The President’s Propagandists
Trump’s
top officials lied through their teeth about his trade war. Why? Because that’s
what he hired them to do.
Apr 17, 2025
ONE OF
THE AUTHORITARIAN PRACTICES Donald Trump has brought to America is propaganda.
Every government lies now and then, but authoritarian regimes go further. They
don’t just stretch or hide the truth. They look you in the eye and tell you
that what you just saw didn’t happen.
This
is what President Trump’s advisers did last week when he suspended his
“reciprocal” (actually not reciprocal) worldwide tariffs. They
reversed their previous statements, invented a new story, and pretended that
the president’s plan had never changed. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.
The
tariff turnabout illustrates what sort of people now populate the upper reaches
of the U.S. government. They’re the sort of people you’d find in a regime like
North Korea’s, willing to say whatever the great leader wants them to say that
day.
Fortunately,
the United States still has independent video and news archives that document
the truth. Here’s what really happened—and how Trump’s apologists are lying
about it.
IN THE
WEEKS LEADING UP TO Trump’s tariff announcement on April 2, his team was divided. One camp, led by trade adviser Peter
Navarro, envisioned tariffs as a long-term policy to favor domestic producers
and lure companies to the United States. The other camp, led by Treasury
Secretary Scott Bessent, saw tariffs as temporary leverage to induce other
countries to lower their trade barriers.
Trump
shared Navarro’s view. That’s why the tariffs he announced covered nearly all
countries, regardless of their trade policies. In the hours after Trump’s Rose
Garden announcement of the plan, Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick
signaled that the boss was firmly dug in. Many countries had “reached out” to
discuss reducing tariffs, Bessent told Bloomberg
TV on April 2, but Trump’s “mindset might be to let things settle for a while.”
The next day, when Lutnick was asked on CNN whether there was “room for
negotiation,” he replied, “I don’t think there’s any chance . .
. that President Trump’s going to back off his tariffs.”
Trump
and Navarro were committed to the tariffs for several reasons. First, the
president was imposing them by executive order, not through legislation, on the
premise that America’s trade deficits constituted an emergency. White House Press Secretary
Karoline Leavitt emphasized that point in an April 3
interview on CNN: “This is not a negotiation. This is a national emergency.”
Second,
Trump’s advisers didn’t believe other countries would give up their most
effective trade barriers. “There’s so much that they’re doing with their
value-added taxes and their non-tariff barriers,” Kevin Hassett, the director
of Trump’s National Economic Council, explained in
a Fox News interview on April 2. “Do you think the EU is going to change all
their regulations that harm American workers? Not fast, for sure. And so I
don’t expect that there’s going to be a massive reduction in this action.” On
CNBC, Navarro went further. In the near term, he argued, the necessary
concessions from the European Union were “impossible.”
Third,
Trump and Navarro understood that companies wouldn’t move production to the
United States, with all the attendant costs, unless they could be sure that the
tariffs would stay in place to compensate them. Navarro, paraphrasing a
like-minded commentator, warned that
companies wouldn’t “invest in a textile plant or an auto plant . . . if they
think the tariffs are going to go away tomorrow.”
On
Truth Social, Trump hammered this point. “TO THE MANY INVESTORS COMING INTO THE
UNITED STATES AND INVESTING MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF MONEY, MY POLICIES WILL NEVER
CHANGE,” he pledged on April 4. Later that day,
he repeated that the tariffs “are here to
stay.”
These
underlying beliefs made Trump and his advisers resistant to trade-talk
overtures from foreign governments. Trump’s focus was on attracting investment,
not on cutting deals to lower trade barriers. “The real thing . . . that he’s
going to gauge the tariff level by,” Bessent told CNN,
“won’t be necessarily the calls from [other countries’] leaders. It’s going to
be the calls from industry saying, ‘Okay, how can we get these off?’ And he’s
going to say . . . ‘Bring your factory to the U.S.’”
Nor
did the White House see much point in waiting to see whether foreign
governments would give up trade barriers they had long maintained. “These
countries around the world have had seventy years to do the right thing by the
American people, and they have chosen not to,” Leavitt charged.
Lutnick
was particularly contemptuous of the idea of more talking. “We’ve been talking
to the trade ministers of the major trading partners for more than a month,”
he told Bloomberg TV. When Lutnick was asked on CNN about further negotiations,
he scoffed: “Negotiate is talking. No
talking! Doing. These countries have abused us and exploited us.”
Ending their abusive policies would take “a long time,” he groused. “Talking is
nonsense.”
By
April 5, more than fifty countries had reportedly contacted
the administration to seek trade discussions. The next day on Face the
Nation, Margaret Brennan asked Lutnick whether Trump was “considering
postponing” the tariffs to make time for negotiations. “There is no
postponing,” Lutnick shot back. “They are definitely going to stay
in place for days and weeks. That is sort of obvious.”
