet it jointly operates the primary air defense network for North America — NORAD. It is also a crucial provider of intelligence as a member of the “Five Eyes,” the club of nations that share the secrets they dig up around the world.
So it was notable when Mr. Trudeau, clearly annoyed at how Mr. Trump calls him “governor,” said the other day that the Trump administration was imposing tariffs because it “wants to see a collapse of the Canadian economy because that would make it easier to annex us.”
Whether that is really Mr. Trump’s motive is hard to say. He has announced many reasons for imposing tariffs. Fentanyl is one, but at other moments the president has said he is making up for what he casts as years of mistreatment of the United States, and exploitation of its open economy. Mexican and Canadian leaders say they are having a difficult time establishing what steps Mr. Trump is insisting they take to get the tariffs eliminated — a complaint that closely parallels what Ukrainian officials say about what it would take to get the halt on American arms lifted.
Comments by outside analysts have been blistering. “25% tariffs on closest allies: crazy,” Ian Bremmer, the global strategist who founded Eurasia Group, wrote on social media recently. “24 hours of 25% tariffs on closest allies: merely stupid.”
Perhaps because Mr. Trudeau is not long for his office, or perhaps because of Mr. Trump’s imperial ambitions to make Canada a 51st state, the prime minister seems to harbor little interest in saying things that might get him back into Mr. Trump’s good graces.
Mr. Trudeau called the tariffs “a very dumb thing to do,” and needles Mr. Trump by referring to him as “Donald.” He has done nothing to discourage Canadian boycotts of American goods. He described a phone call with Mr. Trump on Thursday as “colorful,” which one diplomat said included a smattering of profanity. Mr. Trudeau has now warned his country that it should prepare for an escalating trade war for the “foreseeable future.”
In contrast, President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico has avoided such taunts and warnings. “We had an excellent and respectful call in which we agreed that our work and collaboration have yielded unprecedented results, within the framework of respect for our sovereignties,” she wrote on social media.
President Emmanuel Macron on France has tried a similar tack, laying out all his differences with Mr. Trump — mostly on support of Ukraine — and added, a bit wistfully, “I hope that I can convince and dissuade the president of the United States of America.”
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