In the dining room at Mar-a-Lago on Friday night, President Donald Trump and around two dozen advisers, friends and club members sat to celebrate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Mehmet Oz. But the brimming undercurrent was excitement for “Liberation Day,” a day that could become one of the signature moments of Trump’s second term.
“He was looking forward to it. And so was Howard Lutnick, who was there. And so was Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary. They were all excited about it,” former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who was present, told NOTUS in an interview about Trump’s planned splashy Rose Garden rollout for his new tariff program. The president, Ross said, “is very much of the view that this is the greatest thing in a long time.”
Trump is planning to unveil a program of reciprocal tariffs on Wednesday that is likely to upend decades of trade rules that have governed relationships between countries, taking his love for levies further than any modern president has. And his plan to slap tariffs on imports from America’s trading partners, despite signs that U.S. companies and farmers are already feeling pain, could lead to tumultuous weeks full of market see-sawing, ghastly looking 401Ks and even job losses as the country reorients around the new economic order.
The Trump team isn’t publicly stressed. Senior aides and White House allies say they feel emboldened, and that they’ve learned from Trump’s first term how to maximize the president’s tariff power. Now their first step is to do everything they can to prove they’re right, and get ahead of any disaster narrative.
The White House plans to “blanket the airwaves” with staff and outside allies on Wednesday and Thursday, according to a source familiar with the plans. Formal talking points have yet to be distributed to the allies and influencers who are often the White House’s messengers, one person who expected to have received them said. But the overall strategy so far mirrors the messaging the administration has been laying down for weeks: While the initial effects of the tariffs might be bumpy, in the end the American consumer and economy will gain far more than what they lose from any short-term discomfort.
Economists, however, broadly doubt the White House’s theory of the case, and warn that tariffs would actually increase costs on American consumers and destabilize the already tenuous economy.
The White House says the tariffs will go into effect immediately after they’re announced. And the administration is feeling bullish about the day.
“It is going to work,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during Tuesday’s press briefing.
One source told NOTUS that the White House expects immediate positive responses from corporations after the Rose Garden event, with more companies unveiling plans to change their manufacturing in response.
Part of that messaging campaign will be to tout what the Trump administration sees as successes already happening: countries that have already brought down their own tariff rates in the face of looming reciprocal threats, companies which have already announced plans to bring back manufacturing and support from union members.
The White House is holding details of how high the tariffs will be or whether certain products will be exempt close to the chest. On Monday, Trump said he had “settled” on a plan for broad reciprocal tariffs, and on Tuesday he spent at least part of the day going over the plan with his trade team, after the group has weighed numerous approaches to achieve the president’s wishes.
“They took advantage of us and we are going to be very nice by comparison to what they were,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday.
But Wall Street is bracing for what those numbers might be.
Asked by NOTUS on Tuesday what market indicators the administration would use to gauge the program’s success, Leavitt didn’t get specific.
“I’ve said, and he has said, the market is a snapshot in time,” she said. “Just like they were in his first term, Wall Street will be just fine.”
The agita isn’t limited to the financial sector: Republicans in Congress have already heard from companies in their districts that are navigating higher prices and uncertainty due to Trump’s trade moves.
“Right now, there’s a lot of confusion,” said Ross, who is largely supportive of the administration’s goals. “To me, fear of the unknown is the worst fear, especially for a business. And right now we’re in fear of the unknown, because nobody knows: How big will the tariffs be? What all will they cover? What countries?”
One former White House official told NOTUS that after spending a day on the Hill on Tuesday, it was clear that even lawmakers had very little insider detail on what the program will look like.
“I’m a little surprised given how forward the president has been on this kind of language and how big April 2 should be a national holiday. They’re really doing a piss poor job of coordinating this messaging,” said the former official. “I suspect they don’t want to do that because they don’t want any leaks about what these tariffs are. That’s the charitable side.”
Still, most GOP lawmakers who NOTUS spoke with this week say they are firmly in Trump’s corner. House Speaker Mike Johnson had a simple response to the threat of new tariffs: “Look, you have to trust the president’s instincts on the economy,” Johnson said during a press conference.
Ross said that’s part of the major difference between this tariff rollout and the tariff program in Trump’s first term. Trump now has maximal control over his party, and he’s coupled that with a greater understanding of the powers a president has to enact tariffs through the International Emergency Economic Powers Act — details he didn’t fully grasp in his first term.
“The first time around, we spent a lot of time necessarily learning what the powers he actually has independently of Congress, and we found there quite a lot,” Ross told NOTUS. “He’s got a lot more power. And as a result, he’s now using tariffs — not just the trade issue, but a diplomatic issue, all kinds of issues.”
The staff around the president has also dramatically changed, and those close to him have bought in on using tariffs aggressively — a departure from the free trade policies that used to be dominant in the Republican Party.
Advising the president has been a mix of senior officials like Bessent, Lutnick, Peter Navarro and Stephen Miller, the president’s deputy chief of staff, who differ from the likes of Gary Cohn, Trump’s former chief economic adviser who was against issuing broad tariffs.
To wit, in the early days of the president’s first term, aides would try to keep Trump’s more tariff-eager senior staff from having unfettered access to the president, said one former official, who joked that they would tell Navarro, Trump’s trade czar, that he couldn’t have a certain pin lapel indicating to secret service that a staff member had walk-in privileges to the Oval Office.
And while some advisers like Miller and even Lutnick, according to a source familiar with discussions, have advocated for Trump to take a more targeted and surgical approach to tariffs — more similar to his first-term policy — it’s been Trump who has pushed his team to go bigger, winning the argument every time.
“The president always says, ‘There’s only one person in this room who was elected,’” said the source. “‘I’m the one sitting behind this table.’”
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Jasmine Wright is a reporter at NOTUS. Haley Byrd Wilt contributed reporting for this story.