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• BBC World
• Mon Apr 14 2025

Good cops, bad cops - how Trump's shifting tariff team kept world guessing

In the chaotic minutes after US President Donald Trump's administration abruptly reversed course and paused dozens of sweeping "reciprocal" tariffs, one man quickly became the public face of the decision: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

"It took great courage," the bespectacled 62-year-old former hedge fund manager told the dozens of reporters gathered around him on 9 April. "Great courage to stay the course until this moment."

Notably absent during the press briefing - after which markets rocketed - were the other two men tasked with delivering Trump's tariff message to the American people: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and trade adviser Pete Navarro.

Bessent's centre-stage role in the tariffs announcement, some trade policy veterans have suggested, starkly highlights how shifting power dynamics within the White House brought the US back from the brink of an all-out global trade war, even if all the players are broadly supportive of Trump's economic agenda.

"He's playing the good cop," William Alan Reinsch, the former head of the National Foreign Trade Council, told the BBC. "And Lutnick and Navarro are playing the bad cop."

Publicly, the White House has been largely quiet on the chain of events that led to Trump's market-shaking decision to pause reciprocal tariffs for most countries while raising levies on China, with the president saying only that he had been "thinking about it" for a "few days" before it "came together" early on the morning of 9 April.

But according to US media reports, it was Bessent, inundated with calls from business leaders, that played a key part in swaying Trump, including with conversations on Air Force One the weekend beforehand and in the Oval Office on the morning of the decision.

Earlier in his career, Bessent expressed reservations about tariffs. Some observers believe these views, together with long experience in the bond market, ultimately made it possible for him to gain the president's ear over Navarro and Lutnick, both of whom represented a harder-line stance on the tariffs.

"I think what happened was that Trump wasn't paying attention to the bond market," added Mr Reinsch, now an economics expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "And Bessent got him to pay attention."

Mr Reinsch, who was also undersecretary of commerce for export administration in the 1990s during President Bill Clinton's administration, said that Bessent's approach, so far, has been "a classic way to deal with Trump".

"Don't tell him he's wrong or made a mistake," he added. "Tell him there's a better way forward to achieve his objectives, and that the market is not reacting the way we want it to react."