JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
President Trump's big, new tariffs had just come into effect today, but after a little more than 12 hours, he announced that he would pause most of them for 90 days. Since the president first laid out his plans, markets have been on a wild ride for the past week. NPR senior national political correspondent Mara Liasson joins us now. Hi there.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Hi there.
SUMMERS: I mean, Mara, this was quite the plot twist. How did the president explain it?
LIASSON: Well, this was pretty extraordinary. First, the White House spent most of the day saying it was all part of the plan. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters this pause had nothing to do with the markets tanking. But then, when President Trump was asked about it, he gave a different explanation for the pause. Here's what he said.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, I thought that people were jumping a little bit out of line. They were getting yippy, you know? They were getting a little bit yippy, a little bit afraid.
LIASSON: So it sounds like the market trauma was the reason Trump made the pause. The announcement came during trading hours, and the markets did make up for some of its recent losses, but there were no details available right away, so it was very, very haphazard and confusing.
SUMMERS: Indeed. So what do we know about what happens next?
LIASSON: What happens next is there's still an across-the-board tariff of 10% on imports coming into the U.S. for all countries. But in the case of China, Trump has raised the tariffs to a total of 125% because China retaliated against his original tariffs. For all the other countries that were supposed to have reciprocal tariffs put on, there's going to now be a series of negotiations instead during the next 90 days.
And it's still not exactly clear what the White House is looking for in those talks. Maybe concessions, even small ones that he can call victories, so he gets an off-ramp to climb down from an all-out trade war, or maybe he's trying to eliminate the trade imbalances with all the countries in the world. We don't know because he's never been clear about what the purpose of the tariffs were - to bring in lots of money, to balance the budget and pay for tax cuts or to get rid of trade deficits that he has described as a threat to America's way of life.
SUMMERS: I mean, Mara, you've been doing this for a long time and you've covered Trump for a long time. How surprised were you at this turn of events?
LIASSON: Not that surprised. Trump has a pattern of making big threats and then backing down. We saw that earlier in the year with Mexico and Canada. But this time, the White House said he was - had the stomach to push through the turmoil. They were adamant there would be no pause. Trump recently posted, quote, "my policies will never change," and then they did. So people who think - thought these tariffs were a negotiating tactic, it looks like they were right, at least for the moment.
SUMMERS: Tell me what else stood out to you from today's announcements.
LIASSON: What else stood out to me is that the incredible effort, the great lengths that Trump and his top officials went to argue that this wasn't a backdown or a reversal - Bessent said this was his strategy all along. He said the president had great courage to hold the line, to stay the course until this moment. But it was only 12 hours until he backed off...
SUMMERS: Right.
LIASSON: ...Since the tariffs went on. And Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said that Trump wrote one of the most extraordinary Truth posts of his presidency. So it sounds like they're really trying to refute the comments and views of all those economists and Wall Street traders and billionaires that there didn't seem to be a clear or rational strategy to what Trump was doing with these tariffs.
Last night, in a dinner with lots of Republicans, the president said, quote, "I know what the hell I'm doing." So it sounds like they really wanted to dispel this idea that he didn't know what he was doing. And also, the other thing that struck me is that even for Trump, who expects constant and lavish praise from his Cabinet secretaries, today was pretty much over the top.
SUMMERS: NPR's Mara Liasson. Thank you.
LIASSON: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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