The deal with Trump's deals

Speaker 1 It was just under a month ago in July 2025 that we here at Today Explained brought you an episode titled, I Was Told There Would Be Deals.

Speaker 1 The gist of the thing was Trump promised trade deals, but we weren't really getting them. You know how it goes.
Taco, Trump always chickens out, etc.

Speaker 2 And Trump is calling that a deal, but it's not really anything that looks like a free trade deal as everyone else understands it.

Speaker 1 But to be fair, since we made that show, the president of the United States has had a busy month out on the road.

Speaker 4 I never had the privilege of going to his island.

Speaker 1 Okay, so he never made it to the island, but he did spend some time in Europe and he walked away with a deal.

Speaker 1 He's actually got deals with some of our most important trade partners around the world, and that's why today's show is titled The Deal with Trump's Deals.

Speaker 1 We're going to take a look at what he's been up to. He's bringing in revenue, but long term, is it going to be good for the United States?

Speaker 1 Be careful if you suggest it won't be, though, because that might get you fired.

Speaker 1 She's just a girl and she's fired.

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Speaker 1 today. Explain from Box, Sean Ramesfram, joined by Bloomberg's Brendan Murray, who spoke to us about Trump's deals from the floor of the Bloomberg Newsroom in London, England.

Speaker 11 It seems like a long time ago, but it started around April 2nd.

Speaker 12 Thank you very much.

Speaker 11 And that was the Great Liberation Day, the announcement in the Rose Garden of the White House.

Speaker 13 The day America's destiny was reclaimed, and the day that we began to make America wealthy again.

Speaker 11 The president laid out his plan for reshaping the global economy on a giant poster board.

Speaker 13 Very simple, can't get any simpler than that.

Speaker 11 With a bunch of tariff rates that freaked Wall Street out.

Speaker 14 President Trump's tariff sparking a huge sell-off today, sending all three major markets plunging the trading day there. You're hearing the bell ringing.

Speaker 15 What's stunning, though, is that we are also seeing declines in U.S. government bonds and the U.S.
dollar, all at the same time.

Speaker 11 And the White House had to quickly scramble and back out of those plans. So then the deadline became August 1st, and the White House couldn't get all of its paperwork together to make that happen.

Speaker 11 So now we're staring down another deadline for this Thursday of all of these tariffs taking effect. And Wall Street is recalibrating how this is going to affect the global economy going forward now.

Speaker 1 And so, how much of the world has gotten their deals in in under deadline? Who's still on the outs? What's the sort of general picture here?

Speaker 11 So we've got about eight or ten of the U.S.'s largest trading partners that have announced deals.

Speaker 11 The European Union is the biggest. The European Union accounts for about almost 20% of all U.S.
goods trade. So that is 27 nations that the U.S.

Speaker 11 has had pretty much free trade with over the past past several decades.

Speaker 16 U.S. President Donald Trump and European Union Chief Ursula von der Leyen have reached a trade deal during talks in Scotland.

Speaker 17 Agreed to set a 15% tariff on most goods.

Speaker 18 Well, Mr. Trump said the EU would boost its investment in the U.S.
by $600 billion,

Speaker 18 including a vast investment in American military equipment. While U.S.

Speaker 7 cars and agricultural products, he said, will be more widely available in EU markets.

Speaker 11 There have been a couple of other

Speaker 11 of the the larger trading partners that have done deals. Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom was really the first one.

Speaker 20 Under the deal, Japanese goods will now be facing tariffs of some 15%.

Speaker 10 The deal is that South Korea will give to the United States $350 billion for investments owned and controlled by the United States.

Speaker 19 Washington will lower tariffs on many UK goods. That includes a 10% levy on cars compared with the 25% imposed imposed on other nations.

Speaker 11 And then you have some other deals that have been announced but haven't really been confirmed on the other side. Vietnam was one of those ones.

Speaker 11 The president posted on True Social that he had a deal with Vietnam.

Speaker 7 True Social.

Speaker 21 I just made a trade deal with Vietnam. Details to follow.

Speaker 11 So you've got a few announcements and then you've got some squishier things that haven't really produced many details and so it's hard to tell what exactly the economic impact is going to be.

Speaker 1 And how do all of these closer trading partners of ours, Japan, EU, South Korea, UK,

Speaker 1 I guess Vietnam hasn't said anything yet, how do they feel about these deals? Are they sounding positive?

Speaker 11 I think the main reaction is just reluctance acceptance of this is how it has to be if you want to avoid a trade war with President Trump.

Speaker 11 He has threatened to essentially cripple these economies and their export industries if they don't go along with this.

