It’s easy to understand why Donald Trump might be embarrassed by his lack of second-term trade deals. About a month ago, Peter Navarro, the White House’s top trade adviser, boasted in March, “We’re going to run 90 deals in 90 days.” Navarro added that such a plan “is possible” in part because “the boss is going to be the chief negotiator.”
A month later, the president hasn’t struck any trade deals. In fact, as NBC News’ Jonathan Allen explained this week, Trump has been forced to overhaul his message completely to accommodate his failures: After bragging about the many trade deals he’d soon strike, the Republican has “changed his tone and his tune in recent days,” downplaying the need for trade deals — and urging reporters to stop asking him about this.
It was against this backdrop that Trump told the public that there’d been a breakthrough.
On Wednesday night, the president used his social media platform to announce that the White House had struck a “MAJOR TRADE DEAL.” The following morning, he added that a “full and comprehensive” trade agreement is in place with the United Kingdom, which was soon followed by another online item in which Trump claimed, “Together with our strong Ally, the United Kingdom, we have reached the first, historic Trade Deal since Liberation Day.”
It all sounded rather exciting — right up until the public learned that the “trade deal” isn’t an actual trade deal, at least not yet. NBC News reported:
The U.S. is working toward finalizing a narrow trade deal with the United Kingdom, President Donald Trump said Thursday, a small step as the White House pursues an aggressive tariff agenda across the globe. According to a document furnished by the U.K., the agreement will see duties on U.K. car imports reduced from 27.5% to 10%, while tariffs on U.K. steel imports will be dropped. In return, the U.K. is lowering trade barriers on U.S. beef imports and ethanol.
The emerging picture is one in which the White House has settled on a non-binding framework for a possible future deal with the United States’ 11th largest trading partner. This sets the stage for a series of additional talks — negotiations that will likely last months — that may or may not lead to an agreement.
The New York Times noted that hammering out specific trade deals can be “a tricky and difficult process, and the agreement could still fall apart in the interim.”
During an Oval Office event on the developments, Trump again said that a “conclusive” deal is in place, adding, “It’s a very big deal right now, but I think it’s going to grow, just of its own volition. It’s going to grow. Over time, there will be changes made, there’ll be adjustments made because we’re flexible — we’ll see things we can do even better — but it’s very conclusive.”
The problem, of course, is that the first part of the claim is plainly at odds with the second: If an agreement is still taking shape and is likely to undergo a series of changes, then the new framework obviously is neither “conclusive” nor “comprehensive.”
In his first term, Trump had an unfortunate habit of wildly exaggerating the scope and scale of his narrow trade agreements. In his second term, the Republican is apparently picking up where he left off.
