Donald Trump’s Tariff Dealmaker-in-Chief
How Howard Lutnick, the Secretary of Commerce, plans to transform government into a money-making enterprise.
July 21, 2025One trade negotiator assessed Lutnick’s approach as “Don’t try to make this anything but what it is, which is a shakedown.”Illustration by Kristian Hammerstad; Source photograph by Aaron Schwartz / CNP / Bloomberg / Getty
When Howard Lutnick moved to Washington, earlier this year, to become the Secretary of Commerce, he painted one wall in his new living room gold. It was the only significant modification he made to the house, a château-style mansion purchased for twenty-five million dollars from the Fox News anchor Bret Baier. On a recent Sunday afternoon, Lutnick was in the living room, flipping through a commemorative coffee-table book designed by his family which pairs photographs of him with some of his favorite sayings. “It’s between me and the mirror,” one read. He turned the page: “You are either in or you are out.” Lutnick’s dog, a Havanese-poodle mix named Cali—three of his four children went to college in California—kept nosing her way through a gate to come sit with us. Lutnick was about to fly to London for a round of trade negotiations with China, whose restrictions on the sale of rare-earth metals were threatening to render parts of the American economy nonfunctional. Several suitcases were packed and waiting in the entryway, next to a gold Pop-art sculpture by Robert Indiana that spelled the word “LOVE.” Later, Lutnick led me from room to room to point out a few more works from his personal collection: Rothko, Diebenkorn, Lichtenstein, de Kooning.
A staffer gently reminded Lutnick that he had to leave for the airport, but he was in the middle of a story. Lutnick’s anecdotes, much like those of his boss, tend to meander. A billionaire who became the head of a major bond-trading firm at twenty-nine, he radiates a brash, ebullient energy that is often referred to as “scrappy” or “outer borough.” He likes to dish. He talks with his hands and emphasizes his points with catchphrases such as “How about no” or “How about we don’t.”
Lutnick and President Donald Trump speak on the phone most nights, at around one in the morning, just after Lutnick gets in bed. They talk about “real stuff,” like Canadian steel tariffs, Lutnick told me, and also about “nothing,” which he summarized as “sporting events, people, who’d you have dinner with, what was this guy like, can you believe what this guy did, what’s the TV like, I saw this on TV, what’d you think of what this guy said on TV, what did you think about my press conference, how about this Truth?” Of course, Lutnick said, “Trump has other people he calls late at night.” But does he have other people he always calls?
In “The Art of the Deal,” Trump’s ghostwritten business-advice memoir from 1987, he observes, “Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.” One senses that Lutnick is animated by similar principles. The Department of Commerce, an agency with fifty thousand employees and thirteen bureaus, manages a vast and varied portfolio: the National Weather Service, the Census Bureau, the Patent and Trademark Office. It is, as one Lutnick adviser told me, “a junk drawer for everything under the sun, from red snapper to wind to ships to artificial intelligence—you name it.” But Lutnick sees himself primarily as the President’s dealmaker-in-chief. Lately, this has meant fielding pleas from companies and countries seeking relief from Trump’s tariffs, which the department sets and helps to enforce. In early April, the Administration put a baseline ten-per-cent tariff on nearly every country in the world, alongside so-called reciprocal tariffs on countries with which the U.S. has the biggest trade deficits. China, the bête noire of the President’s trade obsession, would pay thirty-four per cent. (This later skyrocketed up to a hundred and twenty-five per cent, then careened back down.) Lesotho, a country that, in Trump’s words, “nobody has ever heard of,” would pay the highest rate: fifty per cent. A number of America’s closest allies, such as the E.U. and South Korea, were also targeted, as was a group of uninhabited islands near Antarctica. Trump slapped additional tariffs on automobile parts, inciting cries of protest from American car companies. Brides-to-be posted panicked videos to TikTok, wondering whether the cost of their wedding dresses would spike. Preppers, anticipating apocalyptic supply-chain breakdowns, stockpiled hundreds of pairs of shoes.
The announcement, which was immediately followed by widespread economic chaos, soon gave way to a patchwork of concessions and carve-outs. The reciprocal tariffs were paused for ninety days, to allow the affected countries to negotiate. (Trump repeatedly suggested that Canada, one of the U.S.’s top trading partners, could avoid tariffs altogether by simply becoming the fifty-first state.) Meanwhile, corporate executives reeled. They called Lutnick. He constantly held Zoom meetings on his iPad while being driven around town; everyone seemed to know the dead spot in his driveway where the signal briefly cut out.