BACKSTAGE,
BESSENT—PRODDED BY business leaders and alarmed by the tariff-triggered
meltdown in financial markets—was lobbying Trump to relent. On April 6, he flew
with Trump to Florida on Air Force One and suggested easing off. Trump resisted. In video of a gaggle on the plane,
you can see Bessent watching helplessly from behind a doorway
as Trump trashed the latest offer of talks from European leaders. “There’s no
talk unless they pay us a lot of money on a yearly basis,” Trump told the
assembled reporters. And those payments, he insisted, were not just for ongoing
trade barriers “but also for past, because they’ve taken a lot of our wealth
away.”
On
April 7, media outlets picked up a false story that Hassett had publicly
said Trump was considering a ninety-day pause on the tariffs. The White House
promptly shot down the story. CNBC correspondent Eamon Javers announced that in
a phone call, Leavitt had assured him
that “the president is committed to his tariff regime, and any reports that
he’s considering a ninety-day pause are, quote, fake news.” The Trump team’s
“Rapid Response” account on X then posted the Javers clip with the header,
“@PressSec: Reports that @POTUS is considering a 90-day pause on tariffs are
FAKE NEWS.” And the White House account, in turn, reposted the header and
video.
Trump
reaffirmed that he wasn’t budging. On Truth Social, he quoted Fox News host Maria Bartiromo:
“President Trump is not going to bend.” Later that day in the Oval Office, a
reporter asked Trump, “Would you be open to a pause in tariffs to allow for
negotiations?” The president responded,
“We’re not looking at that.”
The
next day, April 8, Leavitt repeated that Trump wouldn’t pause the tariffs. A
reporter asked her whether Trump was “considering, at all, potentially holding
off on imposing some of them before the deadline or maybe later reversing them
because he’s having these negotiations” with other countries. Leavitt batted
away the suggestion. “The president was asked and answered this yesterday,”
she noted. “He said he’s not considering an
extension or a delay.”
On Fox
News, Navarro said the story about a ninety-day pause
was a phony, futile attempt by “Globalism Land” to “shake the knees of the
American people and the president.” “It’s not working,” said Navarro. And that
night, in a speech to the National Republican Congressional Committee, Trump
ridiculed entreaties from foreign governments to negotiate reductions in the
tariffs. “They want to make a deal with us,” he bragged,
but “we don’t necessarily want to make a deal with them.”
BUT
EVENTUALLY, THE CHAOS in financial markets forced Trump’s hand.
All
the evidence supports this explanation. The tariffs were going into effect on
the morning of April 9. Comments from Republican senators, recorded on TV and
in the Washington Post, show them imploring Trump on the night of April 8
and the morning of April 9 to pull back. Backstage reports from well-sourced
news organizations describe similar pleas from donors and business
leaders. On the morning of April 9, Trump posted on Truth Social that he had just
watched Bartiromo’s interview with Jamie Dimon—the CEO of JPMorgan Chase—in
which Dimon warned of a recession if
Trump didn’t step back. And later that morning, according to the New
York Times, Bessent, Hassett, and Lutnick met with Trump and cautioned him about ominous signs in the
bond market.
Shortly
after 1 p.m., Trump gave in. On Truth Social, he announced “a 90 day PAUSE” during which
the tariffs would be stripped down, for the time being, to 10 percent.
The Times reported
that “economic turmoil, particularly a rapid rise in government bond yields,”
had driven Trump’s reversal. The paper based this account on “four people with
direct knowledge of the president’s decision.” Four is a notable number,
because according to Navarro, six people (aside from
Trump) were “in the loop” on the decision: himself, Bessent, Hassett, Lutnick,
JD Vance, and Stephen Miran, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.
If you
do the math, it seems likely that at least two of the four advisers who did
most of the administration’s spinning about the tariffs—Bessent, Hassett,
Lutnick, and Navarro—were among the paper’s sources. Lutnick proudly posted on
X that he and Bessent were the two in the room when Trump announced
the pause. And Hassett, according to the Times, was the third
adviser present at the meeting that preceded the announcement.
Why
are the names and the math significant? Because of what happened next: Once
Trump announced the pause, all of these men—including those who privately
admitted the truth to the Times—went in front of cameras and told
the public a pack of lies.
AROUND
1:35 ON THE AFTERNOON OF APRIL 9—less than twenty minutes after Trump announced
the pause—Bessent and Leavitt walked out of the White House to tell a new
story. “All this,” Bessent assured the
press corps, “was driven by the president’s strategy. He and I had a long talk
on Sunday, and this was his strategy all along.”