Speaker 11 So a lot of them feel like this is the least worst deal we could get, and it's better to have the certainty of this now than this ongoing uncertainty of the really high tariffs that many of them would have faced.

Speaker 11 15%

Speaker 11 is a is a high tariff and if you were looking at this compared to a year ago, but he has threatened countries with 30 and 40 percent, which would essentially destroy a lot of those industries that depend on an American consumer.

Speaker 1 It feels like a lot of the world leaders who are signing deals are also trying to sort of heap praise on Donald Trump.

Speaker 1 You know, the prime minister of the United Kingdom brought him a letter from King Charles, I think is what he's going by now.

Speaker 1 Is that normal?

Speaker 11 It seems to be the new normal. We also heard European Commission President Ursa von der Leyen say, yes, Mr.
President, this is the biggest deal of them all.

Speaker 22 It's a huge deal with tough negotiations.

Speaker 11 And she said some pretty interesting things about how we're going along with this because trade needs rebalancing.

Speaker 11 And rebalancing is exactly the phrase that the Trump administrations would say needs to happen in a trading relationship like the European Union or China or others.

Speaker 1 So a lot of world leaders giving Trump the win, so to speak.

Speaker 11 Who's resisting?

Speaker 1 Who's fighting back?

Speaker 11 Well, there have been only two countries that have technically retaliated with tariffs of their own, and that's Canada and China.

Speaker 23 China announced this morning that from next week they will be imposing 34% tariffs on all U.S. goods from April 10th.

Speaker 24 Canada's retaliatory tariffs on nearly $30 billion of U.S.

Speaker 25 goods are in effect as of today.

Speaker 11 And that has aggravated the situation with Canada, especially if you look at how President Trump has, he just granted Mexico a 90-day extension,

Speaker 11 but he's slapping a 35% tariff on Canadian goods that aren't subject to the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement. So antagonism seems to only bring more pain in this arena from President Trump.

Speaker 1 It also feels like things are tense with Brazil and India. Are they worth talking about here?

Speaker 11 Yeah, absolutely. For different reasons, really, because

Speaker 11 President Trump has brought non-trade issues into these two relationships.

Speaker 11 First with Brazil.

Speaker 20 President Trump, in the latest of a series of new letters to trading partners, has threatened a 50% tariff on Brazil.

Speaker 5 The measures are largely due to Trump's anger at the prosecution of his ally, former President President Jair Bolsonaro, on charges of plotting to overthrow the election of Lula in early 2023.

Speaker 11 With regards to India, President Trump has also brought geopolitics into the equation and said to India, if you don't stop buying Russian energy, then there'll be penalties for you.

Speaker 11 So that's sort of bringing the Russia

Speaker 11 war in Ukraine into the picture. and really using tariffs as a leverage point for foreign policy, not just economic policy.

Speaker 1 But lately, it feels like there are more deals than

Speaker 1 fights. Does it feel like he's winning right now?

Speaker 11 He's definitely winning in the public relations department.

Speaker 11 If you can announce a deal with the European Union or with Japan and South Korea, these big U.S. trading partners

Speaker 11 that have been doing lots of trade with the U.S. for decades.

Speaker 11 That does sound like a win, but it's a little like you and your partner going to your parents and your future in-laws and saying, hey, we're getting married.

Speaker 11 And they look at you and they go, well, where's the ring? When's the date? And where's the city? And you don't have answers.

Speaker 1 They start to question whether you're really serious.

Speaker 11 So

Speaker 11 what we don't have right now are specifics that show both sides in all of these are serious about it.

Speaker 11 And whether are these just promises to get Trump off your back in the short term, or are they actual long-term economic agreements that are going to change the trading relationship in a way that Trump wants, and that's to have a smaller trade deficit with these countries individually?

Speaker 1 It doesn't seem like Americans are freaking out the way they did back in April. How come?

Speaker 11 Well, it's hard to see how the tariffs are flowing flowing through into

Speaker 11 consumer spending or behavior.

Speaker 11 But if you go to Federal Reserve surveys of businesses, and all the Federal Reserve districts do these surveys on manufacturers, and you read the notes in there that these manufacturers relay to the Federal Reserve, they say the tariffs are killing us.

Speaker 11 The uncertainty is killing us. I can't pay my bills this month because suddenly it's 30% more expensive.

Speaker 11 So the anecdotal evidence that we can see is pretty conclusive that these tariffs are hurting businesses' profit margins.

Speaker 11 And economists would tell you it's just a matter of time before that feeds through to consumers.

Speaker 1 And the other thing we have is the job numbers. And that has turned into its own fight.

