MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Tariffs, and agreements to reduce them, are top of the agenda at the G7 summit in Canada this week. Now, President Trump has described himself as a master deal-maker, the guy who wrote "The Art Of The Deal." NPR's Mara Liasson takes a look at how he's doing as he negotiates trade issues with the rest of the world.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: There's nothing more central to Donald Trump's brand than his self-declared talent at negotiating.
(SOUNDBITE OF MONTAGE)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: That's what I do. My whole life is, like, deals. One big deal.
They want to make a deal. They want to make a deal. And, you know, we'll make deals, but we don't have to.
At the end of this, I'll set my own deals because I set the deal. They don't set the deal. I set the deal.
LIASSON: But so far, in this term, Trump has made just one trade deal - with the United Kingdom - and even that deal is only a framework, details TBD.
WENDY SHERMAN: He has thrown a whole lot of spaghetti against the wall.
LIASSON: Wendy Sherman was deputy secretary of state in the Biden administration.
SHERMAN: He said he was going to have 90 tariff deals in 90 days. He said that he would solve Ukraine in a day. He has said that we'll know whether Vladimir Putin is ready for a deal in two weeks. He has said that now four times.
LIASSON: So why has Trump had such trouble getting agreements if he's so good at deal-making? Douglas Holtz-Eakin is a conservative economist and the former head of the Congressional Budget Office.
DOUGLAS HOLTZ-EAKIN: The question I'm getting most is, so what's the real strategy behind this? And I have to say with complete honesty, I don't think there is one. He's impulsive. I think it's just, can I surprise people? Can I get them on their heels and thus look like I won the showdown?
LIASSON: Mike Froman, the former U.S. trade representative under President Obama, says it's too early to judge Trump's record as a deal-maker. But one thing that puzzles him is why Trump sets expectations so impossibly high.
MIKE FROMAN: In my experience in government, presidents usually marshal their credibility very carefully. They always want to underpromise and overdeliver.
LIASSON: But Trump overpromises and, so far, at least, he has underdelivered. Ian Bremmer, who runs the Eurasia Group consulting firm, has another theory about why Trump has trouble making deals.
IAN BREMMER: Trump has a very good sense of top-line policies that are very popular and got him elected - fair trade, end the wars, secure the border - but Trump personally has virtually no interest or expertise in the details of policy.
LIASSON: And trade deals, in particular, are all about the details. One negotiation that seems to have surprised Trump is China. Earlier this month, Trump posted in frustration that Chinese president Xi Jinping is, quote, "very tough and extremely hard to make a deal with."
RICHARD MCGREGOR: And if Trump thinks he's a, you know, kind of hard-a**, a tough negotiator, well, Xi Jinping thinks exactly the same.
LIASSON: Richard McGregor is a China analyst at the Lowy Institute, a think tank in Australia. He watched as Trump slapped high tariffs on China, warned the Chinese not to retaliate. When they did, Trump blinked and lowered the tariffs. He's reversed course like this so many times that Wall Street traders started using the acronym TACO, for Trump always chickens out. When a reporter asked him about this, an angry Trump said it was all part of the plan.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TRUMP: And you ask a nasty question like that. It's called negotiation. You said it...
LIASSON: It's called a negotiation, Trump says. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent calls it strategic uncertainty. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick describes it as a kind of genius.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
HOWARD LUTNICK: You don't understand who's the president of the United States. So he's the closer. He gets deals done that we could never get done because he understands deals.
LIASSON: A White House spokesman sent NPR a long list of deal-making accomplishments, including, quote, "the return of American hostages from Hamas, a Houthi ceasefire, countries such as Colombia retaking their citizen deportees, the return of Americans detained abroad and Mexico and Canada shoring up border security." Experts like Bremmer say Trump's on again, off again deal-making can shake trust in the United States, but other countries don't have a lot of alternatives right now.
BREMMER: The U.S. is the most powerful economy in the world, and so, even if they don't trust the United States, their ability to meaningfully move away from the United States is really constrained in the short-to-medium term.
LIASSON: In the long term, other countries may move on, find new markets and trading partners, but that won't happen overnight, and in the meantime, Trump will keep trying to make a deal.
Mara Liasson, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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