Maggie Haberman Calls Out Failed Trump Deal-Making: ‘No Clear Endgame’
CNN commentator and New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman told anchor Kaitlan Collins that President Donald Trump has “no clear endgame” in his trade war with China and is increasingly desperate to make some “version of a deal.”
Amid mounting pressure over the effects of his tariff regime, Trump claimed “I’ve made 200 deals” — which touched off even more pressure to name even one of them.
On Friday night’s edition of CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins, Collins and Haberman derided the idea that Trump is “this master deal-maker,” and Haberman revealed deep worry in the White House over the lack of an exit strategy:
COLLINS: Well and the President, as his policies start to seem to be clashing with what people are spending and buying, even cheap, fast fashion from overseas. One of the things they’ve gotten rid of is essentially this loophole, that if you bought under a certain amount from overseas, places like China, that you didn’t have to pay tariffs. They have now gotten rid of that, anything under $800.
This is what the President said about this earlier this week.
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TRUMP: It’s very important. De minimis, it’s very — it’s a big deal. It’s a big scam going on against our country, against, really, small businesses. And we’ve ended it. We’ve put an end to it.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
COLLINS: The thing is, and the reality of that is, if you shop at Temu, or Shein, or any of these sites that are incredibly popular in the United States, the prices are changing as a result of this. And they’re saying on some — in some cases, that that is the case. Does the White House assert — are they taking that into account?
HABERMAN: They are, and they’re aware of it. But again, there is no clear endgame here. They want to de-escalate with China. That’s very clear. That’s very clear in everything you see. The President keeps saying, I’ve spoken to President Xi Jinping. Just doesn’t say when he spoke to him. And there’s no end — China is denying that that happened.
But there is — they are worried. There are people within the White House who are worried about this. You would not have seen the reaction about the report about Amazon doing something similar, as aggressively as you saw the President respond and Karoline Leavitt respond, if they weren’t worried. But again, they’re all kind of stuck right now, until there is an off-ramp. And there isn’t one right now.
COLLINS: I do think that’s important for people to know what it is like inside the White House, in terms of, there is real concern over not just China, but where these trade negotiations stand overall.
HABERMAN: Right.
COLLINS: And getting some kind of progress, some kind of movement. Nothing still has been announced.
HABERMAN: Right.
COLLINS: They do have time (ph), as they will point out. They say the President is this master deal-maker. But there is a real sense of concern inside the West Wing.
HABERMAN: Yes, and because, again, there is no — first of all, they never really laid out what exactly the endgame was here. Because there is this pause in place, the President has left open the idea of extending the pause.
As you say, there are no deals announced. And even when they do announce, when and if they announce deals, and they keep saying, India is soon, or this one’s soon, and it hasn’t been announced, it’s now been two — more than two weeks. It will just be a framework for a deal. Actual trade deals take months, and, in some cases, years. So what this ends up looking like for consumers remains to be seen, and is very much in flux.
COLLINS: But do you expect them to tout any topline agreement as an actual trade deal?
HABERMAN: Yes, I do.
COLLINS: Yes.
HABERMAN: We’ll see. Again, we are still — this is all hypothetical, because they keep saying, This is coming, India is coming, Japan is coming, We’re having some kind of discussions offline with China.
China — I don’t know if what China is saying is true, either.
But either way, whatever comes, whatever version of a deal they get, they will tout that as something substantive, regardless of whether it is.
COLLINS: Yes, they said yesterday one would be announced by the end of the day.
HABERMAN: Right.
COLLINS: That has come and gone. Nothing was announced.
HABERMAN: Right.
Watch above via CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins.
