Later that evening, Trump called Lutnick in a rage, wanting to know how the tariff amounts had been determined. Lutnick himself wasn’t certain. Trump told Lutnick to go on TV and defend them anyway. Lutnick would take the fall, even if he didn’t really know what had happened.

In 1981, David Stockman, President Ronald Reagan’s budget director, admitted that “none of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers.” He was talking about the “internal mysteries” of his Administration’s budget. The tariff rates announced on Liberation Day resulted in a series of similar, shrugging admissions. Some commentators pointed out that you could generate the same tariff amounts by asking ChatGPT to design a global tariff policy; speculation emerged that DOGE engineers had in fact done just that. The White House said that the Council of Economic Advisers had calculated the numbers, but then Hassett said that it had been Jamieson Greer, the U.S. Trade Representative. Others blamed Peter Navarro, Trump’s longtime adviser and trade hawk. One person involved in the deliberations, who told me that he still wasn’t sure where the final figures originated, described the calculations as akin to “ninth-grade math.”

On Fox News, the day after the Rose Garden event, Sean Hannity asked Lutnick what economic fallout American consumers should expect from the new tariffs. Lutnick responded by complaining about the European Union. “They won’t take lobsters from America,” he said. “They hate our beef because our beef is beautiful and theirs is weak.” The same day, he told Jesse Watters, another Fox News host, that the tariffs meant that “robotics are going to replace the cheap labor that we’ve seen all across the world.” Three days later, asked on CBS News to clarify, he said, “The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones? That kind of thing is going to come to America.”

Lutnick’s muddled riffing, and what one person close to his team called his “naïve optimism that he can sell anything,” was seen in some quarters as a liability. “Generally speaking, he needs to be kept off TV,” a veteran Trump adviser said. Another MAGA operative described Lutnick as a “carnival barker.” Steve Bannon called his appearances “an unmitigated disaster.” When I recently asked top-ranking White House officials about Lutnick, they presented a united front. Vice-President J. D. Vance told me, “Howard is a natural salesman.” Hassett said, “Howard has an enormously high level of energy.” Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, added, “No one fights harder than Howard.” Nevertheless, one person close to the Administration told me that many in the White House view Lutnick as “disreputable, so when you need to have a bad guy, people blame him. He’s not seen as a real actor. He’s an errand boy.”

In late April, Lutnick attended the Hill and Valley Forum, an annual event in D.C. for “technology builders” and policymakers. After gathering on Capitol Hill for a day of panels, such as “The Arsenal Reimagined: Designing the DoD for the 21st Century Battlefield,” select attendees retired to a banquet at Union Station. Venture capitalists mingled over themed cocktails with defense contractors, business executives, and members of Congress; Senator John Fetterman, of Pennsylvania, lumbered around in a sweatshirt. Lutnick gave the keynote address. He began by citing some simple examples of trade deficits, seemingly to help guide the audience, as though it were full of schoolchildren, through the economic reset that the Administration was pursuing. “I have a trade deficit with my barber,” he said, implying that this was unfair, and that the barber should compensate Lutnick to even things out. “I have a trade deficit with my grocery store. Right? I just buy stuff from them. That’s ridiculous.”

Jacob Helberg, Trump’s nominee for Under-Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment, who co-founded the forum, told me that he had invited Lutnick because “he understands how to turn big ideas into reality and align industry with national purpose.” But during Lutnick’s speech the crowd was visibly confused and uncomfortable. “His analogies and anecdotes seemed to misread the room of sophisticated tech and finance attendees,” someone with ties to the Administration, who had come to the event with several prominent venture-capital contacts, told me. “It’s obvious why Lutnick’s affect appeals to Trump. But it’s Bessent’s presence in the Administration that reassures us there is someone smart looking out for us.”

Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, flew to Mar-a-Lago after Liberation Day to encourage the President to pause the tariffs. Both he and Lutnick have loyally defended the President’s pet cause, but Bessent appeared to have a more realistic sense of the limits of devotion. Or, as a person close to the Administration put it, “Bessent was someone who was trying to temper Trump’s protectionist impulses and explain them in an intelligent way. Lutnick was an unsophisticated true believer encouraging what people viewed as the President’s worst policy instincts.”

Throughout the spring, Trump issued so many tariff-related threats and reversals that critics coined an epithet to describe his behavior: TACO, short for Trump Always Chickens Out. Even the rationale for the tariffs constantly shifted: they were intended to punish America’s trading partners for “cheating,’’ or they were meant to slow the flow of fentanyl into the country, or they were supposed to raise billions, “even trillions,” in revenue. “For Trump, tariffs are his hammer, and everything’s a nail,” Maurice Obstfeld, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told me. Lutnick appeared frequently around Washington, assuming the role of salesman for a product that people didn’t want. In May, on a rainy day at a new waterfront development in D.C., I joined him in a corporate ballroom for an event, co-hosted by Axios, on A.I., trade, and the “new rules of power.” When Lutnick took the stage, his interlocutor asked what exactly was going on with the tariffs. Trump had recently committed to roll back some of the levies on China, prompting what the Financial Times described as “an outpouring of joy that someone is now threatening to chop off only your toe, rather than your whole leg.” But what about the other countries? Lutnick told the crowd, “Every product in the world’s got ten per cent on it right now, with no exceptions. . . . I want you to understand that in the month of May the United States of America is going to take in thirty-five billion dollars of tariff revenue.” As for negative impacts, he asked, “Have any of you felt any of it? Seriously?” The audience groaned as many attendees shouted back, “Yes!”

