Good cops, bad cops - how Trump's tariff team kept world guessing

Competing voices from the White House fuelled uncertainty before the president announced a sweeping pause, experts say.

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"It took great courage," the bespectacled 62-year-old former hedge fund manager told the dozens of reporters gathered around him on 9 April. "Great courage to stay the course until this moment."

Notably absent during the press briefing - after which markets rocketed - were the other two men tasked with delivering Trump's tariff message to the American people: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and trade adviser Pete Navarro.

Bessent's centre-stage role in the tariffs announcement, some trade policy veterans have suggested, starkly highlights how shifting power dynamics within the White House brought the US back from the brink of an all-out global trade war, even if all the players are broadly supportive of Trump's economic agenda.

"He's playing the good cop," William Alan Reinsch, the former head of the National Foreign Trade Council, told the BBC. "And Lutnick and Navarro are playing the bad cop."

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czx4ynxx1nzo

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