U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday signaled a potential end to the tit-for-tat tariff hikes between the United States and China that shocked markets, and that a deal over the fate of social media platform TikTok may have to wait.
“I don’t want them to go higher because at a certain point you make it where people don’t buy,” Trump told reporters about tariffs at the White House.
“So, I may not want to go higher or I may not want to even go up to that level. I may want to go to less because you know you want people to buy and, at a certain point, people aren’t gonna buy.”
Trump’s comments further pointed to a diminished appetite for sharply higher across-the-board tariffs on dozens of countries after markets reacted violently to their introduction on April 2.
The Republican president slapped 10% tariffs on most goods entering the country but delayed the implementation of higher levies, pending negotiations.
Still, he hiked rates on Chinese imports, now totaling 145%, after Beijing retaliated with its own countermeasures. Last week, China said “will not respond” to a “numbers game with tariffs,” its own signal that across-the-board rates would not rise further.
Trump said China had been in touch since the imposition of tariffs and expressed optimism that they could reach a deal.
While the two sides are in touch, sources told Reuters that free-flowing, high-level exchanges of the sorts that would lead to a deal have largely been absent.
Speaking with reporters, Trump repeatedly declined to specify the nature of talks between the countries or whether they directly included Chinese President Xi Jinping.
China has also taken the lead in lobbying other countries to resist Trump’s tariffs, with Xi this week on a visit to Southeast Asia personally urging Vietnam and Cambodia, hit with U.S. tariffs of 46% and 49% respectively, to oppose “unilateral bullying.”
Next week, China is planning an informal United Nations Security Council meeting to accuse the U.S., the world’s biggest economy, of bullying. A note inviting all 193 U.N. member states to attend the April 23 meeting in New York specifically criticises the United States for imposing tariffs.
Some countries, such as Japan, have already started to reach out to Washington to seek a reprieve over the tariffs.
But China remains adamant that the U.S. should show respect before any talks can take place.
Trump has repeatedly extended a legal deadline for China-based ByteDance to divest the U.S. assets of the short video app used by 170 million Americans. On Thursday, he said a spin-off deal would likely wait until the trade issue is settled.
“We have a deal for TikTok, but it’ll be subject to China so we’ll just delay the deal ’til this thing works out one way or the other,” Trump said.
