The Man Behind Trump’s Tariffs Strategy

“I pitch these ideas, and he says, ‘Let’s do it.’ ” Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary, has forged a tight relationship with the President, and put himself at the center of the Administration’s chaotic tariff rollout. Plus:

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Last Monday evening, Donald Trump’s motorcade left the White House to take him to an undisclosed location in Washington. It turned out that he was visiting the D.C. home of Howard Lutnick, the Secretary of Commerce, who was turning sixty-four. Lutnick had thrown a big bash for himself a few days before, but on the night of his actual birthday the President was his only guest. Trump stayed for two and a half hours, hanging out with Lutnick and his family. The two men are kindred spirits. As a person close to Lutnick told me, “If you were a fly on the wall listening to them, you’d think they hate each other—fuck you!—but that’s just how they talk. They’re both New Yorkers.”

For a piece in this week’s issue, I spent time with Lutnick, and those in his orbit, to learn more about the man at the center of the Administration’s efforts to use tariffs to reshape global trade. This spring, on what the President dubbed Liberation Day, Trump deputized Lutnick to become the public face of his tariff plan. After the initial rollout caused widespread economic chaos, the Administration announced a pause and promised to produce ninety trade deals in ninety days. As of this afternoon, they’d only made a handful. “There are so many coming,” Lutnick has said. “We got lots of them in the hopper.”

Lutnick is “an amplifying influence” on Trump, another person close to the Commerce Secretary told me. He and the President both love the idea of using tariffs to erase America’s trade deficits and as a form of redress for what they view as decades of, as Trump puts it, getting “ripped off.”

The original ninety-day deadline was July 9th, which the President then extended again. Lutnick and Trump now have a new, fast-approaching deadline: August 1st. Meanwhile, tariffs are being increasingly used as a diplomatic cudgel. The Administration has threatened Brazil with a tariff of fifty per cent, in response to what it has called “witch hunt” against Jair Bolsonaro, the country’s former President and a Trump ally. Trump said that he will impose a one-hundred-per-cent tariff on countries that do business with Russia if it doesn’t reach a ceasefire with Ukraine. Around Washington, the evolving strategy has been described to me as “shadowboxing.” A New York financier characterized the approach as “throw out an unreasonable proposition, see if someone’s willing to bend, then pivot, diminish expectations, and tell people you achieved victory.”

Read more about Trump’s money man »