The 18 hours that changed the US president’s mind on trade

“We wrote it up from our hearts. But this was something certainly we’ve been talking about for a period of time, and we decided to pull the trigger, and we did it today, and we’re happy about it.”

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Late Tuesday night – after Sean Hannity’s 9pm show ended on Fox News – Trump had an extensive, more than hour-long phone call with a group of Republican senators who had appeared on the episode, according to a person with knowledge of the conversation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail a private call.

Some of the senators had expressed concern about the tariffs. That evening, Trump was also watching bond markets, “where people were getting a little queasy”, he said.

Trump met in the White House with Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, and spoke on the phone with Swiss President Karin Keller-Sutter, whose nation’s Rolexes and chocolates were hit with a 31 per cent tariff overnight and who pushed him to relent on a measure that was bashing her economy.

Over the course of her 25-minute call, she underlined the role that Swiss businesses play in generating US jobs and noted that her country last year abolished tariffs on imports of American industrial goods, a spokesman for the Swiss Finance Ministry said.

Trump watched Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of banking giant JPMorgan Chase, give an interview on Fox News at about 8am. The executive cautioned that a recession was a “likely outcome” given the economic uncertainty, explaining that he was hearing from almost everyone he spoke to that they were “cutting back” as a result.

“I’m taking a calm view, but I think it could get worse if we don’t make some progress here,” Dimon said in the interview, which aired several hours before Trump’s announcement.

“BE COOL!” Trump told the public in a morning post on Truth Social, telling Americans not to worry about what was happening. A few minutes later, he posted, “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY”.

Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, meanwhile, fielded a call from the top European Union trade official, Maros Sefcovic, whose bloc had approved countermeasures on US steel and aluminum tariffs that were tailored to hit a range of Trump voters, from soybean farmers to plastics manufacturers. EU leaders – who represent the biggest foreign market for US goods and services – were readying a bigger retaliation, even as they sought a deal to sweep away as many trade barriers as possible with Washington.

By midday, Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent were sitting in the Oval Office with Trump, hashing out a reversal that would take even some of his own team by surprise.

The two men sat with Trump as he crafted the language for “one of the most extraordinary Truth posts of his presidency”, Lutnick posted on X at 1.30pm – 12 minutes after Trump sent his missive out into the world.

“I thought that people were jumping a little bit out of line. They were getting yippy,” Trump said, speaking on the South Lawn of the White House in front of race car champions, a little more than an hour after he announced the partial tariff reversal.

“Nothing’s over yet, but we have a tremendous amount of spirit from other countries.

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“We’re going to have something that nobody would have even dreamt possible.”

After the announcement, Trump aides raced to declare that it had been the strategy all along.

“President Trump’s master strategy, bold statesmanship and brilliant tactical planning has done more to reform broken international trade in days than anyone has achieved in decades while economically and politically isolating the global architect of economic aggression: China,” deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller wrote on X.

But inside the White House, even some senior-level officials appeared to be blindsided by the reversal.

Moments after Trump’s post about the “pause”, aides sprang up to confer about how to proceed, moving quickly to call an outdoor press gaggle with Bessent and Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary.

A senior foreign diplomat who has been deeply involved in trade discussions learnt of the policy reversal from a reporter’s text message, moments after Trump posted the announcement. The diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly about sensitive negotiations, scrambled to find out more details.

After the post, White House aides huddled to discuss the facts and talking points of Trump’s newly conceived plan.

But key details of the new arrangement remained unclear to White House staff in the aftermath, as reporters sought to clarify basic questions, such as whether Canada and Mexico would also be subject to the new 10 per cent tariffs, as Bessent had said in the presser, despite their not having been part of Trump’s initial “Liberation Day” tariff plan last week.

Before Trump’s social media announcement on Wednesday, the White House’s main orders of business for the day were Trump greeting NASCAR champions and signing executive orders in the afternoon.

But as worrisome economic news flickered across televisions in the West Wing, Bessent and Lutnick joined Trump to write the wording of his announcement.

Peter Navarro, Trump’s longtime trade adviser who had urged Trump to pursue an aggressive tariff policy, didn’t take part in the Oval Office conversation, a potential sign his viewpoint was losing out.

He also received no mention by Bessent and Leavitt when the pair discussed Trump working with Lutnick on a path forward.

Bessent and Navarro were widely seen as coming from opposite perspectives during tariff deliberations, though Trump’s advisers have repeatedly said they are operating in unison in supporting all of his decisions on the matter.

Navarro, who was seen inside the West Wing on Wednesday, took part in a Fox Business interview outside the White House soon after Trump’s announcement, describing the matter as a “beautiful negotiation”.

He avoided reporters lingering to ask follow-up questions, though during his Fox interview insisted he was not being sidelined.

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“We work together beautifully,” Navarro said. “Scotty’s one of my best friends, we’ve worked together for years now … We’re all doing our job for the president, and this is the result.

“One band, one sound, my brother,” Navarro said as he ended the interview.

Later, as Trump talked to reporters in the Oval Office, he laid bare his broader strategy as the massive tariffs of last week gave way to the partial reprieve.

“A lot of times it’s not a negotiation until it is,” Trump said. “And that happens.”