Speaker 11 Yeah, exactly. So the jobs figures were a surprise.

Speaker 11 And of course, those numbers and all the revisions tied to them led to the firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics person who's in charge of those.

Speaker 27 On Friday, Trump fired the former commissioner after a weaker-than-expected jobs report. Now, the president claimed that that report was rigged.

Speaker 28 A little bit of background on McIntarfer.

Speaker 28 Yes, she was appointed to this position by President Biden in January 2024, but she's also a labor economist who served over 20 years in the federal government.

Speaker 24 On the monthly jobs report, going forward, why should anyone trust the numbers?

Speaker 6 And if you're...

Speaker 13 You're right.

Speaker 4 No, you're right.

Speaker 13 Why should anybody trust numbers?

Speaker 11 What was in those numbers as it relates to tariffs, though, was another decline in manufacturing employment.

Speaker 11 President Trump will tell you, and he says regularly, that he's not in this to help Wall Street.

Speaker 11 He's in this to help grow the manufacturing base into this global age of a renaissance of American factory might.

Speaker 11 And what we've seen is three straight months of declines in manufacturing employment. So that is working against his arguments that tariffs are good.

Speaker 11 Tariffs will help bring jobs home, reshore this employment that's gone overseas under previous presidents.

Speaker 11 But he's got a real problem on his hands if that manufacturing employment number doesn't turn turn around and turn around soon.

Speaker 1 Brendan Murray, global trade editor, Bloomberg.com, firing people over facts when Today Explained is back.

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Speaker 1 Mr. President, do you have any reaction to today's lane being named the best news show?

Speaker 7 Wow.

Speaker 4 I didn't know that. I just, you're telling me now for the first time.

Speaker 22 Hey, I'm Kimberly Adams. I'm the senior Washington correspondent from Marketplace and also the host of the Marketplace podcast, Make Me Smart.

Speaker 1 The president fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he didn't like the labor statistics.

Speaker 7 Truth social.

Speaker 21 We need accurate jobs numbers. I have directed my team to fire this Biden political appointee immediately.
She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified.

Speaker 21 Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate. They can't be manipulated for political purposes.

Speaker 1 Why did the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics make up the statistics?

Speaker 22 The head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not make up the labor statistics. It's literally shooting the messenger.

Speaker 22 The President of the United States was complaining on Truth Social and elsewhere that the reason for firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics has to do with the number and the scale of revisions.

Speaker 4 And if you remember, just before the election, this woman came out with these phenomenal numbers on Biden's

Speaker 4 economy. Phenomenal numbers.
And then right after the election, they announced that those numbers were wrong.

Speaker 4 And that's what they did the other day. So

Speaker 4 it's a scam, in my opinion.

Speaker 22 So the jobs numbers are one thing that they came in lower than expected last week.

Speaker 22 And they indicate that there's not the same kind of robust labor market that we thought we'd had over the last couple of months.

Speaker 22 But what drew even more attention were the revisions to the numbers from previous months. And they were pretty drastic revisions that shocked a lot of people.

Speaker 22 And these revisions tell us that the labor market we thought we had the last few months that seemed to be okay, seemed to be pretty resilient against the tariffs and some of the other changes President Trump and his administration were making in the economy, it wasn't actually as resilient as we thought.

Speaker 36 A stunning government report showed hiring had slowed down significantly over the past three months, with the U.S. adding just 73,000 new jobs in July.

Speaker 37 May and June were revised downward by over 250,000. Asked if there was evidence the numbers were rigged, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said the revisions are the evidence.

Speaker 37 I should say,

Speaker 22 labor market numbers get revised all the time. GDP numbers get revised all the time.
Pick whatever economic indicator you want.

Speaker 22 But these revisions in particular were A, really large, and B, just fundamentally changed the story of what the labor market looked like over the last couple of months.

Speaker 22 So not only did they tell us that there was less hiring than we thought there was, it also told us that the labor market itself kind of shrank, that there was a lower labor force participation rate, and a lot of people are blaming that on the crackdown on immigration.

Speaker 22 And it also told us that in the main area where there was a lot of job growth, which is like healthcare, for example, if not for that sort of tariff and economically resilient sector of the healthcare sector and all the job growth there, we would have had almost no job growth at all.

Speaker 1 But now that Donald Trump has fired the commissioner in charge of these job report numbers, the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Speaker 1 It'll all be okay again by the next jobs report in September, we all win?

Speaker 22 I imagine that may be what the president wants to believe, that that will

Speaker 22 give numbers that are a bit more appealing. Most of the slash the vast majority slash almost all of the economists I talk to say that is absolutely not the case.

