Delegations from Japan and South Korea are en route. Italy’s prime minister will be in Washington next week. And Israel’s “proactive approach” to seeking out new US trade agreements could serve as a model for everyone, according to the White House.
A day before President Donald Trump’s new worldwide tariffs are set to take hold, the White House made clear Tuesday the door for new trade negotiations was wide open — even if the exact formula for earning relief from the duties remained unclear.
“These countries are calling us up. Kissing my a**. They are dying to make a deal,” Trump told a group of Republicans on Tuesday evening, hours before the tariffs were set to take hold. He described foreign leaders essentially groveling to avoid the new tariffs: “Please, please sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything sir.”
As countries scramble to respond to Trump’s sweeping tariff announcements last week, many are receiving advice from US diplomats and sources close to the White House encouraging them to think creatively, beyond the scope of trade, as they prepare to negotiate with the White House.
Their message to foreign counterparts seems simple: If they have a unique card to play, they should.
Ideas being discussed run the gamut, and include possible action on securing the freedom of Americans wrongfully detained abroad, committing to working with US artificial intelligence companies, buying more US energy or combatting global drug trafficking, according to five people familiar with the brainstorming sessions.
After days of mixed signals over how willing the president would be to negotiate tariff relief, Tuesday’s message was far clearer: Trump is ready for opening bids.
“The phones have been ringing off the hook, wanting to talk to this administration, this president and his trade team to try to strike a deal,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said midday.
It’s not just foreign leaders who have been calling. As the tariff deadline neared this week, the chief executives of some of the largest multinational companies — who have been loathe to criticize Trump’s tariffs publicly — nonetheless maintained a robust backchannel to the White House.
An onslaught of CEOs from banking, technology, and industrial companies – among others – have been lighting up the phone lines of chief of staff Susie Wiles, Vice President JD Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, several executives told CNN, to argue the tariff policy will harm the global economy and credibility of American business and government. The recent effort was described by one CEO close to the White House as a “tsunami” in recent days.
Trump endorsed the shift in message toward more dealmaking – and notably, messengers – after becoming frustrated by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s television appearances, which seemed to fuel the market’s meltdown, several executives familiar with the discussions told CNN. The shift also came after aides warned Trump that the damage sustained in the market would endanger him politically, those people told CNN.
Wiles, those executives added, had been particularly effective in convincing Trump that the market rout was costing considerable political capital that he would need for future agenda items, with lawmakers fielding increasingly angry constituent calls as the market continued sinking.
“There are voices in the White House that want high tariffs forever. There are angels and demons sitting on President Trump’s shoulders,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz posted on X. “Who does he listen to? I hope he listens to the angels.”
After days of criticism from some of his closest allies over his tariff strategy, Trump on Tuesday made clear he was confident in his decisions.
“I know what the hell I’m doing,” he told the GOP crowd.
White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement to CNN that “the administration maintains regular contact with business leaders, industry groups, and everyday Americans,” adding that “the only special interest guiding President Trump’s decision-making, however, is the best interest of the American people.”
Desai added: “The entire Trump administration is playing from the same playbook – President Trump’s playbook – to level the playing field for our industries and workers, and Secretary Lutnick continues to be one of the administration’s most effective TV communicators for that playbook.”
Seeking deals that go beyond tariffs and trade barriers
But what precisely the president is looking for from his foreign interlocutors will vary by nation, White House officials said. It seemed certain the contours of his new trade deals would extend well beyond tariffs and trade barriers to other areas, including US military presence and foreign aid.
Trump described the approach Tuesday as “one-stop shopping”: using the threat of withering tariffs as leverage on any manner of issues arising between the United States and its partners.
“A beautiful and efficient process!!!” he wrote online.
In some cases, the White House is working with the State Department on preparing lists of actions that countries could take, according to one US official.
That is the case with China, where one idea on the table is for President Xi Jinping to make a public pronouncement that Chinese companies should stop producing fentanyl precursor chemicals, which could be an effective step in reining in the global drug war, an issue that Trump has prioritized.
There is no expectation that an offer completely devoid of trade or tariff action will spur movement, particularly because Trump himself has said that this is the “only chance” for the US to “re-set the table” on trade. But sources involved in the current discussions expect offers that couple action on trade plus something else to sweeten the deal could be effective.
Trump’s advisers hope to have results soon that can demonstrate the success of his tariff plan, which has generated deep concern even among his closest allies and sent markets reeling earlier this week.
