Trump faces imposing timeline to broker 75 trade deals in less than 90 days
The clock is ticking on a race of President Donald Trump's own making: a sprint to negotiate dozens of trade deals before his 90-day pause on some tariffs expires — talks that negotiators of past trade deals say come with a range of strategic and logistical hurdles due to Trump's compressed timeline.
The clock is ticking on a race of President Donald Trump's own making: a sprint to negotiate dozens of trade deals before his 90-day pause on some tariffs expires — talks that negotiators of past trade deals say come with a range of strategic and logistical hurdles due to Trump's compressed timeline.
Trump announced last week that he was pausing some of his sweeping global tariffs to give his administration time to work out trade deals with 75 countries he said had reached out to the White House to offer concessions. While Trump later said the pause was also driven by volatility in the stock and bond markets, top administration officials sought to spin the move as an example of Trump’s deal-making prowess.
But translating that initial outreach from countries into actual trade deals, especially in such a short period of time, won’t come easy, said former trade negotiators. And that will likely limit the potential gains Trump hopes to make from these talks, they added.
Many of the significant trade barriers that countries have in place are there for a reason — to protect a key local industry, for example, or because of differing views over health and safety standards than in the U.S., like in food products. Hammering out those differences while navigating the different political and cultural nuances of each country will require back-and-forth discussions that could take months and involved dozens of officials across the federal government.
“Trade negotiations can be brutal, and they can take years,” said Warren Maruyama, who worked on trade deals during the George W. Bush administration as general counsel for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. “I don’t think this is going to be anywhere near as easy as some people are spinning it.”
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