During every outing I took with Lutnick, as spring turned to summer in Washington, he was approached by someone asking if he could intervene on their behalf. Petitioners speed-walked to fall in step with him; they held the handshake firmly and for a second too long after posing for a photo. One afternoon, as we left a greenroom at the InterContinental hotel, moving quickly through a thick set of curtains, the C.E.O. of one of the largest companies in the world was lingering by a stairwell. As he clasped Lutnick’s hands, I heard him say something about a supply-chain issue and two billion dollars. Lutnick, who had just wrapped up a panel discussion, was already running ten minutes late for an evening reception at the White House. They would settle this matter later. Lutnick held out his iPhone, with the screen facing down. Take a picture, he said. A sticker with Lutnick’s phone number and e-mail address had been printed with a label-maker and affixed to the back of his phone. The C.E.O. snapped a photograph.
During Trump’s Presidential transition, which Lutnick co-chaired, he lobbied vigorously to be appointed Treasury Secretary, a more powerful and prestigious position. He was crushed when Trump passed him up for Scott Bessent, a former hedge-fund manager. “There hasn’t been an important Secretary of Commerce since Herbert Hoover,” the founder of a major New York investment bank told me. “Call anybody and ask them to tell you the last five.” Lutnick is determined to elevate the role. “I’m a different Secretary of Commerce,” he said. “No one’s ever cared before.” And Commerce—with its tariff-enforcement authority—is at the center of the Administration’s efforts to frantically rework the flow of global trade. Although Lutnick spent decades as the chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald, a financial-services firm that does business around the world, his most valuable asset in this endeavor may be a natural intuition for what the President wants, and a penchant for radical oversimplification. Sitting across from me one afternoon, he pinched the fabric of his gray button-down shirt between his fingers. “If I buy this shirt and it’s made in Italy or in China, it doesn’t help us,” he said. “I consumed, but I didn’t employ anybody.” He grabbed hold of his pants. “Whereas if I buy jeans and they’re made in America, then that’s good.” Lutnick believes that he and the President possess a clarity of thought that is unique among Washington types. “I’m just experienced in business in the way none of these people are—except Donald Trump,” he said. “I know him so well that I know where the puck is going.”
It’s not just tariffs. Lutnick has all sorts of ideas about how to transform the government. “If I was in the Biden Administration, they’d be staring at me like I’m from some other planet,” he told me. “But this President, he wants to make change. So I pitch these ideas, and he says, ‘Let’s do it.’ ” Why not replace the I.R.S. with an External Revenue Service, which will collect tariffs and other levies from foreign sources instead of taxing citizens? And how about we get rid of most of the government enumerators, who gather data for the Census Bureau? (They “literally call to Lincoln, Nebraska, and ask what the price of cargo pants is, as if they don’t have a computer.”) Lutnick’s most prized idea is to sell U.S. citizenship for five million dollars per person. He calls it the Trump Card, and it looks like a gold American Express with the President’s face on it. “If I give two hundred thousand of them for five million dollars each, we make a trillion dollars,” he said. “A trillion! You would say, ‘This doesn’t sound like government, because it sounds kind of smart.’ But you just want outcomes, right? It’s obvious—common sense.”
Lutnick grew up in Jericho, on Long Island, in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. He knew tragedy early in life: his mother died of lymphoma while he was in high school; in his first week of college, his father was accidentally administered a fatal dose of chemotherapy. Other relatives receded into the background, leaving Lutnick and his two siblings on their own.
After Lutnick graduated from Haverford, a small liberal-arts school in Pennsylvania known for its Quaker roots and progressive values, he moved to New York. He started working at Cantor Fitzgerald and became a protégé of Bernie Cantor, the firm’s co-founder. “I ramped up really fast,” Lutnick told me. “I was doubling and doubling and doubling.” In 1996, Cantor died, and Lutnick, after an ugly succession battle with Cantor’s widow, Iris, took control. The trading floor was “more about ass-kicking than old-school analysis,” an old friend of Lutnick’s said. Compared with other firms, Cantor Fitzgerald had a reputation that was “less preppy, less blue-blood—maybe more rumors about strip clubs.” Around this time, Lutnick, who went by Howie, bought a bar called Rex, on the Lower East Side. “It was very Tom Cruise in ‘Cocktail,’ ” the old friend told me, referring to the film about a business student and bartender who entertains patrons with tricks while making drinks. In 1998, Lutnick and his wife, Allison—the two got married at the Plaza—bought and gut-renovated a Beaux-Arts town house on East Seventy-first Street, behind the Frick Collection. (Their next-door neighbor was Jeffrey Epstein.) Lutnick started showing up to college reunions in a helicopter. “He’d always say he’s five-ten—but six feet if he stands on his wallet,” the friend recalled.
