Editors at Issues and Insights explore the president’s bumbling rollout of a tariff policy.
So far, President Donald Trump has been piloting his second term like Maverick from “Top Gun.” With one exception. The tariff rollout has been FUBAR, which is troubling since it’s Trump’s signature economic policy issue.
There have been glaring missteps along the way, repeated pauses, confused and conflicting messaging, turf wars. It’s draining public support and causing real economic problems as businesses can’t make plans while all this is in flux. …
… Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement turned out to be a disaster. Not just because an island inhabited only by penguins was listed as a trade abuser, but because it quickly became apparent that the math used to set tariff rates made no sense.
While Trump called the tariffs reciprocal, they weren’t. They were instead based on trade imbalances with other nations, which even Trump supporters pointed out is a flawed metric.
Then, less than a week later, Trump announced a 90-day pause on Liberation Day. …
… Meanwhile, there’s news that two camps in the White House are fighting for dominance – team tariff, led by Peter Navarro, and team econ, led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
Here’s how Semafor put it:
President Donald Trump’s economic advisers are becoming a team of rivals … Ask Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, and National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett about negotiating on tariffs, for example — and you’ll hear four different answers ….
The mixed messages point to fundamental disagreements within the administration about how to address trade deficits, according to more than a dozen lawmakers, lobbyists and analysts interviewed for this story. Trump’s advisers sound united behind the spirit of his trade agenda but far less aligned on its execution — differences driven by both personality and ideology.
When Trump announced the pause, the word went out that Navarro had been sidelined and Bessent was in the driver’s seat on trade. (Elon Musk called Navarro a “moron.”)
