“Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer have all been meeting with foreign officials seeking agreements to stave off the crushing tariffs President Donald Trump has threatened to impose next month.
But Trump’s three-headed negotiating team is often working at cross purposes, or at least that’s how it seems to 11 foreign officials, business leaders and advisers on trade talks, who say they are receiving mixed messages from different departments, in what one person close to the talks described as a contest for Trump’s loyalty.
Their differing approaches have occasionally slowed down progress, the foreign officials say, like when the Commerce Department tightened restrictions on some Chinese technology in May, quickly derailing an agreement with Beijing that was negotiated by Bessent.”