The White House Insists Other Countries Are Desperate to Deal With the U.S. on Tariffs

The White House says “countries are falling over themselves” to find deals with the U.S. to get around President Donald Trump’s new tariff regime — acknowledging that negotiations could be coming while indicating that the administration won’t move easily.

“The president’s message has been simple and consistent from the beginning to countries around the world: Bring us your best offers, and he will listen,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters in the White House briefing room on Tuesday. “Deals will only be made if they benefit American workers and address our nation’s crippling trade deficits.”

But there’s been some shifting messaging from the White House — initially, senior administration officials said these tariffs were explicitly not a negotiation. When NOTUS’ Jasmine Wright asked Leavitt to explain the White House’s evolution on the tariffs from specifically not a negotiation to asking countries to pitch negotiations, she doubled down on Trump’s statements Monday that both things could be true.

“As the President said yesterday, Jasmine, both things can be true at the same time, and it is a non-negotiable position that the United States has faced a national security and economic crisis because of the unfair trade practices by countries around the world,” she said. “The entire administration has always said that President Trump is willing to pick up the phone and talk, and the president met with his trade team this morning, and he directed them to have tailor-made trade deals with each and every country that calls up this administration.”

When NOTUS followed up and asked if the evolution, then, was unrelated to the past week’s stock market tumult, Leavitt said she rejected “that there was an evolution.”

“On day one, we had said that the president will always pick up the phone for other nations and other companies that call this administration. The president always has a listening ear,” she said.

Leavitt said any new trade deal “should be tailored and unique based on that country’s markets, based on that country’s exports, the imports here in the United States of America, what makes the most sense for the American worker and for our industry.”

And even though the administration is set to implement new tariffs on China on Wednesday, after the Chinese President Xi Jinping set retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods, Leavitt said Trump “believes that Xi and China want to make a deal. They just don’t know how to get that started.”

Leavitt tried to project optimism throughout Tuesday’s briefing. Asked about predictions that the U.S. economy could enter a recession this year, Leavitt said she could “speak for the optimism that [Trump] sees in our economy every day,” pointing specifically to oil, gas and egg prices.

Leavitt also reiterated Trump’s desire to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. Asked specifically about iPhone production, Leavitt insisted that could take place in America.

Trump “believes we have the labor,” she said. “We have the workforce, we have the resources to do it. And as you know, Apple has invested $500 billion here in the United States, so if Apple didn’t think the United States could do it, they probably wouldn’t have put up that big chunk of change.”

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Nuha Dolby is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.