Donald Trump made two big public announcements on the day he launched a battery of new tariffs and upended the global trading order: one about a new ballroom at the White House and another about sports.
“We’re making a lot of deals,” the president said on Thursday afternoon, turning his attention briefly to trade while flanked by an array of football and golf stars. “We just made a couple of others a little while ago — I don’t know if you’d be interested right now. I won’t even bother to tell you.”
The comments seemed designed to taunt US trading partners such as Canada, Taiwan and India, which lobbied frantically for days to avoid more Trump tariffs — but were still bereft as the clock raced towards the US president’s August 1 deadline to strike new deals.