These days, Lutnick likes to tell stories from the nineties about cavorting with Trump at “rubber-chicken dinners” on the New York charity circuit and “chasing the same girls,” but the two were not especially close. Back then, Lutnick had no particular interest in government. “I was a classic New Yorker,” he told me. “I just gave money to whoever the local politician was, whatever.”
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Lutnick was taking his son Kyle to his first day of kindergarten at Horace Mann, an élite private school in the Bronx. Cantor’s offices were on the top floors of One World Trade Center. Everyone on those floors died, including Lutnick’s brother, Gary. “Whatever cord had attached me to my life had been severed,” Lutnick later wrote. He set up a crisis center for Cantor families at the Pierre, a swank hotel on the Upper East Side. The firm had lost more than two-thirds of its staff; Lutnick sobbed during TV interviews while desperately trying to keep the business from going under. Four days after the attacks, Cantor stopped paying the salaries of the missing employees, many of whom were not yet confirmed dead. Lutnick received a deluge of hate mail, including a letter that quoted Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War”: “Let me ask you one question / is your money that good / will it buy you forgiveness?”
By the spring, Lutnick and the surviving Cantor partners had distributed sixty-three million dollars to the families of the deceased. (They would eventually pay three times that amount.) Kenneth Feinberg, an attorney who oversaw the U.S. government’s September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, told me that Lutnick “vigorously represented his people.” Still, the narrative persisted that he had abandoned them. A chorus of critics accused Lutnick of crying crocodile tears. The first time I met Lutnick, he brought up 9/11 immediately, with the defensiveness of someone accustomed to being maligned. “The media was picking on me for not paying the salaries of people who died, which was crazy,” he said. “All the people who made money were killed.”
Lutnick did save Cantor; the company was trading again just two days after the Twin Towers fell. “Despite that, or perhaps because of his perceived self-enrichment,” Lutnick was never granted access to the most rarefied Manhattan circles, one New York financier told me. “Sound familiar?” Someone close to Lutnick said, “It’s the same as it is with Trump. The middle of the country is, like, Wow, he is so rich, he has a gold car, he’s so successful. And then at a cocktail party in New York people are, like, Psh, who the fuck is this guy?”
Trump had called Lutnick to offer his condolences after 9/11, and to congratulate him on keeping Cantor afloat. Seven years later, Lutnick appeared on Trump’s reality-TV show “The Celebrity Apprentice.” In the episode, which featured a live charity auction, Lutnick bid on items such as high tea with the Duchess of York. The British media personality Piers Morgan, who was a contestant on the show that season, recalled Lutnick’s entrance: “This balding, bullet-haired guy bullfrogged his way into the crowd, barrelled through, and shouted, ‘One hundred thousand dollars!’ Then he looked at me and winked. It was great TV, a real piece of theatre.”
When Trump ran for President in 2016, Lutnick told a friend that he considered him a “buffoon,” and donated to his opponent, Hillary Clinton. He did, however, support Trump’s 2020 campaign. In the aftermath of the January 6th attack on the Capitol, Trump was kicked off Twitter, owing to, as the site put it, “further risk of incitement of violence.” At the time, Lutnick was asked if he had qualms about Trump’s presence on other online platforms. He responded, “The key to being neutral is you take both sides.”
Last summer, in the run-up to the November election, Trump called to ask for money, and Lutnick obliged by hosting a fund-raiser for him in the Hamptons. Soon afterward, Trump asked Lutnick to co-chair his transition team. Lutnick initially appeared to see himself as something of a moderating influence. At the time, the campaign was trying to downplay its association with Project 2025, a comprehensive policy initiative that aimed to expand executive power and had amassed a list of thousands of potential hires in service of that goal. Lutnick insisted that the transition team wouldn’t recruit from that “radioactive” database. (In the end, it did.)
