The Trump administration is seeking “deals” with countries around the globe, telling major trading partners that it is open for negotiations before higher tariffs kick in on Aug. 1.
But what constitutes a trade deal these days has become a tricky question. For the president, a trade deal seems to be pretty much anything he wants it to be.
While traditional trade deals run into the hundreds of pages and take years to negotiate, Mr. Trump and his advisers have been using the term to refer to much more limited arrangements. That includes the framework deal announced with Britain in May, which was only a few pages long and included many promises that still need to be negotiated.
The president also used the “trade deal” term for the handshake agreement announced with Vietnam last week. In a post on Truth Social, he said it would be “a Great Deal of Cooperation between our two Countries” and bring some tariffs on Vietnamese products down to 20 percent. But since then, neither country has yet publicly released any text or fact sheets describing what has actually been agreed upon.
The president has also recently taken to referring to the trade truce his officials made with China in June as a “trade deal,” even though the agreement constituted only an agreement by the two governments to roll back the tariffs and other retaliatory measures they had taken against each other in recent months. A trade deal typically makes changes to the rules of trade — but this truce just returned the relationship to the status quo.
In a cabinet meeting at the White House on Tuesday, Mr. Trump also used the term “deal” to refer to one-sided arrangements that other countries had not consented to at all: the letters that he has been sending via his social media account informing governments of new tariff rates on their exports.
In nearly identical letters posted on Truth Social on Monday, the president informed South Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, South Africa and other nations of the tariff rates their products would face unless they struck a trade deal with him first. To give his negotiators more time, Mr. Trump announced that he would move the previous July 9 deadline to Aug. 1.
But then on Tuesday he seemed to suggest that future opportunities for negotiating could be limited.
“The deals are mostly my deal to them,” Mr. Trump said during the cabinet meeting, referring to the letters. He seemed to acknowledge that the mission his government had set out this year, of forging trade deals with dozens of countries in a matter of months, was unrealistic.
“We have made some deals,” he said. “We can make a lot more deals. It’s just too time consuming. It just makes it more complicated. And we can do things over the years, too.”
“A letter means a deal,” the president added. “We got 200 countries. We can’t meet with 200 countries.”
The president has used the term deal loosely for some time. In an interview with Time in April, the president claimed, bewilderingly, to have made “200 deals” with other countries. Asked to explain, he said, “Because the deal is a deal that I choose.”
In his first term, Mr. Trump also had a penchant for negotiating more limited trade agreements, for example with Japan in 2019. But his administration also undertook more comprehensive trade agreements. It spent several years renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico, and negotiated a trade deal with China that covered an array of issues, from intellectual property to agriculture.
The United States, Canada and Mexico are required to revisit their trade deal next year. But otherwise, the second Trump administration has shown little interest or patience for comprehensive trade negotiations. Traditional free-trade deals have proved difficult to negotiate and politically toxic. They also typically require approval from Congress, which the administration has avoided seeking, to the chagrin of Democrats.
But the main reason the administration’s new deals are so limited is that U.S. officials are seeking them on such a compressed time frame. Since the president announced in April that he was giving countries just three months to strike deals with the United States, many trade experts have called the goal wildly unrealistic.
Officials at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and the Department of Commerce have been working busily, pressing countries to open up their markets for U.S. agriculture, airplanes, cars and other goods. They have been pushing other governments to cancel discriminatory taxes that apply to American companies, and asking them to work together to try to stop Chinese goods from flooding through their countries into the United States.
Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the Cato Institute, said the president’s decision to delay the tariff deadline to Aug. 1 “should come as no surprise.”
“We’ve known since April that quickly inking, no less implementing, complicated trade agreements with dozens of foreign governments was impossible, and that the president is deeply concerned about the market reaction to a worst-case U.S. tariff scenario,” he said.
“That said, the news isn’t exactly good here, either: It means at least another month of uncertainty, a best case of historically high U.S. tariffs, and thus significant headwinds for the U.S. economy going into the fall,” he added.
Nisha Biswal, a senior adviser to the Asia Group, a business consultancy, said that no matter how ambitious countries were in trying to reach agreements, “trade negotiations are inherently complex.”
“To think that you’re going to get a really robust and really comprehensive deal in a matter of weeks or months, I think, is really unrealistic because there is just a lot of legal text that needs to be negotiated, and those negotiations by their very nature take time,” she said.
She added: “It’s a lot of trading text back and forth over a period of time to get to a text that will hold in both countries.”
It remains to be seen how expansive the deal with Vietnam and other forthcoming agreements really are. The United States and India appear to be close to announcing some kind of first-phase deal, which could then be expanded in future negotiations. Those familiar with the talks say the European Union and the United States have also been closing in on an agreement, which would be more of a broad-brush draft consisting of a few pages rather than a fleshed-out trade deal.
That hasn’t seemed to be a problem for Mr. Trump, who was content to announce deals with both Britain and Vietnam before they were final.
When U.S. officials informed their counterparts in Britain that they were ready to announce an agreement, negotiators on both sides were still pressing each other on difficult issues. The United States was pushing Britain to roll back taxes on American tech companies, while British officials were still angling to further reduce a 10 percent tariff the United States had imposed on their products.
But negotiators on both sides were ordered to put their pencils down. And late on the night of May 7, as Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, was watching the second half of the Arsenal soccer game on TV, he got a call from Mr. Trump confirming that a U.S.-U.K. trade deal was ready to announce.
Mr. Starmer admitted to the press that month that he didn’t know “the exact day” when the deal would be announced but said he wasn’t ashamed of pushing to finish it when he did. “Our teams have been hard at work for weeks on end. I wanted to get a deal over the line,” he said.
Eshe Nelson and Jeanna Smialek contributed reporting.
Ana Swanson covers trade and international economics for The Times and is based in Washington. She has been a journalist for more than a decade.
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