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Can Trump call off his trade war with China while pretending he’s not?
The latest on the trade war.
Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.
Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump and his administration have spent much of the past two days signaling a desire to deescalate the trade war with China that they started.
But every time investors get excited a breakthrough might be imminent, Trump officials have thrown some cold water on their enthusiasm — likely because they’re afraid of looking like they’re climbing down.
What did they say, exactly? On Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told investors at a closed-door event that the current status quo of 145 percent tariffs on China is “unsustainable.” He added: “I would posit that over the very near future, there will be a deescalation.”
Later that day, Trump signaled he agreed. “145 percent is very high and it won’t be that high,” he told reporters, adding: “It’ll come down substantially. But it won’t be zero.”
Then, today, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s team “is considering” slashing his China tariff levels by more than half “in a bid to deescalate tensions with Beijing” — though their sources stressed that Trump had not yet made a final decision.
Stocks initially soared this morning, but gave back some of their gains after Bessent and other White House aides cautioned that no change in the tariffs was imminent, and that Trump was not making a “unilateral” offer.
So what’s going on here? Trump started this trade war impulsively, slapping ridiculously large tariffs on China because they’d dared to retaliate against new tariffs he’d placed on them. He did this without any larger strategic planning or advance notice for businesses — and it’s becoming undeniable that without change, the US economy is going to start facing very serious problems quite soon.
Chinese leaders have so far refused to give into Trump’s threats, deeming them disrespectful bullying. Per the Wall Street Journal’s sources, Trump’s comments “were viewed as a sign of him folding” in China’s policymaking circles. The hashtag “Trump chickened out” trended on the Chinese social media platform Weibo.
Now, facing imminent economic disaster, Trump appears to be looking for a way to climb down, without looking too much like he’s climbing down. Will he actually go through with it? We don’t yet know, but no rush — it’s only the global economy hanging on his decision.
And with that, it’s time to log off…
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