Mike Allen at Axios:
President Trump's boosters hailed his decision to pause tariff increases for countries around the world as a strategic masterstroke, Axios' Marc Caputo reports. But few are buying the spin. Trump buckled under tremendous, mounting-by-the-minute pressure from CEOs ... friends ... GOP senators ... the markets ... and bond prices. Trump himself admits he blinked when "people were getting a little queasy" about the bond market.
Why it matters: Inside the White House, the episode highlighted the competing views and roles of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick as they animated Trump's risky game with trade.Inside the room: Both men were advising Trump in the Oval Office when he decided to post a message on Truth Social announcing the tariff pause for 90 days while the administration negotiated with as many as 75 countries.The stunning move, which rallied cratering markets globally, was based on three factors, according to three sources familiar with the meeting:Panic: The real credit, "Trump's advisers admit privately, should go to the bond markets," the N.Y. Times reports. "Trump's decision was driven by fear that his tariffs gamble could quickly turn into a financial crisis. And unlike the two previous crashes of the past 20 years — the global financial crisis of 2008 and the pandemic of 2020 — this crisis would have been directly attributable to only one man."
[From] Tuesday evening to Wednesday afternoon, Trump and his trade advisers spoke to several Republican lawmakers and top foreign leaders who raised concerns about the faltering global markets and the growing concerns of a worldwide recession, urging him to do something.
By late Wednesday afternoon, Trump was saying he had been thinking about switching course “over the last few days.”
The final decision, he said, “probably came together early this morning, fairly early this morning. Just wrote it up. We didn’t have the use of, we didn’t have access to lawyers,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. “We wrote it up from our hearts.”
“But this was something certainly we’ve been talking about for a period of time, and we decided to pull the trigger, and we did it today, and we’re happy about it,” he added.
Late Tuesday night — after Sean Hannity’s 9 p.m. show ended on Fox News — Trump had an extensive, roughly hour-long phone call with a group of Republican senators who had appeared on the episode, according to three people with knowledge of the conversation. Some of the senators had expressed concern about the tariffs. That evening, Trump was also watching bond markets, “where people were getting a little queasy,” he said Wednesday.
Before the end of the last commercial break during the Hannity interview, Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-Louisiana) asked the host for “15 seconds to speak directly to the president” on tariffs, Kennedy told The Washington Post, because Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) had told Kennedy that Trump would be watching the show. Kennedy and Graham were among those in the group interview with Hannity, along with Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota), and Republican Sens. Tim Scott of South Carolina, Katie Boyd Britt of Alabama, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Ted Cruz of Texas and Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma. Some of the senators expressed a desire for Trump to negotiate with other countries coming to the table on tariffs, and several of them spoke to the president after the show ended.
