Ever since President Trump announced he was slapping hefty tariffs on countries across the globe, he has been predicting they would force trading partners to sign major deals beneficial to the United States.
But on Tuesday, with the Canadian prime minister sitting beside him in the Oval Office and no new trade deal between the two countries achieved, Mr. Trump had a different message for the public: “We don’t have to sign deals.”
“Everyone says ‘When, when, when are you going to sign deals?’” Mr. Trump said, at one point motioning toward Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary. “We don’t have to sign deals. We could sign 25 deals right now, Howard, if we wanted to. We don’t have to sign deals. They have to sign deals with us. They want our market. We don’t want a piece of their market. We don’t care about their market.”
Within days of the April 2 announcement of the widespread tariffs, White House officials said around 70 countries were already calling to strike deals. Mr. Trump’s trade adviser predicted there would be 90 deals in 90 days.
But more than a month later, no such deals have materialized. And the clock is ticking.
Mr. Trump predicted the first deals could be signed this week. But administration officials also made that prediction the week before that, and the week before that.
On Tuesday, the president told the members of the press gathered around him that he would have an important announcement soon, but cautioned that it might not be a trade deal.
“You keep writing about deals, deals, ‘when are we going to sign?’” Mr. Trump said, sounding annoyed at reporters’ questions.
At another point he vented, “I wish they’d stop asking how many deals are you signing this week.”
Then Mr. Trump seemed to change the very definition of a deal from a two-sided agreement into a one-sided demand.
In the next two weeks, the president said, he would sit down with his top aides and make unilateral “deals” that the administration would announce without the participation of other countries.
“One day we’ll come and we’ll give you 100 deals,” the president said.
On Capitol Hill, Scott Bessent, the Treasury security, striking a less freewheeling tone, said some trade deals could be announced this week.
Mr. Bessent told a House committee he was negotiating with 17 major trading partners, but not with China, the largest economy in the world after the United States.
“Many of our trading partners have approached us with very good offers,” he said.
Negotiating trade deals is famously complex and time-consuming.
The Peterson Institute for International Economics said in a 2016 analysis that negotiations for a single trade deal can often take more than a year, while implementation can take multiple years.
And for the trade deals Mr. Trump does reach, he can sour on them quickly. The major trade deal of his first term was the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which the president now says he wants to renegotiate.
