President Donald Trump’s top economic lieutenants are offering mixed messages about whether his tariffs are a short-lived bargaining chip to renegotiate duties on U.S. goods or a long-term springboard to create more domestic jobs.
What is clear that the president’s wide-ranging tariffs have tanked the markets and created recession fears. What is not clear is exactly why he’s done it—and the messaging from his team hasn’t helped shed any light.
At around 10:30 Eastern time on Sunday, Trump’s tariff cheerleader Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was very much in the job-creation camp. During an appearance on CBS’ Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan, he said that “trillions of dollars of factories are going to be built in America.”
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Challenged by Brennan on previous comments about “robots” running the factories, he added: “But the key is, who’s going to build the factories? Who’s going to operate the factories? Who’s going to make them work? Great American workers.”
Challenged again about the robot comments, he added: “Remember, 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.”
In response, Jessica Tarlov, the lone Democratic voice on Fox News’ The Five, posted Lutnick’s answer on X and wrote: “When you’ve given too many crappy interviews and forget you admitted the whole premise of bringing manufacturing back to America to create good paying jobs was a farce.”
Lutnick also repeated the party line that dozens of countries had contacted the White House to enter into negotiations about lowering the tariffs imposed on them. That is because, he claimed, “all these countries know that they’ve been ripping us off, and the day has come for that to end.”
But ahead of tariffs on imports from dozens of countries set to start Wednesday, Lutnick said Trump would not pause the duties to allow for time for negotiations. “There is no postponing,” he said “They are definitely going to stay in place for days and weeks. That is sort of obvious. The president needs to reset global trade.
“The tariffs are coming. He [Trump] announced it, and he wasn’t kidding. The tariffs are coming. Of course they are.”
On Sunday evening, the president’s deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller, seemed situate himself in the job-creation camp, too. He wrote on X: “During Joe Biden’s Administration US-born Americans gained zero net jobs in four years. All jobs gains for foreign workers. For American workers, the Biden years were a depression.”
A later post in which he claimed “allies have shut their markets to our cars while our market has been flooded with theirs” was endorsed by Vice President JD Vance.
However, also on Sunday morning, Director of the National Economic Council Kevin Hassett said that while more than 50 countries have apparently already reached out, they’ve done so in a bid to get to the negotiating table with Trump. Speaking on This Week With George Stephanopoulos around an hour before Lutnick’s appearance on Face the Nation, he said: “I got a report from the USTR (US Trade Representative) last night that more than 50 countries have reached out to the president to begin a negotiation. But they’re doing that because they understand that they bear a lot of the tariff.”
Less than 30 minutes before Hassett’s interview, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins was on another network saying the nations were “desperate” to thrash out new terms. But, speaking to CNN’s Jake Tapper on State of the Union, she was unable to clarify whether tariffs are here to stay or whether there is room for negotiation.
“This is the ultimate dealmaker who is a businessman at the head of our government. But the president is resolute in his focus and his boldness and his fearlessness and in his relentlessness to ensure that we’re putting America first by using these tariffs,” she spluttered.
Trump himself indicated Sunday he was open to negotiating, during a press conference on Air Force One. However, he will only talk if countries address their trade deficits with the U.S. “I do want to solve the deficit problem we have in China, with the European Union and other nations, and they’re going to have to do that. And if they want to talk about that, I’m open to talking,” he said.
CNN reported that his team is already in active discussions with Israel, Vietnam, and India about the possibility of “bespoke trade deals.”
But the mixed messaging led Politico’s Playbook to quip: “So which is it? Are we negotiating here, or are we not?"
