The president is deploying the word “deal” liberally, using the term to describe all kinds of trade arrangements, some very limited or one-sided.
The Trump administration is seeking “deals” with countries around the globe, telling major trading partners that it is open for negotiations ahead of higher tariffs kicking in Aug. 1.
But what constitutes a trade deal these days has become a tricky question. For the president, a trade deal seems to be pretty much anything he wants it to be.
While traditional trade deals run into the hundreds of pages and take years to negotiate, Mr. Trump and his advisers have been using the term to refer to much more limited arrangements. That includes the framework deal announced with Britain in May, which was only a few pages long and included many promises that still need to be negotiated.
The president also used the “trade deal” term for the handshake agreement announced with Vietnam last week. In a post on Truth Social, the president said it would be “a Great Deal of Cooperation between our two Countries” and bring some tariffs on Vietnamese products down to 20 percent. But since then, neither country has yet publicly released any text or fact sheets describing what has actually been agreed upon.
The president has also recently taken to referring to the trade truce his officials made with China in June as a “trade deal,” even though the agreement constituted only an agreement by the two governments to roll back the tariffs and other retaliatory measures they had taken against each other in recent months. A trade deal typically makes changes to the rules of trade — but this truce just returned the relationship to the status quo.
In a cabinet meeting at the White House on Tuesday, Mr. Trump also used the term “deal” to refer to one-sided arrangements that other countries had not consented to at all: the letters that he has been sending via his social media account informing governments of new tariff rates on their exports.
