President Donald Trump placed a 90-day pause on his sweeping tariffs plan, and it sure seems like it was prompted by the market meltdown and growing calls for him to find an “off-ramp.”
Shortly after the pause was announced on Wednesday, Trump spoke to reporters outside of the White House.
“I thought that people were jumping a little bit,” he said. “They were getting a little bit yippy, a little afraid.”
He also spoke about the tumult in the bond market Tuesday night.
“The bond market is very tricky, I was watching it. But if you look at it now, it’s beautiful,” he said. “The bond market right now is beautiful. I saw last night where people were getting a little queasy.”
MAGA loyalists, however, are arguing that the reversal was part of his strategy from the beginning.
“President Trump created maximum negotiating leverage for himself,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters shortly after Trump’s announcement on Wednesday. “This was his strategy all along.”
Stephen Miller, a senior advisor to Trump, wrote on X, “You have been watching the greatest economic master strategy from an American President in history.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt suggested it was all part of a larger scheme to target China. “Many of you in the media clearly missed the art of the deal. You clearly failed to see what President Trump is doing here,” she told reporters on Wednesday, adding that the tariffs have pushed the “entire world” closer to the US, not to China as some had feared. “And that’s exactly why more than 75 countries have called,” she said.
The billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, an ally of Trump who had recently criticized the scale of the tariffs, applauded the pause. “This was brilliantly executed by @realDonaldTrump. Textbook, Art of the Deal,” he wrote on X.
So was it a masterful gambit or an impulsive decision prompted by external pressures? In the end, it might not matter: By Thursday morning, the markets were tanking again.