During the fall, Lutnick travelled on Trump’s campaign plane, and Trump started talking to him about tariffs, trade deficits, and his general sense that the U.S. was constantly being “ripped off” by other countries. Lutnick “sort of became a student,” one person close to him told me. The teacher, though, seemed more important than the lesson. Lutnick has “always loved celebrities,” his friend went on. “I think in his mind he’s hanging out with Matt Damon or Brad Pitt.” Lutnick and Trump both idealize the American economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an era of dramatic industrial growth supported by muscular state protectionism. Lutnick has characterized the period as a “golden age,” a time when “our economy was rockin’. . . . We had no income tax, and all we had was tariffs. And we had so much money that we had the greatest businessmen of America get together to try to figure out how to spend it.”
Trump, who is superstitious, refused to discuss plans for his Administration until after he won. But in October, 2024, Lutnick got a stretch of uninterrupted time with Trump in New York while driving back to Manhattan from a campaign event in Queens. Lutnick, sensing an opportunity to convey what he calls one of his “big ideas,” told Trump that he wanted to balance the budget of the United States. Dwight Eisenhower was the last Republican President to pull this off, and it has remained a G.O.P. fantasy ever since. (Bill Clinton, a Democrat, balanced the budget for four years in the nineties.) Trump has always complained about the national debt, though his own budgets have increased it by trillions of dollars. In the car, Lutnick posited that the country could wipe out the deficit, which stood at two trillion dollars, by cutting a trillion a year in expenses and generating a trillion in revenues, through tariffs and a few other mechanisms, such as his five-million-dollar Trump Card—an ad for which now sits atop the home page of the Commerce Department’s website. “And the reason you want to work for Donald Trump is he looks at me and he goes, ‘Sure!’ ” Lutnick said. Lutnick suggested recruiting Elon Musk to help with the project. (At the time, Musk was campaigning for Trump in Pennsylvania—dancing around on a rally stage, enticing people to register to vote via a million-dollar sweepstakes of dubious legality—but he had no official plans to join the Administration.)
The next week, Lutnick flew to Brownsville, Texas, where Musk was testing a SpaceX rocket booster. After the test, Musk went to celebrate with the engineers, and his staff parked Lutnick in a SpaceX canteen, which Lutnick has described as “the equivalent of a Margaritaville.” He ate a quesadilla and drank a supersized Diet Coke. Hours passed. It turned out that Musk was taking a nap, Lutnick said. When Musk woke up, he summoned Lutnick to the living quarters that he keeps on the property. The men sat across from each other on plastic chairs, in a bare-bones room, and Lutnick told Musk that they should balance the budget together. Musk agreed that it would be easy to save a trillion dollars—by cutting eighty per cent of the federal government. He’d done the same thing with Twitter’s workforce after buying the company, in 2022. “Elon’s gonna cut, Howard’s gonna raise,” Lutnick said. This became his mantra. He texted Trump to say that Musk was on board, and that the venture would be called the Department of Government Efficiency. Lutnick and Musk posed for a photograph outside: arms crossed, grabbing their biceps. Lutnick posted it on X and wrote, “Welcome to DOGE.”
After Trump won, Lutnick, who was still running Cantor, decamped to Palm Beach to staff the new Administration. Each day, beneath one of Mar-a-Lago’s many chandeliers, he would gather top Trump advisers around a conference table to present potential appointees to the President-elect. Lutnick put A.I.-enhanced photos of the candidates on four eighty-five-inch TVs, alongside bulleted résumé highlights; at the click of a button, a clip of a candidate speaking would play for twenty seconds. “President Trump makes decisions by orchestra,” Lutnick told me. “And I would say I’m the first violin.” Trump swiftly filled his Cabinet positions, and announced them on Truth Social. Lutnick told me that it was “the most successful transition in the world.” One candidate interviewed by Lutnick for a high-ranking job at a federal agency didn’t find him especially discerning. “He immediately told me how many billions of dollars he had and didn’t listen to a thing I said,” the candidate, who is now a senior Administration official, told me. “But I loved him. He had this libidinal Jewish energy, like a character in a Philip Roth novel. I’m MAGA because we are culturally lost as a nation, and we need that energy.”