Speaker 22 They say there's no reason whatsoever to believe that the Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner, much less the Bureau of Labor Statistics itself, is manipulating the numbers or that the numbers are rigged, as the president said.

Speaker 22 There's been a huge backlash from the community of people that follow this stuff very closely about this firing.

Speaker 8 I don't think there's any grounds at all for this firing, and it really hurts the statistical system. It undermines credibility in BLS, supposedly.

Speaker 35 This is benign Republic stuff. This is

Speaker 35 I wrote about it, I call it Caracas on the Potomac.

Speaker 35 This is the kind of thing we only see in authoritarian regimes.

Speaker 12 It's outrageous, but it's not surprising. It is consistent with a practice of hating the truth.

Speaker 22 And to the contrary of what the president might want by firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and potentially putting in someone who might be a little bit more amenable to the president's narrative around economic data, that has the potential to actually undermine economic data in the United States and make it less trustworthy both for businesses here in the U.S.

Speaker 22 as well as in sort of the global economy.

Speaker 1 And why does that matter? I mean, for people who don't pay attention to these numbers, why does trustworthy data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics matter to this country and to the world?

Speaker 22 Because lots of different businesses and countries and even individuals use this data to make decisions about how they're going to manage their own money, how they're going to manage their own businesses, and how they are going to plan for the future.

Speaker 22 So for example, if you know that the unemployment rate is 4.2%, which is what the numbers came in at last week, you can say that's a pretty low unemployment rate.

Speaker 22 And that means that most of the people out there who want jobs have jobs.

Speaker 22 And if we're going to hire, we're going to need to position ourselves well in the market to compete with the relatively few workers who are out there looking for a job this gets into one of the main reasons that this is on the agenda for a lot of folks which is the federal reserve the federal reserve has two mandates full employment and stable prices.

Speaker 22 Full employment basically means as near as you can get to it, low unemployment rates. Stable prices relatively equates to a more or less 2% inflation rate.

Speaker 22 We are still trending a little bit above 2% inflation, but when the Fed met last week, which was before these jobs numbers came out, the unemployment situation looked pretty good.

Speaker 22 So they didn't have much of an incentive to do anything about interest rates because inflation was still running a bit high. Unemployment looked fine, so no big deal.

Speaker 22 So let's leave interest rates alone until inflation cools down a bit more. If the Fed had the information on Wednesday that they ended up getting on Friday, would that have changed their decision?

Speaker 22 Maybe.

Speaker 1 You know, the last time you were on this show, Kimberly, you'll recall that you were here to talk about the Fed.

Speaker 22 I know the Fed, the most exciting thing in the world.

Speaker 1 It sounded for weeks now like Trump has been itching to fire Jerome Powell, the head of the Fed. Of course, they had that cute little photo.

Speaker 22 Who he hired.

Speaker 1 Who he hired, thank you. Of course they had that cute little photo op where they got to wear hard hats but Tim Scott didn't.

Speaker 34 Nice to take these off every once in a while when we're not under too much danger.

Speaker 34 So any questions?

Speaker 1 He didn't end up firing Powell, but then he fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Speaker 1 So are these economists you're talking to afraid now that this might not be the end of Trump getting rid of people who seem to disagree with his imaginary vision of what the numbers should be.

Speaker 22 You're absolutely right. This is definitely creating an environment where folks are worried that

Speaker 22 even if

Speaker 22 people at the Bureau of Labor Statistics or any of these other federal statistical agencies are still putting their heads down, doing the work, churning out the data without fear or favor, that kind of hanging over their head that if they release a report the president doesn't like, that they might lose their job, even if they still do the work, other people and other entities might look at it and say, well, can it really be true with that hanging over their head?

Speaker 22 You can look at a country like China, which releases economic data about the performance of its economy all the time, and you'll always hear folks say, well, take it with a grain of salt because the Chinese Communist Party likes to mess with the numbers and this, that, and the other.

Speaker 22 And so that means lots of folks have to jump through all of these additional hoops to try to figure out what's actually going on in the Chinese economy.

Speaker 22 This is one of the biggest economies in the world, right? So, what happens if we end up in the same boat?

Speaker 1 Kimberly Adams, as mentioned, she's got her own show called Make Me Smart. She also talks about this, there, go listen.
Thanks to Rebecca Ibarra for making the show. Thanks to Jolie Myers for editing.

Speaker 1 Thanks to Laura Bullard for fact-checking. Thanks to Patrick Boyd and Andrea Christenstachter for mixing.
Thanks to Rachel Wolfe at the Wall Street Journal.

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