President Donald Trump listens during a discussion at the Generation Next forum. Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
When the president threatened China with $100 billion in new tariffs, there had hardly been any White House discussion.
What I’m hearing: There wasn’t one single deliberative meeting in which senior officials sat down to debate the pros and cons of this historic threat. Trump didn’t even ask for advice from his new top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, instead presenting the tariffs as a fait accompli. Chief of Staff John Kelly knew Trump wanted more tariffs but was blindsided by the speed of the announcement. And Legislative Affairs Director Marc Short — the White House’s liaison to Capitol Hill — was totally in the dark.
To be sure, the president wasn’t completely freelancing. The topic came up at the senior staff meeting the morning of the announcement. And he personally ordered Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to put together the threat and to get it done by Thursday. Trump said he had to protect American farmers, whom the Chinese were threatening with billions in tariffs.
But for some White House officials, the moment was jarring: Trump had melted down Capitol Hill and roiled the markets with zero substantive internal debate.
Several senior officials blame Mnuchin for the messy rollout. One source ripped him for “hiding the ball” by not looping enough people in after getting such a significant request from Trump.
Another senior administration official defended Mnuchin, noting that after getting the order from Trump, he told the Staff Secretary and had multiple conversations with trade representative Bob Lighthizer, who worked in lockstep with him on this. The senior official also pointed out that no tariffs have been implemented yet, and that this was just a statement. (Though sources who were caught off guard say this wasn’t any old statement; Trump was effectively declaring a trade war against China.)
Why this matters: Trump isn’t just emboldened; he’s unleashed — bringing the U.S. to the brink of a trade war at a breakneck pace.
What’s next: Free-traders like Kudlow hope to lower the temperature and avoid a tit-for-tat with China on tariffs that could be economically disastrous. But with Trump as mercurial as he is, any soothing words from Kudlow should be taken with a very large grain of salt.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel will arrive in Washington tomorrow a diminished figure — limping into her fourth term after six months of torturous coalition talks and touching down in the afterglow of Emmanuel Macron’s state visit.
Flashback: Days after Trump’s election in November 2016, Barack Obama flew to Germany and hailed Merkel — then TIME’s reigning Person of the Year — as “my closest international partner these last eight years.” Headlines declared that she had, however reluctantly, become the "leader of the free world."
Flash forward: Since losing ground in September’s election, Merkel has been in something of a strategic retreat internationally. A recent Der Speigel cover story bemoaned “Germany’s Incredibly Shrinking Role on the World Stage.”
According to Erik Brattberg, director of the Carnegie Endowment’s Europe program, that retreat involved leaving some distance between her and a U.S. president who is toxic in Germany — though cold air was clearly flowing in both directions.
While she’ll never match Macron’s chummy relationship with Trump, she’ll have more freedom to engage with him now that she has formed a government.
With Macron having moved the ball as far as he could on the Iran deal, and an E.U. exemption from Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs expiring Tuesday, her chief focus is likely to be trade.
Peter Foster, the Telegraph’s Europe editor, says that if Merkel makes progress there, it will be a characteristic "triumph of substance over style."
"After Macron, Merkel will inevitably look ponderous, dour even. But she has been around long enough to know that the Trumps and Macrons of this world have a habit of coming and going."
"Even as she enters the endgame of her political life, she will be quietly confident about whose legacy will endure. She will note that Macron may have upstaged her on the back-slapping stakes, but to scant effect — it looks certain that Trump will pull out of the Iran deal. Merkel still has the chance to pull off a substantive diplomatic achievement."
The bigger picture: With perhaps 3 years left as chancellor, and more than a dozen behind her, don't expect Merkel to take drastic steps to burnish her legacy.
“She sees her legacy as keeping Europe and the West together at a difficult time. That’s how she wants to go down in history.”