In
fact, said Bessent, “It took great courage—great courage—for him to stay the
course until this moment.”
On X,
Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, hailed the new policy as part of
“President Trump’s master strategy, bold statesmanship and brilliant tactical
planning.” Miller added: “You have been watching the greatest
economic master strategy from an American President in history.”
On ABC
News, Linsey Davis asked Navarro to explain Trump’s obvious about-face.
He rejected the premise: “This negotiation went
exactly the way we had hoped it would go,” he professed. Davis followed up: “So
is this all playing out today as you had anticipated?” Navarro replied, “Yes,
exactly. Exactly.”
When
Davis inquired about the market meltdown. Navarro brushed it aside. “How much
of a role did the stock market play in this decision?” she asked. “None
whatsoever,” he asserted.
The
administration’s new line, articulated by Bessent in his press conference
outside the White House, was that Trump had paused the tariffs not because of
the markets but because so many countries were seeking negotiations. Never mind
Bessent’s previous explanation that Trump wasn’t primarily interested in
negotiations—or, for that matter, Bessent’s previous boast that more than fifty
countries had already been seeking negotiations four
days earlier, when Trump was still refusing to pause the tariffs. Trump’s
advisers needed to find some new factor to explain his switch. So they
pretended that the flood of calls from other countries was new.
Shortly
after Bessent’s remarks, Trump told reporters
in the Oval Office that the pause “was something certainly we’ve been talking
about for a period of time.” He indicated that by “we,” he meant Bessent,
Lutnick, himself, and “some other people.” In a separate interview,
Hassett called it “the pause that we had been
talking about all along.” And a Republican member of Congress told Politico that around the
White House, the pause “had been in discussion for a week.”
If
that’s true, then Trump, Lutnick, and Leavitt lied when they denied on April 6,
7, and 8 that Trump was considering a pause.
Lutnick
was particularly shameless in his revisions and rationalizations. Shortly after
Trump announced the pause, Lutnick appeared outside the White House and told
reporters that Trump had not, in fact, changed his tariff policy. “He announced
Liberation Day, and he did not bend,” the commerce secretary declared.
This was true, he insisted, because although Trump had hacked his tariffs down
to 10 percent, they would—at that level—“stay in place.”
And
despite having previously derided the idea that talks with foreign governments
were sufficient to solve America’s trade problems, Lutnick now claimed that
talks sufficed. “We have so many great countries who want to talk, who are
willing to talk,” he boasted. “And we’re really excited to talk to them.”
In the
days since Trump announced the pause, his spokesmen have continued to trumpet
the new party line. Last Thursday, April 10, Hassett went on CNBC and praised the
pause as “a very systematic, well-planned move.” On Fox & Friends,
Hassett added, “This is the plan that he [Trump] was
pursuing all along.” And on Sunday, Navarro—whose grand vision of an enduring
tariff wall Trump had just abandoned—showed up on Meet the Press to
claim victory. “This is unfolding exactly like we thought it would in a
dominant scenario,” he asserted.
HOW DO
THESE MEN SPOUT such utter garbage with a straight face?
The
answer is that they’re in these jobs precisely because they’re the sort of
people who can do it. They’re invertebrates. They’re able and willing to
contort themselves in whatever way Trump, at any moment, requires.
On
April 3, the day after Trump announced the tariffs, Bessent sat for an
hour-long interview with Tucker Carlson. Carlson asked him how Trump’s
communications operation worked: “How do you keep messages from contradicting
one another?”
“We
all take President Trump’s lead,” Bessent explained.
“We had a meeting after the announcement in the Rose Garden, before we went out
doing media” to promote the tariffs. “And then we fan out, and we are all
unified behind this and his vision. That’s why we’re here. If you didn’t want
to be part of it, [you] shouldn’t be here.”
Six
days later, when Trump reversed the policy, Lutnick stood in front of the White
House and demonstrated the kind of message discipline Bessent was talking
about. A CNBC anchor asked Lutnick, “Did the market reaction
cause the administration to rethink its tariff plan?” And Lutnick confidently
answered: “Absolutely not.”
“All
of us who work for Donald Trump, we are his spokesmen. But he is the driver,”
Lutnick proclaimed. “You just have to let Donald Trump drive the car.” Like a
Pyongyang broadcaster exalting Kim Jong-un, the commerce secretary went on:
“Donald Trump is in charge. He understands how to do this. And no one could do
it better. . . . Never bet against Donald Trump.”
In
Trump’s first administration, there were people who wouldn’t debase themselves
this way: Jim Comey, Chris Wray, John Kelly, Jim Mattis, Mark Esper, Sue
Gordon, and many more. One way or another, Trump got rid of them all.
The
government we have now, full of stooges like Howard Lutnick, is what’s left.