Lutnick is in many ways the most Trumpian member of Trump’s Cabinet—a raw, unbridled _expression_ of the President’s mercantilist instincts and branding acumen, of government as dealmaking in gold-plated rooms. Lutnick delights in the aspects of Trump that make others in Washington bristle—the Trump who hosts a banquet for the highest-paying investors in his personal cryptocurrency business, the Trump who accepts a two-hundred-million-dollar “palace in the sky” as a gift from Qatar, the Trump who talks about Greenland as something to buy. (Cantor Fitzgerald actually has a preëxisting financial stake in the island.) “Howard is just kind of, Boom, I came up with it, let’s do it,” a Lutnick adviser told me.
Another person close to Lutnick described his operating mode as “It doesn’t matter if it’s a state dinner—if you can get somebody to put a hundred billion into the U.S., let’s do that. It’s, like, I’m here, you’re here, let’s do the deal.” On a recent trip to Saudi Arabia, Lutnick started selling Trump Cards, which had yet to formally launch, during an official visit to At-Turaif, a UNESCO World Heritage site. “Everyone’s really respectful, and I have my phone out,” Lutnick said. “So one of the senior leaders walks by and he goes, ‘Why do you have your phone out?,’ and I go, ‘I’m selling cards.’ It’s, like, O.K.! Everyone I meet is going to want to buy this card.”
Lutnick and Trump both seem to view the government as one giant accounts ledger. Originally, DOGE was on one side, slashing away to save, and Lutnick was on the other, beating the bushes for cash. The DOGE effort, or Musk’s stewardship of it, has ended ignominiously—with little money saved and vital services decimated. (“Was it all bullshit?” Trump reportedly asked.) Even though Musk has crashed out of Washington, Lutnick maintains that he isn’t concerned about still being able to fulfill his end of the bargain. “If I could put my glasses on you, you’d see what can be accomplished,” Lutnick told me. “It’s really fun.”
Until the late nineteenth century, tariffs were often the primary source of revenue for the U.S. government. Trump has long been enamored with them. “ ‘Tariffs’ is the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary,” he said recently. “Because tariffs are going to make us rich as hell.” (In the first half of the year, tariffs have brought in around a hundred billion dollars, a tiny fraction of the federal budget.) But tariffs, in Trump’s view, will do more than just bring in revenue—they will incentivize companies to reinvest in American manufacturing and will reset what he considers the inherent injustice of trade deficits. “There’s only one time when you’ll have balanced trade with everybody, and that’s if money didn’t exist, if you had a barter economy,” Robert Lawrence, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, told me. “It’s Stone Age economics.”
Tariffs are often passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices; Trump has admitted that there will be “a little pain” in the short term. “Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of thirty dolls, and maybe the dolls will cost a couple of bucks more,” as he put it at a recent Cabinet meeting. This, he argues, is a worthwhile sacrifice. In his view, U.S. consumers have become the growth engine for the rest of the world. But if the idea is to bring doll production, among other things, back to American shores, the Administration’s approach is so haphazard that, as Lawrence told me, “it’s short-term pain for long-term pain.” The notion, he continued, “that America should go back to making our own clothes, producing and undertaking very labor-intensive activities—this is the kind of work that Americans don’t want to do.”
On April 2nd, Trump’s Cabinet gathered in the Rose Garden for an event that was billed as Liberation Day. Trump, using the name of a holiday that usually implies liberation from an occupying force or regime, said that it would be the day “America’s destiny was reclaimed.” In the preceding weeks, various factions in the Administration had pitched different tariff-implementation schemes. Trump himself liked the idea of one universal tariff; Lutnick and Kevin Hassett, the head of the National Economic Council, were drawn to reciprocal tariffs that were tailored to specific countries. The U.S. Trade Representative’s office pitched a middle ground: an across-the-board tariff on a subset of nations. Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, outlined a more targeted approach, which he called the Dirty Fifteen: tariffs would apply to fifteen per cent of nations that had the highest persistent trade imbalances with the U.S. The camps jockeyed back and forth while a few aides were still trying to talk Trump out of the whole thing. Lutnick readied poster boards on which the final tariff rates were printed. “He and Trump like presentations,” someone close to the Administration told me. “They like visual aids.”
In the Rose Garden, Trump summoned Lutnick to the podium. “I’d like to see the chart if you have it—could you bring it up, Howard?” Trump asked. The President read aloud some of the countries and their corresponding numbers, then handed the chart back to Lutnick. “I think you better take it with you,” he said.
