War inside Trump trade team triggers global angst
The president’s abrupt announcement of steep tariffs on European, Canadian and Mexican imports capped a week of whipsaw statements.
This story is being published by the South China Morning Post as part of a content partnership with POLITICO. It was written by Ben White, Andrew Restuccia and Nancy Cook and originally appeared on politico.com on May 22, 2018.
President Donald Trump’s abrupt decision Thursday to slap steel and aluminum tariffs on Canada, Mexico and the European Union capped a whipsaw week that reflected not just the deep divisions among his top economic advisers but the changeable attitudes of the irascible and unpredictable president himself.
Senior administration officials profess privately to not know exactly what Trump will ultimately decide to do on trade at any given moment. The uncertainty has led the president’s advisers to compete for his attention in a bid to sway him, leading to nasty behind-the-scenes fights that are increasingly bursting into public view.
The week began with a statement that the administration would move ahead with trade levies on China, just days after Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said a trade war with the world’s second largest economy was “on hold.” Trump’s senior trade adviser Peter Navarro publicly rebuked Mnuchin’s statement on Wednesday, calling it an “unfortunate sound bite.”
One senior administration official said privately this week that Navarro’s public scolding of the Treasury Secretary was a “firing-level offense” but held out no hope that Trump would take any action.
The result of the infighting is a trade policy that’s nearly impossible for anyone to understand or predict and which risks undermining Trump’s economic and stock market gains. Thursday’s action sent markets down, compounding losses earlier in the week after the China announcement.