Trump shrugs off July tariff deadline: ‘We can do whatever we want’

President Donald Trump said Friday he may not stick to the deadline in early July when massive U.S. tariffs are set to snap back into effect on a slew of countries.

“No, we can do whatever we want,” Trump said at the White House when asked if his deadline was set in stone. “We could extend it. We could make it shorter.”

The question had specifically been about July 9, the deadline for the U.S. and the European Union to negotiate a trade deal or else trigger a 50% tariff on EU imports to take effect.

But the president’s answer appeared to refer to a July 8 deadline when a three-month pause on his self-described “reciprocal tariffs” on many nations ends, sending country-specific tariff rates back up to their initial, much higher levels.

Despite Trump’s apparent flexibility as to the dates, the executive order he signed on April 9 is not flexible unless it’s formally updated.

That order reduced Trump’s country-specific tariffs down to a rate of 10% across the board for 90 days, and specified that the temporary reprieve would only last for three months.

Unless Trump revises his order, the sweeping tariffs will return to their sky-high rates in 12 days.

That could have a major impact on a slew of U.S. trading partners, and risks repeating the global economic turmoil that Trump set off when he announced the initial tariff rates on April 2.

Countries were blindsided by the massive import duties — some as high as nearly 50% — that Trump rolled out on what he called “liberation day.”

What immediately followed were days of highly volatile markets and criticism and alarm from investors, world leaders and importers. One week later, Trump announced a 90-day pause on the new tariff rates.

The White House initially suggested in April that it would hammer out individual trade deals with scores of countries in the intervening months.

But with less than two weeks remaining in the 90-day interim period, the White House has so far only struck limited trade agreements with China and the United Kingdom.

Both of those deals have been described as more akin to frameworks than to finalized deals. Beijing’s Commerce Ministry said earlier Friday that China and the U.S. have confirmed the details of the trade framework that both sides agreed to in prior talks.

“We’ve made a deal with probably four or five different countries,” Trump said Friday, but “We have 200 countries, you could say 200 countries plus,” on the list of country-specific tariff targets from April.

“So at a certain point, over the next week and a half or so, or maybe before, we’re going to send out a letter, we talked to many of the countries, and we’re just going to tell them what they have to pay to do business in the United States, and it’s going to go very quickly,” said Trump.

Trump’s latest comments followed other recent suggestions by administration officials that the July tariff deadlines are fluid.

“Perhaps it could be extended, but that’s a decision for the president to make,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday.

In late May, a federal trade court struck down the tariffs, ruling that the law Trump invoked to impose them did not grant him the authority he claimed it did. But a federal appeals court has paused that ruling from taking effect.