Inside President Trump’s whirlwind decision to blow up global trade

Not long after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the administration’s economic staff went to work on a daunting task: determining tariff rates for dozens of countries to fulfill the president’s campaign pledge of imposing “reciprocal” trade barriers.

After weeks of work, aides from several government agencies produced a menu of options meant to account for a wide range of trading practices, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Instead, Trump personally selected a formula that was based on two simple variables — the trade deficit with each country and the total value of its U.S. exports, said two of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to recount internal talks. While precisely who proposed that option remains unclear, it bears some striking similarities to a methodology published during Trump’s first administration by Peter Navarro, now the president’s hard-charging economic adviser. After its debut in the Rose Garden on Wednesday, the crude math drew mockery from economists as Trump’s new global trade war prompted a sharp drop in markets.

The president’s decision to impose tariffs on trillions of dollars of goods reflects two key factors animating his second term in office: his resolve to follow his own instincts even if it means bucking long-standing checks on the U.S. presidency, and his choice of a senior team that enables his defiance of those checks.

The process represented a stark departure from past administrations. The White House used emergency powers to implement the tariffs, allowing officials to speed through deliberations and limit input from corporations and foreign leaders.

After deliberations that went late into Tuesday, Trump didn’t decide on the final plan until about 1 p.m. Wednesday — less than three hours ahead of his Rose Garden announcement.

Inside and outside the White House, advisers say Trump is unbowed even as the world reels from the biggest increase in trade hostilities in a century. They say Trump is unperturbed by negative headlines or criticism from foreign leaders. He is determined to listen to a single voice — his own — to secure what he views as his political legacy.

“He’s at the peak of just not giving a f--- anymore,” said a White House official with knowledge of Trump’s thinking. “Bad news stories? Doesn’t give a f---. He’s going to do what he’s going to do. He’s going to do what he promised to do on the campaign trail.”

In Trump’s first term, top aides including Gary Cohn, then the director of the National Economic Council, and Steven Mnuchin, the treasury secretary, successfully constrained Trump’s tariff agenda.

Aides frequently sought to steer Trump in particular directions during heated Oval Office conversations, according to current and former officials. Trump’s White House then was beset by internal quarrels that spilled into public view, his team of advisers not just clashing on matters of personality but over deep ideological differences.

“In the first term,” a senior White House official said, “everyone thought they were president.”

This time, there was far less internal fighting. The president’s team mounted remarkably little dissent to a sweeping overhaul of trade policy, according to interviews with more than a dozen people inside and outside the administration, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect private talks.

Among those involved in crafting options for country-specific tariff formulas were officials from the White House National Economic Council, the Commerce Department, the Council of Economic Advisers and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, people familiar with the matter said.

Early on, staff from the trade office spent weeks calling U.S. firms operating abroad to learn the precise challenges they faced in foreign countries. Numerous more sophisticated approaches were developed than the one Trump selected, people familiar with the matter said.

Ultimately, however, they treated Trump as the final decider of the merits of each policy.

In the room with Trump as he deliberated the tariff plan was a group of top White House advisers on economic issues: Navarro, Trump’s senior trade counselor; Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary; Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary; Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative; Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff for policy; Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council; and Vice President JD Vance. Chief of Staff Susie Wiles was also in meetings. Hassett was not present for the final meeting Wednesday.

Navarro, consistent with his longtime position on tariffs, was the loudest champion of taking aggressive measures. Miller and Vance in particular, said a person with knowledge of the discussions, continually expressed deference to Trump’s preferences — reiterating that they were in favor of whatever the president wanted to do. Bessent, a hedge fund manager who some on Wall Street had hoped would serve as a potential ally in restraining the president’s tariffs, had made clear even before he was nominated that he would support Trump’s trade agenda, The Washington Post and other outlets have previously reported.

“In their recruiting process, they made sure it would only be people who were totally Trumpers, because in the first administration, there was a lot of trouble with people quitting, writing bad books, things like that,” said Wilbur Ross, who served as commerce secretary during Trump’s first term. “The people now have been confirmed as true Trumpers.”

Trump seems to believe that a more loyal White House team is ultimately a more effective one. But as the now-unrestrained president’s ideas on trade wreak havoc on the global economy, even some of his allies have expressed deepening confusion and alarm. Two days after the momentous rollout, financial markets continued to reel.

For a month preceding what the White House branded “Liberation Day,” Trump and the tariff working group had been briefed a couple of times a week about the matter, though preliminary discussions about the viability of different options began during the transition.

“There were a lot of options put in front of him. I think he just needed time to go through each one and pick out the ones he wanted,” the senior White House official said. “And the great thing is that the team made everything interchangeable, so it was just a matter of him picking and choosing which ones he wanted to do.”

Key allies were left in the dark about critical potential details — in part because not even the president’s team knew what Trump would ultimately decide.

As late as last week, senior House Republican lawmakers were also unaware of even the broad strokes of what tariffs Trump would land on, according to two people in close communication with lawmakers. Some GOP lawmakers were still seeking answers about the tariff measures that had been announced the preceding week, the people said.