Trump, too, is eagerly watching as his global counterparts seek him out in the hopes he’ll lift his tariffs, relishing his role as the ultimate decider on what — and who — gets a reprieve, depending on what they’re offering.
“I call them tailored, not off the rack,” Trump said of the nascent agreements his team is now entertaining with as many as 70 countries that have approached the administration to talk trade.
The logistics of arbitrating dozens of new bilateral agreements did not seem lost on the president, who suggested he may conscript lawyers at the large law firms he’s targeted for retribution to help him write up the terms.
“We need a lot of talent. We have a lot of countries coming that want to make deals,” he said in the East Room, where he was discussing a new energy initiative surrounded by coal workers in hard hats. “Our problem is [we] can’t see that many that fast,” he said of the countries reaching out.
For that reason, there appeared little hope for an eleventh-hour cancelation of the new duties that are set to take effect at midnight. For as keen as Trump and his team are to secure new agreements that can be trumpeted as examples of the tariffs’ success, advisers expressed doubt they could be struck in only a day’s time, even for a president in a hurry.
And for as enthusiastic as many foreign leaders appeared to be to hop on an airplane or pick up the phone, the world’s second-largest economy proved a tougher case.
“China also wants to make a deal, badly, but they don’t know how to get it started,” Trump wrote on social media. “We are waiting for their call. It will happen!”
It hadn’t happened by the time US markets closed Tuesday. After posting big gains earlier in the day, the S&P 500 slumped again in late-day trading when it became clear Trump was plowing ahead with the new tariffs, including an extraordinary 104% tariff on China that will take effect a minute past midnight.
Trump has spent the last four years brooding about the shortcomings of the trade agreements he signed with China during his first administration. Beijing reneged on many of its promised purchases of American farm products, and Chinese duties on US soybeans and corns caused agricultural exports to sink.
This time around, Trump is seeking out a bigger, better trade agreement, and hopes the massive tariffs applied on China will lure its leader, Xi Jinping, to the negotiating table. So far, however, Xi has resisted Trump’s pressure to submit, ratcheting up tit-for-tat tariffs that could have widespread consequences.
Continued mixed messages from the administration
Trump acknowledged the effect his tariffs were having on global stability in his remarks Tuesday.
“Sometimes you have to mix it up a little bit,” he said, describing his tariffs as “somewhat explosive.”
Just this week, the market has shifted based on the conflicting messages of the people around the president. On Sunday, Lutnick said any chance of Trump reversing, pausing, or diluting his tariffs would “absolutely not” happen. That stance spurred steep losses for global markets that positioned US markets to open at levels that represented a 20% drop from all-time highs reached in mid-February, the fastest drop of that magnitude in history.
Markets experienced a slight bounce on Monday when National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett sidestepped a question over whether Trump would consider a 90-day pause – leading to false interpretations that Trump was, in fact, open to such a move.
By Tuesday, though, Bessent was front and center, attempting to reset the White House’s message that the tariffs were a means to a negotiated end.
But as early deliberations are now underway among nations looking to strike a deal, some countries say they are still receiving mixed messages from different corners of the administration.
In recent days, Lutnick told Japanese officials that making commitments on a possible future 800-mile pipeline facilitating transport of US natural gas to Asia more quickly – which has been referenced as a possible Alaska pipeline – would not be meaningful in these conversations, according to two sources familiar with the discussions.
The Alaska pipeline is a project Trump has supported and has urged Japan, South Korea and Taiwan to partake in. And on Tuesday morning, Bessent, who has been tapped to lead the tariff talks with Japan, publicly spoke about the Alaska pipeline as a ripe topic to include in the negotiations.
“We will see what our trading partners offer. For instance there is talk of a big energy deal in Alaska where the Japanese, and perhaps the Koreans, perhaps the Taiwanese, would provide – would take a lot of the offtake – and provide financing for the deal,” Bessent said on CNBC. “That could be an alternative for them to come forward with that because not only would that provide a lot of American jobs, it would narrow the trade deficit.”
The confusion over what to include and what not to include underscores a concern among some former Trump administration officials that negotiating without a clear end game could become messy and unproductive.
“The president always wants the same thing in any negotiation: more,” said a former administration official.
“Even if the president was willing to discuss compromises, his differing rationales for the tariffs could conflict with one another and raise a question as to if he is even willing to negotiate.”
This story has been updated with additional details.
