Inside the Trump Admin’s Strong-Arm Trade Negotiations

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Inside the Trump Administration’s Strong-Arm Trade Negotiations

After a faltering start to his effort to remake global trade, President Trump wanted deals, and he wanted them quickly.

To deliver for their boss, senior administration officials embarked on an aggressive campaign beginning this spring to pressure trading partners into agreements that would allow Trump to declare victory.

On trips to Europe, a top economic adviser, Stephen Miran, delivered a warning to his counterparts: If they didn’t start seriously negotiating and find a way to come to a deal with the U.S., then their countries would face high tariffs. Miran conveyed the message in May to France and Germany, and later in June to officials in Brussels, where the European Union’s executive arm is based, according to a senior administration official.

The behind the scenes campaign was launched after Trump paused a wave of tariffs he announced in April, according to people familiar with the matter. He had pulled the plug on his large-scale reciprocal tariff plans that were initially announced on “Liberation Day” as global markets faltered. The effort has resulted in a tariff truce with China and deals with some of the country’s largest trading partners, including the EU, Japan and South Korea, as well the highest overall U.S. tariffs since the Great Depression. On Thursday, higher tariffs on nearly 100 nations went into effect.

The private negotiations since the pause were largely led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer. All three men used their own methods of trying to set up Trump with trade deals featuring enormous investment promises in the U.S. by trading partners and a range of Trump’s beloved tariffs.

“President Trump has assembled the best and most experienced trade and economic team in modern history, and their full court efforts have delivered one historic trade deal after another to level the playing field for American industries and workers.” said White House spokesman Kush Desai.

Trump’s deals with the EU and others highlight a new type of accelerated negotiation strategy used by the administration with allies and adversaries alike. Instead of months or years of talks that arrive at extensive, legally binding trade agreements, Trump’s team has sought broad, fast-tracked trade agreements in which enforcement relies on Trump’s personal interpretation of emergency economic powers, rather than typical dispute-settlement processes that often involve neutral arbitrators.

“This is not like a free-trade agreement, where there’s a dispute settlement system and we have to give consultations for 45 days and then select arbitrators,” Greer told reporters after a recent round of talks with the Chinese officials in Stockholm. “This is a situation where we are…trying to control our trade deficit” using an emergency measure and an International Emergency Economic Powers Act order that the president can modify as needed, he said.

While the administration has trumpeted initial successes from its aggressive approach, officials have left some important details unfinished in their rush to announce deals.

In Southeast Asia, the administration has said that nations will face higher tariffs—double their normal rate or more—if their goods contain too much content from nonmarket economies, particularly China. But no information has been released on how much Chinese content would make goods eligible for higher tariffs—a detail that will determine how the brunt of exports from nations like the Philippines, Vietnam or Malaysia are handled.

A senior administration official said the Trump team knows “what that rule of origin is going to be” for Chinese content, but isn’t yet ready to implement it and declined to give more details. Major retailers are still in the dark, as are several Southeast Asian trading partners that haven’t been notified of U.S. plans and haven’t agreed to any rule of origin when it comes to the Chinese content, said people familiar with the discussions.

Elsewhere, the administration is still working through details of trade frameworks that it has already announced. The U.S. and U.K. are still negotiating the finer points of the trade pact they struck back in May, including details for U.K. steel exports. U.S. and Japanese negotiators met this past week to iron out how automotive tariffs would be treated under their deal. There are still open questions about how the Japanese government plans to fulfill its pledge to provide $550 billion in funding for infrastructure—projects that Trump has insisted will be under his sole discretion.

The administration faces another self-imposed deadline on Aug. 12—the date that tariffs on China will climb to 80%-85% if the president doesn’t extend a tariff truce with Beijing. Greer and Bessent concluded what they termed constructive talks with the Chinese recently in Stockholm, but Trump hasn’t yet said if he would extend the deadline.

Still, the administration said its aggressive, personalized approach to trade talks is yielding results. In the days leading up to Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s announcement of a deal in July in Scotland, Lutnick personally called French President Emmanuel Macron, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and other leaders in the EU, according to U.S. officials. Lutnick was concerned that von der Leyen couldn’t make a deal with Trump on her own authority without the backing of key European leaders, these people explained.

When Lutnick got on the phone with Macron, the French president pushed back on a larger agreement with the EU. Trump had threatened in July that it might include zero tariffs on the U.S. and potentially up to a 30% tariff on Europe.

Lutnick warned Macron that if he wanted the pharmaceutical giant Sanofi to remain based in France, he shouldn’t put up too much of a fight, the people said. Trump, at the time, was publicly threatening a tariff of over 200% on non-U.S. pharmaceutical companies, which could have hurt the likes of Sanofi, possibly spurring them to relocate.

The deal eventually struck by Trump and von der Leyen featured a 15% tariff on European pharmaceutical products as well as no tariffs on U.S. goods. The EU also agreed to purchase $750 billion of U.S. energy exports through 2028.

Just before the president signed an executive order on July 31 imposing a 39% tariff on Switzerland, Swiss President Karin Keller-Sutter spoke to Trump on a tense phone call. Trump said in a subsequent CNBC interview that during their call, Keller-Sutter “didn’t want to listen” to the points he made about the trade deficit between the two countries.

In a separate call, an aide to Greer told Keller-Sutter she must come to the negotiating table with a compelling case of how the Swiss plan to help eliminate the deficit. The U.S. has a $38 billion trade deficit with Switzerland as of 2024.

The calls led to the Swiss president’s scrambling to get to Washington to meet with Trump’s advisers. During her trip she was unable to have a meeting with Greer, Lutnick or Bessent, according to people familiar with the matter.

She met with Secretary of State Marco Rubio instead. A Swiss government official insisted that their offer to Rubio would lead to a reduction in trade deficits between both countries but declined to provide further details. No deal has been struck yet.

Write to Brian Schwartz at brian.schwartz@wsj.com and Gavin Bade at gavin.bade@wsj.com