Just days after Donald Trump took his oath of office in 2017 and abandoned the behemoth Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, the president’s trade czar, Peter Navarro, came to the Office of the United States Trade Representative with a big request: negotiate roughly a dozen stand-alone free trade agreements with about a dozen nations.
Only a handful of deals were made over the next four years.
Administration officials are now racing to avoid a repeat, on a much shorter timeline. And they are working with a new set of rules, with a president who says he’s willing to levy higher tariffs on partners or end negotiations entirely.