After Trump paused the tariffs, he promised to produce ninety trade deals in ninety days. Lutnick would take the lead. By early June, with the deadline a month away, the Administration had made no deals, and had agreed to a framework for just one. At a congressional hearing, Lutnick was pressed by Representative Madeleine Dean, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, about the remaining eighty-nine. “I’m doing it,” Lutnick snapped. He explained that countries could avoid the tariffs by simply encouraging companies to relocate factories to the U.S. “The concept is very, very clear,” he said. (Dean held up a banana. “We cannot build bananas in America,” she said.) The single agreement that the Administration had reached was with the United Kingdom; it would expand U.S. market access in the U.K. for items like animal feed, shellfish, and textiles while reducing tariffs on U.K.-produced steel and aluminum. On June 16th, Trump and Keir Starmer, the U.K.’s Prime Minister, signed the deal at a G-7 summit in Alberta, Canada. When Trump held up the finalized agreement, the papers blew out of his hands. Starmer crouched down to pick them up.

A few days earlier, the British Embassy in Washington had held a summer garden party in honor of King Charles III’s birthday. Peter Mandelson, the British Ambassador, gave a joint toast to Trump, Charles, and America’s upcoming semiquincentennial. In his remarks, he gently implied that the trade deal was a way of placating the President. “Our balanced trading relationship, now enhanced”—he paused to let the crowd laugh—“by a trade deal, a beautiful trade deal. We are literally transatlantically the golden corridor for trade and investment.” Historic Land Rover models were parked on the grass outside. (Per the deal, a limited number of U.K. cars could be imported with a ten-per-cent tariff, instead of twenty-five.)

During the negotiations with the U.K., Lutnick met with Varun Chandra, an adviser to Starmer who doesn’t have a formal background in trade but has been described as an “arch-networker” and comes from the private sector. “They knew they couldn’t have Howard with some stiff trade negotiator whose job is to draw this out for, like, two years,” someone on Lutnick’s team told me. “They did, like, a matchmaking.” Chandra and Lutnick ended up having a three-course meal together at Lutnick’s house, late at night, after Chandra’s flight landed in Washington. They were to begin the first of many meetings the next day. “Howard is unorthodox as a trade negotiator,” Chandra said. “I’d describe him much more as a classic dealmaker—straight, direct, tough, creative—which is reflective of our interactions with the Administration.” Another negotiator who has dealt with Lutnick told me, “You basically listen to him go on and on about how Trump sees the world and how we’re doing everything wrong. He comes in guns blazing, he talks and talks and talks, he never stops talking.”

Trade deals typically take years to complete—the average negotiation lasts nine hundred and seventeen days. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which was signed in 1947, was for many decades the main multilateral pact governing international trade. Its main purpose was to reduce tariffs and promote free trade. Member nations were constantly renegotiating it; the final such round, which started in the mid-eighties, lasted more than seven years and resulted in almost three hundred thousand pages of legal text. It covered everything from toothbrushes to AIDS treatments, and ultimately led to the creation of the World Trade Organization, in 1995, to administer the new rules. Trump has long complained about the W.T.O., and his Liberation Day deals represent an attempt to sideline it.

The U.K. deal, like others that are still in progress, is more of a basis for continued negotiation than an actual commitment. The terms are vague and unenforceable, reversible, and nonbinding. “At some level, you have to ask, Does Trump really want deals?” Obstfeld, of the Peterson Institute, said. “Or does he just want to create constant froth that keeps everyone off balance but ultimately doesn’t do the job of reshaping trade in a way that might be more favorable to the U.S.?”

The dealmaking has been complicated by the “constant shifting of goalposts,” a negotiator from another major trading partner told me. For one thing, he said, “you don’t know if the tariffs are legal.” A number of states and businesses have sued the President, arguing that his invocation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the authority under which he has imposed the tariffs, is unconstitutional. And when Trump issues a tariff-related edict via social media, it can be difficult to parse the meaning. In May, he posted on Truth Social that “any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands” will be subject to a hundred-per-cent tariff. “When you’re talking about tariffing movies, do you mean the literal cannisters for film, or streaming?” the negotiator said. The radically accelerated timeline for negotiating made the deals feel “more like the deals you’d do in private business, more like a gentlemen’s agreement. But how is it a gentlemen’s agreement if then you find out heading into the weekend that suddenly the steel tariffs are changed based off of a Truth Social post?”