President Donald Trump’s team spent the start of this week denying that he was considering any sort of pause of his new tariff regime.
“We’re not looking at that,” Trump said when a reporter asked about on Monday a potential pause.
But the president was privately talking on Tuesday with certain aides about instituting one, an administration official told NOTUS. And the final decision to place a 90-day hold on much of a program that had shaken global financial markets came together Wednesday, disseminated across the globe via the president’s own social media service.
“We didn’t have access to lawyers or — it was just wrote up,” Trump said of the announcement to reporters inside the Oval Office, with members of his economic team behind him. “We wrote it up from our hearts, right? It was written from the heart, and I think it was well written, too, but it was written from the heart.”
The stunning about-face had been days in the making. Investor fears spiked Tuesday night into Wednesday morning, as the U.S. bond market saw sharp sell-offs and confidence concerns about the U.S. dollar, leading industry heads like JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon to increase their projections of a recession. All of that came after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent flew to Mar-a-Lago on Sunday to meet with the president and encourage him to calm the markets by focusing his public messaging on potential dealmaking, Politico first reported and the official confirmed.
Bessent has been one of the administration’s biggest advocates for a more restrained tariff policy, and it seems his theory of the case has won out — at least for now.
When Trump announced the pause on Truth Social, the official said he did so from the Oval Office alongside only Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, one of the most aggressive public voices backing the tariff plan.The official said Lutnick, who has received considerable pushback following media appearances enthusiastically heralding the coming tariffs over the last week, was supportive of the pause.
“He was ecstatic,” said the official. On X, Lutnick called Trump’s social media post announcing the pause “one of the most extraordinary Truth posts of his Presidency.”
The official also denied that Peter Navarro, an architect of Trump’s tariff policy, was upset by the president’s decision.
“This is one of the greatest days in American economic history we have had,” Navarro said after the announcement in a Fox News interview. “I think we’re going to call it the ‘art of the reciprocal trade deal.’”
The White House quickly shifted into taking a victory lap after Trump’s decision, despite the whiplash after spending days insisting there would be no pause and that anyone saying otherwise was “fake news.”
“The markets right now are extremely good,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “Nobody’s ever seen a day like that.”
Trump aides spent the afternoon telling reporters that it wasn’t a pivot in strategy, but instead, as Bessent put it, was Trump’s strategy “all along.”
“The only interest guiding President Trump’s decision making is the best interest of the American people,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai said to NOTUS in a statement. “The Trump administration remains committed to using every tool at our disposal to address the national emergency posed by chronic trade deficits – including both tariffs and negotiations.”
Bessent denied that the pause was connected to the bond market cratering Wednesday morning. But hours later, Trump made clear he was well aware of the sell-off and its accompanying panic.
“The bond market is very tricky, I was watching it,” Trump told reporters. “The bond market right now is beautiful. But yeah, I saw last night where people were getting a little queasy.”
By Wednesday, Trump said, more than 75 countries had reached out to negotiate deals. But the White House was also hearing from CEOs, who called to protest the implementation of the tariffs.
The president told reporters that he had been watching Dimon’s interview on Fox Business on Wednesday morning, where the CEO warned that a recession was “a likely outcome” of Trump’s trade policies.
“He’s very smart and very genius financially,” the president said of Dimon. But the official said those CEOs who have reached out to the White House privately to encourage the administration to change its position ultimately did not have an impact on Trump’s final decision.
By late Wednesday afternoon, the White House and its allies were arguing that the endgame for the first phase of Trump’s tariff plan was just to take clear aim at China.
The official said that China retaliating with higher tariffs Tuesday provided the president an opportunity to “isolate” China by bringing down tariffs on allies (even though the 10% baseline tariff remains) while supercharging China’s to 125%.
That narrative quickly took hold with outside allies, with one telling NOTUS, “The enemy in all of this has always been China.”
They added, “After today, everyone who was nervous is resolute.”
But the announcement still took Trump’s allies by surprise. In the initial hours after Trump’s post, aides had some difficulty explaining decisively which countries would retain what rate of tariffs — a symptom of the fast pace of this policy change.
Trump’s own U.S. trade representative, Jamieson Greer, appeared to be caught flat-footed on Capitol Hill during a prescheduled committee hearing Wednesday, seemingly unaware that a major reversal was coming.
Ultimately, Trump celebrated his move and its resulting market surge.
“I looked an hour ago, but we were up to close to 3000 points,” Trump said after the stock market skyrocketed. “I think that’s a record.”
Trump’s day, despite the tumult and jubilation, quickly became business as usual, as he moved on to host racing champions on the South Lawn and sign punishing executive orders against his foes. But he did, according to the administration official, find time to have lunch with mega-investor Charles R. Schwab.
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Jasmine Wright is a reporter at NOTUS.