Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent flew to Florida Sunday to encourage President Donald Trump to focus his message on negotiating favorable trade deals — or risk the stock market cratering further, according to two people familiar with the conversations, granted anonymity to share details of them.
Bessent, who landed with the president at the White House on Marine One Sunday night, told Trump that markets would remain in peril unless he started putting more emphasis on talking about his endgame with tariffs — winning deals with other countries.
Shifting the Narrative
“Bessent’s view was, ‘The markets will keep melting unless you shift,’” one of the people said. “You’re not going to abandon the policy, but you have to talk about negotiating and what the endgame is.”
A second person described the meeting as an opportunity to figure out next steps after 50 countries reached out to open discussions on the U.S.’s new tariff regime after the “shock and awe” of last week’s “Liberation Day” announcement. The purpose of Trump’s April 2 tariff rollout was to create “maximum leverage” over foreign governments, the person added, describing Bessent’s view.
Trump and top administration officials have spent the last several days urging Americans to brace for a long, painful and potentially permanent trade war. Bessent is perhaps the most powerful voice urging Trump to telegraph to anxious Americans that there is an end in sight.
Bessent is also the first known adviser to try to urge the president to alter his rhetoric on trade — albeit privately and gently. And even as the Treasury secretary has confined his advice to messaging, it appears to be moving Trump to allow more room publicly for negotiations — including the possibility of cutting back on some of the aggressive international trade barriers he announced last week.
The Treasury secretary, who has been a public and vocal defender of the president’s new tariff regime, suggested that Trump put more emphasis on how the policy would result in a better deal for America and more jobs in the U.S. Wall Street titans have been bewildered by the administration’s strategy.
Trump and his administration’s contradictory rhetoric has been a hallmark of the early days of the trade war. On Monday, Bessent announced the U.S. was opening negotiations with Japan over tariffs at around the same time trade czar Peter Navarro published an op-ed in the Financial Times digging his heels in on the “no negotiations” rhetoric the administration was using last week. (A White House official said Navarro wrote the op-ed with the “best intentions” and it was “written at a time when that was the message.”)
And even as the White House moves forward on negotiations with Japan, Trump is ramping up a trade war with China, threatening to impose 104 percent levies on Beijing, a move that on its own is likely to stoke significant market fear.
But Bessent’s advice appears to have encouraged Trump to tamp down his most absolutist statements and formally open the door for negotiations with some countries.
“We have many many countries that are coming to negotiate deals with us, and they’re going to be fair deals,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Monday afternoon, before muddying the waters again by saying there would be both “permanent tariffs” and “negotiations,” which he said “can both be true.”
“Some of these tariffs are going to be permanent, and some of them may be up for negotiation,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told POLITICO, adding that doesn’t mean he’s going to “strike a deal, but it means he’s willing to entertain one.”
On Monday, Bessent announced on X that Trump had directed him and Trade Representative Jamieson Greer to open negotiations with Japan over tariffs, the first country to formally begin talks with the U.S.
“Japan remains among America’s closest allies, and I look forward to our upcoming productive engagement regarding tariffs, non-tariff trade barriers, currency issues, and government subsidies. I appreciate the Japanese government’s outreach and measured approach to this process,” Bessent said in a post on X.
He added that more than 50 countries have responded “openly and positively” to Trump’s tariffs and that the U.S. looks “forward to meaningful negotiations with them over the coming weeks.” Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during a visit to the White House Monday, promised to quickly close the trade gap and reduce trade barriers with the U.S.
Trump had started telling allies in phone calls Monday morning that the end game of the tariffs would be sooner than people expect and that the White House is in talks with multiple countries, stressing that deals will be made, said one person familiar with one of those phone calls, who, like others in this story, was granted anonymity to share details of private discussions.
Stock markets on Monday fluctuated on the uncertainties of the president’s trade policy, with the S&P 500, Dow and NASDAQ all within a point up or down by close. The variations reflect the unease on Wall Street, which doesn’t know how to view the inconsistent messages coming out of the White House and appeared disinclined Monday to view subtle shifts in messaging too positively. It didn’t, for instance, jump at the news that the U.S. is opening negotiations with Japan.
But it still marked a shift for Trump, at least rhetorically.
Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Sunday night that “sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something,” an extension of his patient-in-recovery metaphor from Thursday.
The opening of negotiations with Japan comes as relief to many in Trump’s orbit who support his protectionist policies — including imposing more trade barriers on other countries — but who believe that there should also be room for dealmaking. The so-called fair trade camp, including Bessent, Trump’s economic adviser Kevin Hassett and others, had taken a backseat in recent weeks to a more aggressively protectionist contingent that includes Navarro and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, who see tariffs not as a means to an end but the end goal.
Some in Trump’s orbit worry that in an effort to help the president fulfill his goals, those around the president have offered little pushback, even when it would be to his benefit. They say it’s left people like Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick telling the president what he wants to hear — as opposed to what they believe he needs to hear.
A person close to the White House insisted that the tariff policy remains unchanged, though the administration is interested in seeing the offers other countries bring to the table. The person added that while they were initially concerned about the political impact of the tariffs, internal polling they have seen has changed their thinking.
The person said polling from outside groups that were in the field last week show that the tariffs are going over well with both the base and working class voters more broadly, which has alleviated some of the fears of political damage. The person declined to share the internal polling data with POLITICO.
There has not yet been public polling that captures the period after huge stock market losses last week following the new tariff announcement . But the number of Americans who own stock has been rising in recent years and was above 60 percent in the most recent Gallup poll in 2023, a metric that includes people with 401(k)s and other retirement accounts. And those people have seen their holdings drop significantly in recent days.
The person added that none of the panic is so far spooking Trump. It’s a point Trump underscored in yet another Truth Social post on Monday, in which he encouraged people not to be “weak” and “stupid” — and part of what he coined the “Panican Party” — but “strong, courageous and patient.”
Still, that patience may last only so long. A CBS News-YouGov poll taken in late March found that 23 percent of people believe they are better off financially than they were before Trump took office, down from 42 percent in January before Trump took office.
“‘Since when do people care about the stock market?’ That’s bullshit. That’s fucking bullshit,” said Dave Portnoy, the president of Barstool Sports who became an influential Trump backer during the campaign, in a livestream on Monday. “Everybody has the right to panic — Panican Party — and be worried about the stock market, their 401(k), their portfolio.”
Dasha Burns and Jake Traylor contributed to this report.
