President Donald Trump’s Aug. 1 trade-agreement deadline is here, and despite early attempts to speed-run “90 Deals in 90 Days,” agreements have only been reached with eight countries and the European Union in over 100 days. Tariffs for many countries will go into effect in seven days, according to an executive order signed Thursday night, hours before the deadline.
The executive order sets a baseline tariff rate of 10%, with steeper tariffs scheduled for a number of trading partners — some as high as 40%.
Though the Trump administration has been insistent on the Aug. 1 deadline, negotiations with other countries, like Mexico, will continue.
So far, eight trade agreements have been reached with major trading partners like the United Kingdom and Japan. Most of those deals have been light on details and none are in their final form.
“The thing to always remember about Trump is that the squeeze is more important than the juice,” said William Alan Reinsch, under secretary of commerce for export administration during the Clinton administration and a senior adviser at Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It doesn’t always get nailed down in the eyes of the other countries in the way that Trump says it was nailed down.”
Foreign nations have frequently disagreed with the Trump administration on the terms of the agreements after they have been announced. The administration touted $500-billion dollars in investments from Japan, only to have Japanese officials say they were committing to at most $11 billion, with the rest in loans. The president announced a key deal with Vietnam that Vietnamese officials have yet to formally accept because they disagree with Trump on the terms.
“We expect our trading partners who have made deals to honor their commitments, and the president reserves the right to adjust tariffs if any party reneges,” a White House Official told NOTUS earlier this week.
For countries that have reached deals, significant issues remain unresolved. Dawn Shackleford, who has worked in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and the Department of Commerce, pointed out that the agreements all lack enforcement measures, a standard component of such deals.
“What is making these agreements binding?” she said. “Traders can’t rely on a PDF of a letter they need; they need, you know, something with some type of legal certainty to make it binding for them to be able to properly comply.”
Shackleford, who advises domestic importers, has also been fielding concerns about how the tariffs will be implemented by Customs and Border Protection, due to the number of different tariffs that apply to some items.
Adding another layer of uncertainty, the Trump administration is still defending the legality of the tariffs in court. The president was sued for his use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act; in a hearing Thursday, government lawyers defended the administration’s use of the law to levy tariffs.
“For us, this is a real existential threat to our business, to all small businesses across America,” Victor Schwartz, the founder of V.O.S. Selections, the plaintiff in the case, told reporters after the hearing. “It’s interesting for us to see that what we’re arguing is diametrically opposed to what the government has done. But this is an existential threat to us, we’re not unique in that.”
In theory the Trump administration would have to immediately cease the use of tariffs and pay back all the revenue it has collected if it lost the case. In actuality, experts told NOTUS there are a myriad of ways the administration could wriggle out of an unfavorable ruling by picking another statute.
Three trade experts who work with domestic businesses and foreign governments told NOTUS no one is operating under the assumption that the courts will stop Trump on tariffs.
“They’re proceeding as if these tariffs are going to stay in place, hoping that they don’t, but not making business decisions based on an uncertain court outcome,” Bryan Riley, the director of the National Taxpayers Union’s Free Trade Initiative.
Trump’s trade strategy has been defined by uncertainty.
“I talk to congressional staffers every day, and they’re saying they’re getting bombarded with stories of how these tariffs are making it harder for them to do business, just making things more difficult, and a lot of them are just confused about why he’s doing this to them,” Riley said.
This is unlikely to change anytime soon. In addition to more trade negotiations, the administration has left the door open for more demands down the line. For example, Trump has been critical of the U.K.’s digital services tax, an issue that wasn’t addressed in his trade agreement with the country.
Reinsch recalled a recent meeting with a career trade negotiator who said that while other countries are asking whether or not Trump will come back with more demands after a deal was made, negotiators were noncommittal.
“Countries are beginning to learn this is never ending,” Reinsch said.
Further, the president has started leveraging tariffs to influence political outcomes. Trump has said a trade deal with Canada is now contingent on the country’s position on Palestinian statehood, and Brazil is facing a 50% tariff for its prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro.
“Those are two issues that are completely unrelated,” Sen. Raphael Warnock, the ranking member on the Senate’s trade subcommittee, told NOTUS. “And they should not be conflated. What this underscores is that this president does not respect the constitution and the idea of three coequal branches. And so he’s just running trade policy willy-nilly.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
“I guess in some ideal world, trade would be its own isolated little area. But it hasn’t been over the history of trade,” said Gilbert Kaplan, under secretary of commerce for international trade during Trump’s first term, pointing to sanctions placed on countries like Russia, Cuba and South Africa. “We’ve used trade to achieve important political goals, and other countries do that too.”
NOTUS spoke to more than half a dozen former USTR and Commerce officials and economists. The consensus was that the Trump administration is reshaping the way trade is done, both internationally and abroad.
“They’re not everything you might want in a free trade agreement. That’s really not the point. He’s successfully changed the tariff import structure for the United States,” Kaplan said. “It seems like it will be sustainable and it really shows how much bargaining power the United States had with respect to trade that we never really used.”
There is no consensus on whether the new Trump-imposed global order — defined by double-digit baseline tariff rates and bilateral trade agreements — is sustainable.
“The trade deals are fantastic. We’re making our country very rich,” Trump said Tuesday. “It’s about time somebody did it.”