| April 14, 2025 08:06:43 AM |
|
|
| April 14, 2025 08:06:43 AM |
|
|
We take a look at the Trump administration’s economic messaging after another week of reeling markets that saw the president reverse course on some of his steepest tariffs.
Welcome to this week’s edition of AP Ground Game. |
Policy changes, but facts endure. AP delivers accurate, fact-based journalism to keep the world informed in every administration. Support independent reporting today. |
President Donald Trump gestures to reporters as he walks on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, Sunday. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana) |
Trump team tries to project confidence and calm after tariff moves |
While his team was out defending his proposals on Sunday, Trump said on his social media platform that there ultimately will be no exemptions for his sweeping tariff agenda, disputing characterizations that he has granted tariff exceptions for certain electronics, including smartphones, whose production is concentrated in China. Rather, Trump said, “those products are subject to the existing 20% Fentanyl Tariffs, and they are just moving to a different Tariff ‘bucket.’”
A week ago, Trump’s team stood by his promise to leave the impending tariffs in place without exceptions. They used their latest news show appearances to defend his move to ratchet back to a 10% universal tariff for most nations except China (145%), while seeming to grant exemptions for certain electronics like smartphones, laptops, hard drives, flat-panel monitors and semiconductor chips. Last week on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick played up national security. “You’ve got to realize this is a national security issue,” he said, raising the worst-case scenarios of what could happen if the U.S. were involved in a war. On Sunday, Lutnick stuck to that national security framing, but White House trade adviser Peter Navarro focused more on the import taxes being leverage in the bigger economic puzzle.
“The world cheats us. They’ve been cheating us for decades,” Navarro said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He cited practices such as dumping products at unfairly low prices, currency manipulation and barriers to U.S. auto and agricultural products entering foreign markets. Read more. |
|
|
Of note:
With the higher rates set to be collected beginning April 9, administration officials argued last week that other countries would rush to the negotiating table. On Sunday, Navarro named the United Kingdom, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia and Israel as among the nations in active negotiations with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, Lutnick and other officials.
Greer said on CBS that his goal was “to get meaningful deals before 90 days” – the duration of Trump’s pause – “and I think we’re going to be there with several countries in the next few weeks.” |
|
|
Thune's 'old fashioned' approach to Senate has kept Trump on board so far |
The Senate, once again, was working into the early morning hours Friday with its new majority leader, Republican John Thune, setting the pace.
It wasn’t until just after 2 a.m. that the last of the senators had straggled into the chamber to cast their vote on the confirmation of retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The vote capped a grinding start to the year for the Senate that included several all-night floor sessions and — importantly for Thune — the quickest top-level Cabinet confirmation process in the past 20 years.
At the outset, however, such an outcome was far from assured. Trump was making demands that the new Senate leader be ready to put the chamber into recess so he could skip over the Senate confirmation process altogether. Faced with that prospect, Thune said his message in conversations with the president was, “Let us do this the old-fashioned way and just use the clock and grind it out, and then we’ll see where we go from there.” Read more.
|
|
|
Of note:
That approach has been successful so far, allowing the South Dakota Republican to show Trump the Senate’s worth while also preserving its constitutional role in installing a president’s Cabinet. |
|
|
What might El Salvador’s Bukele get by visiting Trump? |
Trump is hosting El Salvador President Nayib Bukele at the White House on Monday as the small Central American nation becomes a lynchpin of the U.S. administration's mass deportation operation.
Since March, El Salvador has accepted from the U.S. More than 200 Venezuelan immigrants – whom Trump administration officials have accused of gang activity and violent crimes — and placed them inside the country's notorious maximum-security gang prison just outside of the capital, San Salvador. It is also holding a Maryland man who the administration admits was wrongly deported but has not been returned to the U.S., despite court orders to do so.
That has made Bukele, who remains extremely popular in El Salvador due in part to the crackdown on the country’s powerful street gangs, a vital ally for the Trump administration, which has offered little evidence for its claims that the Venezuelan immigrants were in fact gang members, nor has it released names of those deported. Read more.
|
|
|
Of note:
Since Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visit in February, Bukele — whose government has arrested more than 84,000 people as part of his three-year crackdown on gangs — has made it clear he’s ready to help the Trump administration with its deportation ambitions.
Bukele struck a deal under which the U.S. will pay about $6 million for El Salvador to imprison the Venezuelan immigrants for a year. When a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to turn around a flight carrying the immigrants already en route to El Salvador, Bukele wrote on social media: “Oopsie ... too late." |
|
|
President Donald Trump and Elon Musk's son X Æ A-Xii watch a mixed martial arts fight at UFC 314, Saturday, in Miami. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky) |
- Trump hosts Bukele at the White House on Monday.
|
|
|
|