Members of Congress who had been at the White House on Wednesday were among those reporting back to officials at the Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s biggest business lobby, that they still didn’t know Trump’s final plan.

CEOs from major retail companies had met with top Cabinet officials in recent weeks, including Lutnick, Bessent, Greer and Hassett, trying to get a sense of the president’s plans and to express their concerns about the impact the levies could have on the cost of apparel and other goods, another person said.

“It was really hard to navigate,” the person said. Information was limited because “the president was making his own decisions on this.”

PhRMA, an industry group representing pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, tried to communicate its concerns in meetings at all levels of government, including with Lutnick.

The task was “challenging” for business groups because it wasn’t clear which Trump official was leading the process, said one person familiar with the conversations, who questioned whether “the dots are fully connected internally within the administration” and whether federal agencies were in communication with each other.

The 11th-hour nature of the debate gave business leaders hope that the White House would pursue lower tariffs, said a person familiar with meetings between the administration and industry leaders.

Ultimately, CEOs across industries were shocked by the extent of the tariffs. Retail executives were surprised by the methodology the White House used to calculate the rates, the person said. Some companies were gaming out what they anticipated would be the worst-case scenario. The final numbers were “two times worse” than what one business had mapped out.

Foreign leaders were similarly baffled and scrambling for answers.

In meetings with trade partners in the weeks leading up to Wednesday’s tariff announcement, White House trade officials demanded what they called “term sheets,” a phrase borrowed from the business world referring to deal negotiations.

But unlike a business deal where both parties negotiate and there is some back and forth, the White House was simply demanding lists of concessions, according to one foreign diplomat deeply involved in the conversations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to frankly discuss how the White House operated in the sensitive talks. The diplomat said Trump officials wanted regulations and other barriers to be wiped away to boost U.S. goods and services being sold abroad.

Foreign trade negotiators have been flummoxed by the White House strategy and occasional mixed messages coming from Trump and his top lieutenants. At times, U.S. officials appeared focused on pushing back on foreign tariffs, leading their foreign counterparts to wonder whether they could avoid U.S. tariffs by cutting their own, a development that would lead to more free trade, not less of it.

But at other moments, U.S. leaders appeared more focused on fundamentally reshaping global trade and the U.S. economy by breaking the generations-long U.S. dependence on imports. If that is the strategy, no amount of negotiation from other nations can shift tariffs, the diplomat said.

Amid the confusion, foreign capitals around the world have been consulting with each other to try to understand the U.S. strategy and themes — a level of coordination among countries that are nominally competitors but that have been driven together by Trump’s aggressive policies, the diplomat said.

“It’s not clear what they want to achieve,” the diplomat said, adding that foreign trade partners felt they had little ability to sway the conversation. “I don’t think that they listen to foreigners. I think they listen to their own businesses.”

The White House demanded that Britain and India change their health and sanitation rules to make it easier to export U.S. agricultural products. In Brazil, India and Europe, they targeted digital regulations that have entangled U.S. tech giants. And there has been an effort to sweep away barriers for U.S. carmakers wherever they exist, the diplomat said.

Countries tried to offer up policy changes ahead of time to spare themselves from the worst of the tariffs, not always successfully. India’s government last week announced plans to scrap a 6 percent tax on the advertising revenue of foreign companies. The country was still hit with a 26 percent tariff, based on a formula that didn’t take into account the country’s policy change.

The confusion may reflect in part how quickly the planning came together, even to the last moment. Throughout the day Tuesday, Trump and his advisers on tariffs met morning, afternoon and evening, with the final discussion of the day continuing late into the night. They resumed about 11 a.m. Wednesday, with some details still needing to be finalized.

Lutnick, who was clutching a large poster board sign in the Rose Garden ahead of Trump’s remarks, had been tasked with the printing of the visual aids Trump displayed there — though the breezy conditions Wednesday afternoon prevented them all from being displayed.

White House spokesman Kush Desai said Trump had assembled “the best and brightest economic team in modern history” to develop the tariff plan.

“Instead of prioritizing special interests, President Trump once again acted in the best interest of our country and our citizens when he made his decision on reciprocal tariffs,” Desai said in a statement to the Post.

From the time the White House began planning the logistics of Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement last week, advisers were set on staging it in the Rose Garden. It would be Trump’s first public event there during his second term. White House aides also arranged for the gathering to feature scores of the working-class voters who twice had propelled Trump to the presidency, and who Trump has insisted will benefit in the long term from his tariff plan. The crowd was filled with men and women in blue jeans, neon work vests and hard hats, a stark contrast with the attire of guests at most White House events.

Even Trump’s own team — a day after the announcements — was inconsistent on how to discuss the tariffs’ effects.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday in an interview with NewsNation that “there’s not going to be any pain” for American workers, even as financial markets reeled and people worried about rising costs.

In an interview on Fox News the same day, Vance appeared to acknowledge the short-term impact that the tariffs could have on Americans, warning that they would not feel economic relief overnight. “Yes, this is a big change. I’m not going to shy away from it, but we needed a big change,” the vice president said.

Meanwhile, Trump compared the impact to an operation. An hour before the stock market fell upon opening, he declared on Truth Social that the patient was “HEALING.”