While investors spent the weekend licking their wounds over the $6.6 trillion wipeout in American equities in the 48 hours after “Liberation Day,” world leaders went into overdrive to secure eleventh-hour trade deals with President Donald Trump before the so-called reciprocal tariff penalties on the 60 countries subject to additional tariffs beyond the 10% baseline goes into effect this Wednesday. Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council, announced on Sunday that more than 50 countries reached out to the White House to make a deal, with Vietnam publicly pledging to bring their tariffs down to zero if the United States agrees to do the same.
If the stated purpose of Trump’s tariff regime is to correct the “national emergency” of “the current lack of trade reciprocity” that supposedly imperils our economic and national security, then Trump can and should begin to declare victory by sealing a zero-zero reciprocal tariff deal with Vietnam and our other allies smart enough to follow suit. While Vietnam’s tariffs on American exports are nowhere near the White House’s hysterical estimate of 46% — the Trump administration’s own trade.gov concedes that “most U.S. exports now face tariffs of 15% or less” in Vietnam — bringing down a 15% tariff to 0% is no small feat. Demonstrating the art of the deal in practice would not only reverse the short-term tragedy in the equities markets, but help to consolidate our democratic partners in icing the Chinese out of freer and fairer markets, making the +50% tariffs we’re now imposing on Beijing all the more punishing.
But while Trump is reportedly golfing in Mar-a-Lago, his consiglieres are trying to doom any dream of making deals with allies before markets have a chance of hoping that they’ll avoid a Black Monday.
“This is not a negotiation,” top trade adviser Peter Navarro said during an interview on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures. “This is a national emergency based on a trade deficit that’s gotten out of control because of cheating. Don’t say you want to lower the tariffs and be done with it. It’s the nontariff cheating. Stop manipulating your currencies. Stop dumping stuff in.”
(It’s worth noting that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has not designated Vietnam or any other country a currency manipulator, and as recently as the end of last year, an extensive Treasury report found zero evidence of currency manipulation among our major trading partners.)
When Fox News’s Jackie DeAngelis pressed Navarro on whether there is a rift between him and Elon Musk, who called for a zero-zero tariff deal between the U.S. and Europe, Navarro dismissed the billionaire entrepreneur whose companies employ at least 120,000 Americans, saying Musk merely “sells cars” and “doesn’t understand” global trade.
Over on CBS’s News’s Face the Nation, Margaret Brennan pressed Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on whether the president would entertain negotiations before the reciprocal tariffs go into effect on April 9, but Lutnick made clear that nothing would stop them.
“The tariffs are coming,” said Lutnick, who also bragged that “the army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones — that kind of thing is going to come to America.”
Even Bessent, who is widely regarded as the most pragmatic of the trio, waved away hopes of securing zero-zero tariff deals, at least anytime soon, saying on NBC News that “it’s not the kind of thing you can negotiate away in days or weeks.”
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If Trump did begin to cement zero-zero trade deals and formalize them with congressional authorization, it wouldn’t merely undo the 11% evisceration of the S&P 500’s market cap over the past two days of trading. It would likely spur a renaissance in the markets, providing a boom in capital gains tax revenue to the Treasury and the political capital for Congress to finally extend and expand his landmark 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
But Lutnick and Navarro are giving the lie to the stated legal justification that the “national emergency” is justified by a lack of reciprocity in our trade relationships. If this were really a matter of fair trade, a zero-zero tariff agreement would be far preferable to the White House’s impending plan of tariffing Taiwanese imports by 32% when Taiwan only tariffs our exports by 6.34%. But fairness, at least for Lutnick and Navarro, is not the point. Their warped, autarkic, and immoral delusion that the trade deficit is an inherent bad is their only motivation. If Trump wants to save the economy and his own presidency, he must dispense with such charlatans and go make a deal.