The rollout was shambolic. Mainstream economists said that the measures were likely to push the U.S. into a recession, and both the stock market and the dollar plummeted. “There was no clear articulation or underlying logic for the levels of tariff that they were imposing,” the New York financier told me. The founder of the major New York investment bank said, “If you did something like this at Goldman Sachs or Lehman Brothers or any place on Wall Street, everyone would’ve been fired.” Julius Krein, the editor of American Affairs, a political journal that has defended economic nationalism, wrote, “Minor changes to transportation safety regulations undergo more thorough preparation, vetting, and coalition building than did the largest tariff increase in a century.” It was done, he added, “without any meaningful consultation with industry—including U.S. manufacturers that the measures were supposed to benefit—or political outreach.”
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?”
In these talks, Lutnick has a distinctive style of bullying. The negotiator told me, “You feel with him that there is the idea of looking at potential tools beyond the tariffs to punish us. He would make these veiled threats about how we might not be able to access U.S. tech, how they might be able to harm us.” The negotiator and his team saw their job as making Lutnick think that they had been wrestled into submission. “We have to convince Lutnick that he can tell Trump that he’s hustled us, that they’ve extracted concessions from us,” he said.
Lutnick likes to make it clear that he is the one person who will be able to sell Trump on a deal. For the most part, he has little concern for maintaining relationships with allies. “There’s actually something honest about it,” the other negotiator told me. “Like, don’t try to make this anything but what it is, which is a shakedown.” One person close to Lutnick compared his style to that of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s golf buddy turned special envoy, who has been dispatched to broker an end to the hostilities in Ukraine and Gaza. “Someone like Lutnick or Witkoff, Trump sees old friend, dealmaker,” the person close to Lutnick told me. He views them as people who are willing to flout diplomatic norms. “It’s like when the President said, Why do we have NATO? And the President sort of explains that he doesn’t understand what NATO provides us.” A person connected to the Administration told me, “There’s all these things we do that have value that we don’t charge for, so why don’t we? We’re doing them for free. If we let in immigrants, why not make them pay? People would pay. If we helped Ukraine, why not make them pay us back?”
In mid-May, Trump hosted a dinner for the board of the Kennedy Center in the State Dining Room at the White House. (Earlier in the year, he had fired the institution’s traditionally nonpartisan board and installed himself as the chairman.) Administration officials sat alongside the new board members at round tables adorned with pink flowers and tall white candles. Trump addressed guests from beneath a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. The painting hangs over a stone fireplace; toward the end of the Second World War, Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered a blessing from John Adams to be carved into the mantel: “May none but Honest and Wise Men ever rule under This Roof.” Lutnick sat at a table with his wife and Ed Martin, the Department of Justice’s new pardon attorney. The President called out compliments to various attendees, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio (“I know how tough he is because I used to have to be up there with him—he was not nice”); Attorney General Pam Bondi (she was there with “the best-looking guy in the room”); and Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff (“She’s the most powerful woman in the world”). He praised Lutnick for rebuilding Cantor Fitzgerald. “A very top firm,” Trump said. “He was always there at six in the morning, five-thirty in the morning—you know, a lot of the stock guys have to do that. Someday you’ll explain to me why. Probably insider trading, Pam, I don’t know.” Trump told the White House staff to begin serving the meal—green salad and lamb Wellington—while he continued.
Trump had just returned from the first major foreign trip of his second term, a swing through three monarchies in the Middle East: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the U.A.E. Lutnick had joined him. Beforehand, some of the families of Cantor employees who died on 9/11 had asked Lutnick to help extradite a Saudi national tied to the attacks via newly unsealed evidence. He didn’t. Terry Strada, the national chair of 9/11 Families United, told me, “Howard’s cried with us year after year. You think we’re going to just say, ‘That’s nice of you’? You can’t sweep what happened under the rug just because it’s been twenty years and we need to make deals with them.”
Lutnick and Trump spoke of the trip like it was a summer fund-raiser on Martha’s Vineyard that went better than expected. They had been accompanied by dozens of American executives. “We brought back about $5.1 trillion,” Trump said, boasting about commitments that the three countries had made to invest in defense, technology, and A.I. “We talk in the trillions now. Think of it. . . . We’re talking big numbers.” (In fact, Trump brought back less than a tenth of what he claimed. Senate Democrats sent Lutnick a letter expressing concern that the deals “greenlight the sale of sensitive U.S. technology in exchange for illusory promises” and “present an immediate threat to U.S. national security.”) Lutnick slapped the table and howled with laughter when Trump joked about getting rid of “lesbian-only Shakespeare” at the Kennedy Center. He laughs the loudest at Trump’s jokes, and it isn’t the studied tittering of the President’s other courtiers; he seems to be truly enjoying himself.
