Remember this 👇? This was April 9th, the day of the announcement of the 90-day pause for "liberation day" tariffs, and Trump was saying that countries were "dying to make a deal" and would do anything for it, "kissing his ass" to make deals. Basically, the narrative was that countries were so desperate to avoid the tariffs that deals would be easy. We're now July 7th, the eve - literally - of the 90-day deadline. So where are we? 1) Not a single actual trade "deal" was achieved. The US has reached 3 "framework" agreements with respectively China, the UK and Vietnam but even with those the US wasn't exactly negotiating from a position of strength where the other side were "ass-kissing" them (save, maybe, for the UK). In fact the framework agreement with China - by far the most consequential country - was adopted precisely because China retaliated to Trump's tariffs and banned rare earth exports, inflicting real economic damage and forcing the U.S. to quickly negotiate a face-saving framework that restored Chinese exports while reducing American tariffs. 2) Scott Bessent just admitted ( that "many of these countries never even contacted us" 3) Most notably, again save for the UK, the US hasn't reached a single deal with any of its traditional allies and has instead only managed to thoroughly antagonize them. So much so that the Japanese Finance Minister has for instance threatened, for the first time ever and on national TV, to sell their holdings of US treasuries as a tool of economic warfare against the US ( So basically, far from revealing, as Trump obviously seemed to believe, the strength of American economic dominance, the Liberation Day tariffs have accomplished the exact opposite. Instead of countries begging for mercy, most just ignored him, allies turned hostile, China made him blink first by demonstrating that they could inflict real economic pain and America ends up looking weak, isolated and outmaneuvered by the very countries Trump claimed would be "kissing his ass." As always, Trump is the great revealer and in this instance he revealed that America simply doesn't matter much trade-wise for the rest of the world, at least not enough for them to lower themselves to kiss his ass.