Fox Business Network host Charles Payne said Tuesday that the Trump administration’s constant talk of tariff-related deals comes across as desperate.
On Fox News’ Special Report, anchor Bret Baier first rolled a clip from Payne’s show, Making Money, in which financial analyst David Nelson said he would prefer the administration “talk a little less,” and that he didn’t want to hear about “trade deals in the works.”
“Tell me after it’s done,” Nelson said.
Trump bragged a few weeks ago that “everybody wants to come and make a deal,” but didn’t specify which countries. Few such deals have been publicly inked since then.
Baier asked Payne whether these types of updates are helping or making the markets more volatile.
Payne replied that the markets would be better off without them.
“It’s not helping, because I think what you need here is, if you’re going to start to really have these conversations, give us some real listed markers,” Payne said.
“Over the weekend, Apollo published a piece that said the average trade deal takes 18 months to put together and 45 months to implement,“ he explained. ”Obviously, no one wants or hopes that this is going to be the case this time around. But, you know, if you come up every other day, ‘Yeah, we just had a great call with so and so, and these guys,’ it starts to take away credibility. It starts to smack of desperation, and we just don’t necessarily need it.”
Payne added that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s public comments seem to have a positive effect, since “he is typically not the kind of person to offer ‘pie in the sky’ kind of stuff.’” On Monday, Bessent told Americans, perhaps as a warning, that “everyone should become financially literate.”
At the end of the day, Payne said, “The American public wants this White House just to level with us.”
But that might be asking too much.
When questioned at a press briefing earlier this month as to why consumer confidence was so low—it was at its second-worst mark since 1952, according to one survey—Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted that there’s actually “a great optimism in this economy.”
“The president is…trying to renegotiate the global trade agenda that has ripped off the American people for far too long,” she told reporters on April 11. “As he said, this is going to be a period of transition. He wants consumers to trust in him, and they should trust in him.”
The post Fox Host: Trump’s Tariff Deal Updates ‘Smack of Desperation’ appeared first on The Daily Beast.
