Senior Trump officials give conflicting lines on tariffs after markets turmoil

Senior officials within Donald Trump’s administration officials gave conflicting messages on Sunday about the US president’s global tariffs that have caused a meltdown in stock markets, prompted warnings of a world recession and provoked rare expressions of dissent from within his Republican party.

Cabinet members fanned out across Sunday’s political talk shows armed with talking points on Trump’s 10% across-the-board tariff on almost all US imports, with higher rates targeted at about 60 countries. If the intention was to calm nerves with a clear statement of intent, then it backfired as top officials gave starkly contrasting signals.

Howard Lutnick, the billionaire commerce secretary, struck an aggressive note on CBS News’s Face the Nation in which he portrayed the tariffs as here to stay. Asked whether there was a chance that tariffs would be postponed to allow countries to negotiate a deal with Washington, he replied: “There is no postponing – they are definitely going to stay in place for days and weeks, that is sort of obvious.”

Lutnick added that Trump intended to “reset global trade”.

“The president has made it crystal, crystal clear,” he said.

However, two other cabinet members gave the opposite take, suggesting that negotiations with individual countries were very much on the cards. Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, told Meet the Press on NBC News that Trump had “created maximum leverage for himself, and more than 50 countries have approached the administration about lowering their non-tariff trade barriers, lowering their tariffs, stopping currency manipulation”.

The agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, echoed Bessent by flagging up possible talks. “We’ve got 50 countries that are burning the phone lines into the White House,” she told CNN’s State of the Union.

The scale of Trump’s tariffs have sent shockwaves around the world, catching US investors as well as top Republican politicians by surprise. In just two days last week, more than $6tn was wiped off Wall Street’s market value.

Trump told US consumers in a post on his Truth Social network to “hang tough, it won’t be easy, but the end result will be historic”. Yet as he spent the weekend golfing at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, his unprecedented tax increase goaded senior Republicans to speak out, in a vanishingly rare display of criticism of their leader.

Trump’s former vice-president Mike Pence denounced the tariffs as the “largest peacetime tax hike in US history”. Thom Tillis, the Republican senator from North Carolina, said: “Anyone who says there may be a little bit of pain before we get things right needs to talk to farmers who are one crop away from bankruptcy.”

Ted Cruz, senator from Texas, warned of a “bloodbath” for Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections should the tariffs force the US into recession.

Democrats are detecting opportunity in such unusual challenges to Trump from within his own party. Adam Schiff, the Democratic senator from California, floated on Meet the Press what sounded like a draft campaign strategy for the midterms.

“If we head into a recession, it will be the Trump recession,” he said. Of Trump, Schiff also said: “He’s wrecking our economy.”

Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota who ran as the Democrats’ vice-presidential candidate in last November’s defeat to Trump, called the tariffs “really, really terrifying” on State of the Union. He warned that if you punish dependable trading partners like Mexico and Canada, “they don’t come back overnight.”

As the tariffs kick in, analysts are increasingly pointing to the chances of a recession, which is normally assessed as being two consecutive quarters of falling GDP. The head of economic research at JP Morgan, Bruce Kasman, has raised the probability of global recession to 60%, a figure that he included in a memo titled There Will Be Blood.

Larry Summers, US treasury secretary during Bill Clinton’s presidency, called the tariffs the “biggest self-inflicted wound we’ve put on our economy in history”. Speaking on ABC News’s This Week, he gave his own estimate of the total loss to US consumers at $30tn – equivalent to doubling petrol prices at the pump.

Trump’s cabinet members attempted to use rhetorical devices as a way of assuaging rattled investors and consumers. Rollins said the markets weren’t crashing – they were “adjusting”.

Asked what he would say to Americans close to retirement who had just watched their lifetime savings drop significantly in recent days, Bessent called that a “false narrative”.

“Americans who want to retire right now, they don’t look at the day-to-day fluctuations of what’s happening,” Bessent said.

Bessent’s answer was coloured, perhaps, by his own net worth, which has been put at more than $521m.

There were moments of the surreal in the exchanges between Trump’s top officials and the political show hosts. Asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper why 10% tariffs had been placed on Heard Island and McDonald Islands which are populated by penguins near Antarctica but no humans, Rollins said: “I mean, come on, whatever. Listen, the people that are leading this are serious, intentional, patriotic – the smartest people I’ve ever worked with.”

Tapper then pushed back on the agriculture secretary’s justification for the 20% “reciprocal” tariffs that have been imposed on EU goods sold to the US. Rollins said that Honduras bought more pork from the US than the entire European Union.

Tapper pointed out that the EU had tight restrictions on hormone use in livestock production. The EU banned use of synthetic hormones in 1981, and blocked imports of animals that had been treated in that way.

Rollins then accused the EU of using “fake science” to prohibit US products. “That’s just absolute bull,” she said. “We produce the safest, the most secure, the best food in the world.”