Earlier in the day, at an Oval Office reception for the families of fallen police officers, Trump had mused, “My whole life is deals. One big deal.” He had spoken to Vladimir Putin on the phone for more than two hours that morning about Russia’s war in Ukraine.“We’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars,” Trump said, referring to the aid that the U.S. had allocated to Ukraine. In Trump’s accounting, the Middle East tour had helped balance that out. “We made much more than that just in four days,” he said.
Helping the President secure foreign investment wasn’t a big part of the Commerce Department’s original remit. When Theodore Roosevelt signed legislation creating the department, in 1903, it was tasked with applying immigration law, taking the census, and protecting Alaskan fur seals. The National Aquarium was originally situated in the basement of the department’s headquarters; fish from all over the country, as well as five alligators, lived in tanks surrounded by terrazzo. At the time, it was one of the largest office buildings ever constructed.
Nowadays, at Commerce headquarters, where the hallways are covered with vintage posters advertising the U.S. census, the word “innovation” frequently comes up in conversation. “The Secretary sort of sets the tone,” a senior adviser to Lutnick told me. “We’re not thugs, but we are going to question first principles.” Lutnick has created a new “investment accelerator,” for instance. As another adviser put it, “If you have a billion dollars, we’re going to give you concierge treatment.” Lutnick and Trump like to bat around ideas that Commerce could implement. Last month, when Nippon Steel acquired U.S. Steel, for fifteen billion dollars, Lutnick helped negotiate a “golden share” for Trump. The arrangement effectively grants the President a nonfinancial stake in U.S. Steel, and significant influence in its affairs.
Lutnick is unbothered by the appearance of a porous barrier between money and politics, and some lawmakers have alleged that he stands to gain financially from his position. After he was confirmed by the Senate, his eldest sons, Brandon and Kyle, who are in their late twenties, were named chairman and executive vice-chairman of Cantor, respectively. (Kyle is a d.j.) Last year, Cantor acquired a five-per-cent stake in Tether, a crypto firm that has been linked to money laundering, terrorism, and international fraud. (Tether has not been charged with any crimes.) Cantor also manages a substantial amount of Tether’s assets, for which it collects millions of dollars in fees. Since Trump’s election, Tether’s market capitalization has risen to more than a hundred and sixty billion dollars. According to the Wall Street Journal, Giancarlo Devasini, Tether’s chairman, told associates that Lutnick would “use his political clout to try to defuse threats facing Tether.” (A spokesperson for Lutnick denied this.) Lutnick reportedly brought a lobbyist who works for both Tether and Cantor to transition meetings, and now participates in one of Trump’s crypto advisory groups, which determine how companies like Tether will be regulated. “It is biologically painful for him to miss a business opportunity,” his old friend told me. Another Commerce adviser said, of Lutnick and Trump, “They’re just two deal guys going into rooms with people considering where to put their money. They’re both very high-I.Q. individuals.”
Earlier this summer, Lutnick held a town hall at the Patent and Trademark Office, one of Commerce’s thirteen bureaus, in northern Virginia. Soon after he arrived, he was taken to the National Inventors Hall of Fame museum. He pressed a button that played the giggle of the Pillsbury Doughboy, then smelled a tub of Play-Doh. (Both the sound and the scent are trademarked.) In an interactive exhibit that allows visitors to identify counterfeit products, Lutnick paused in front of two Spalding basketballs. He pointed at me and asked, “You guessing the fakes?”
Downstairs, hundreds of Commerce employees ate doughnuts as an in-house choir sang “America the Beautiful.” Then they filtered into an auditorium for Lutnick’s town hall, which became an exercise, in part, in mollifying anxieties about DOGE cuts. During a Q. & A., a branch chief asked whether he should worry about the department’s finances. Lutnick had signed off on eliminating hundreds of employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, including weather forecasters, and seventy or so at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which regulates measurement standards related to everything from electricity to atomic clocks. He had proposed slashing Commerce’s over-all budget by nearly seventeen per cent. “We are going to make more money for America,” he announced.
Later, Lutnick told me that he didn’t understand why Democrats opposed his cuts, which also included National Weather Service employees who are essential during emergencies. “If I asked them, ‘Why don’t you like it?,’ their answer would be ‘Because of these twelve people in my district!’ ” he told me. “They say, like, ‘Why isn’t this weather station manned 24/7?’ And I say, ‘Forecasting the weather is based on data. You don’t actually have to be in your district to forecast the weather.’ It’s not like the people are looking out the window and say, ‘Oh, it’s about to rain!’ ”
Lutnick had been pitching various ideas about how to make the department, and other government agencies, more efficient—having the U.S. Postal Service conduct the census, for instance. “You have a baby? Just tell your postman—they’ll take out their iPad,” he told me. The Postal Service employs between ten and twenty-two mules to deliver mail to a handful of people who live in the Grand Canyon. He wants to get rid of the mules. (“You can’t make this up!” he told me. “How stupid is this?”)
When I stopped by the Commerce Department’s headquarters in late June, little was happening with the trade deals. Lutnick was carrying around a physical prototype of the Trump Card, and combing through the sign-up list to see who was interested. Two days later, Trump abruptly ended negotiations with Canada, to protest a digital-services tax that the country wanted to apply to several U.S. tech companies. He called Japan “very spoiled.” Could Trumpian aggressiveness alone force the outcomes he sought? “We can do whatever we want,” Trump said.
With the ninety-deal deadline less than a week away, the U.S. seemed to have reached just three. Trump announced the third, with Vietnam, on Truth Social. Afterward, the Vietnamese negotiators claimed that he had doubled the tariff rate without telling them, and the country so far has refused to sign the deal. Another self-imposed deadline loomed. Trump had ordered Republican lawmakers to pass his “Big Beautiful Bill”—a gargantuan wealth transfer that would cut taxes for the rich, defund welfare programs for the poor, and, according to the Congressional Budget Office, add $3.4 trillion to the federal deficit—by Independence Day.
Over the July 4th weekend, Trump and Lutnick holed up at the President’s Bedminster golf club, where they prepared letters calling for new deadlines and new tariffs for a handful of countries. Trump has always known how to recast bad news. “Throw out an unreasonable proposition, see if someone’s willing to bend, then pivot, diminish expectations, and tell people you achieved victory,” the New York financier said.
Since Liberation Day, the over-all trade deficit had actually worsened. Inflation was rising. Still, the financier told me, the economic impact may be less profound than the damage done to America’s trustworthiness on the world stage. “In Trump’s style of negotiation, there is no expectation of an ongoing relationship,” he said. “He’s using aggressive real-estate techniques in an international context. We have to work on other issues with all of these countries. The real risk is what happens if you treat your counterparties as a one-and-done.”
The letters, which were posted to Truth Social, were topped with a gold coat of arms and littered with random capitalizations and confusing turns of phrase. To inform Indonesia that it would pay a thirty-two-per-cent tariff, starting August 1st, Trump wrote, “Nevertheless, we have decided to move forward with you, but only with more balanced, and fair, TRADE. Therefore, we invite you to participate in the extraordinary Economy of the United States, the Number One Market in the World, by far.” Sometimes economic logic seemed to fade from the equation. Trump fired off a letter that imposed a fifty-per-cent tariff on Brazil, citing a “Witch Hunt” against former President Jair Bolsonaro, an ally of Trump, who is being prosecuted for attempting a coup. The U.S. actually has a trade surplus with Brazil.
After finishing the letters, Trump and Lutnick took a helicopter to the Morristown airport, where Air Force One was waiting. Trump wore an oversized white baseball cap emblazoned with the letters “USA,” and Lutnick had on a black suit jacket and a white shirt. “The tariffs are going to be the tariffs,” Trump told reporters. In Texas, flash floods had inundated the Hill Country, and rescuers were searching for survivors, including young girls at a summer camp. Seventy-nine people were already confirmed dead; key roles at local offices of the National Weather Service were vacant, and state officials were questioning whether staffing shortages had contributed to a lack of coördination as the disaster unfolded. A reporter asked Lutnick whether his cuts had played a role. He shook his head and interrupted Trump, who already had his mouth open. “They did not!” Lutnick said. The plane engines were running, and both men had to yell to be heard. Would more trade deals be signed soon? “The gentleman to my right’s going to decide,” Lutnick said, beaming at Trump. “And I’m going to be with him when he makes that decision.” Trump turned to climb the stairs to Air Force One, and Lutnick stood on the tarmac, wondering where to go next. ♦