In Donald Trump's Washington, it's easy to forget how things used to be... that is, a week ago. This week, tariffs have returned to the forefront of political and economic discussions, but not, as expected, because the July 9 deadline he himself set for the implementation of the tariffs he himself threatened dozens of countries with in April was about to expire, but because the US president decided—unilaterally, once again—to set a new date for their entry into force: August 1.

That's when those tariffs will materialize, both those Trump has communicated by letter to some of his partners—25 as of this Saturday, the day that kicked off in Washington with the 30% tariff bombs launched at the European Union and Mexico—and those yet to reach their recipients.

Or maybe not. Dismay is the only certainty in this administration's trade policy. Also certain is its president's confidence in the power of import tariffs to restore manufacturing jobs to the United States—and, incidentally, its greatness, Make America Great Again (MAGA). The rest are uncertain: Will the threats be real this time? Will those countries have time to reach agreements with Washington that soften these punishments? Will it fall on those who haven't agreed to a universal"15% or 20%" tax by then, as Trump promised in a television interview on Thursday?

“I don’t have answers to those questions,” Maurice Obstfeld, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and a fellow at the Washington-based Peterson Institute, replied in an email Friday. “We live in a state of shared ignorance about what the president is really thinking.” At least Obstfeld seemed convinced of one thing: the three weeks remaining until the new truce expires “are not enough time to make serious trade deals, but they are enough time for [Trump] to, under face-saving excuses, extend the negotiating deadline yet again.”

The club of those already questioned by letter is a heterogeneous list, from Moldova to South Korea, and from Sri Lanka to Japan. In that group, there are notable exceptions, such as Brazil, which has seen its tariffs quintupled for non-trade reasons (as much as Trump's desire to free his friend Jair Bolsonaro from jail in his trial for coup plotting). Or Canada, which was unexpectedly slapped with a 35% tariff on certain products with a somewhat laughable excuse: its alleged inaction to stop fentanyl trafficking. But in general, the figures noted in those letters from Trump—again, with the exceptions of the EU and Mexico—are very similar to those that appeared on the XL poster board with which he threatened to unleash a global trade war on April 2 in an appearance at the White House.

Then, the markets collapsed and the panic nearly spread to public debt—a big deal. So the president backtracked and decided to grant the countries 90 days to mitigate their respective blows by sitting down to negotiate with the United States. Washington also fantasized about a sounding slogan ("90 trade deals in 90 days"), but has had to settle for two agreements in principle—with the United Kingdom and with Vietnam, a pact for which, a week later, there is still no documentary evidence from either side—as well as a truce with China.

This time things have been different: rather than shouting, the stock markets have responded with a prolonged yawn, waiting to see how they will react to the onslaught this Saturday, the day markets are closed."These clearly rule out the possibility of draconian tariffs coming into force," Obstfeld continues. Or, to put it less flatteringly for the US president, it seems that investors are once again seeing him in his TACO version, an acronym invented by a Financial Times analyst. It stands for"Trump Always Chickens Out" and its protagonist finds it "repugnant."

“He relies on his negotiating talent, and his strategy is to go all out before lowering the stakes, taking things to the extreme and, yes, retreating,” opines Carolyn Kissane, a professor at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University, in a telephone interview. She clarifies that all his bravado serves at least to “send a message to his supporters”: they see, according to the expert, a strongman defending the United States after years of being—Trump’s words—a “looted, pillaged, raped and plundered” country. And he does so in a grandiloquent manner. “He grabs headlines, and then makes concessions a couple of weeks later, when people are already looking elsewhere.” That amazing place that Trump’s own show will have taken them to.

The Tale of Peter and the Wolf

Kissane is confident that US negotiators will back down"with the larger countries" and with copper, a material on whose imports the world's leading power will impose a 50% tariff, also starting August 1st if nothing changes. The expert also believes that Trump's behavior this week is partly due to the fact that"he is emboldened because the economic indicators are relatively stable." "Companies have rushed to fill their warehouses, and that has increased activity, so the repercussions of the tariffs will come later." To explain the markets' reaction and the countries' attitude of resignation, the expert resorts to the tale of Peter and the Wolf. When the tariffs finally arrive, perhaps no one will believe Trump.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman warned this week on his Substack channel about the danger of trusting that Trump won't follow through on his threats."My bet is that the TACO people will be wrong this time. I'd love to be wrong, but right now it looks to me like deeply destructive tariffs are coming," Krugman wrote."The tone of those letters" and "Trump's obvious obsession with tariffs" lead the illustrious economist to believe that the US president "won't withdraw them."

If left as they are now (i.e., a mix of those introduced in April and this week's correspondence adjustments, plus the sudden changes they've experienced along the way), businesses and consumers will face, according to a report from the Yale Budget Analysis Lab, the highest tariffs since 1934, at the height of the American isolationist heyday brought about by the Smoot-Hawley Act. With that unintended repercussions, President Herbert Hoover sought to protect a failing agricultural sector. The Yale report also estimates that Trump's tariffs will cost American families an additional $2,300 per year.

Bank of America global economists Claudio Irigoyen and Antonio Gabriel warned in an analysis this week that the fact that the stock market has “ignored Trump’s new [tariff] shock,” coupled with the low likelihood that consumer confidence “will be affected,” could encourage Trump to “upsize” his bet, given that the “marginal cost” he faces “is very low.” Irigoyen and Gabriel also do not rule out the risk of “stagflation [a phenomenon resulting from higher inflation and lower growth] as uncertainty increases.”

The factor that contributes most to this uncertainty is Trump's volatile personality, whom a critical editorialist in The Wall Street Journal, in the spirit of a B-movie superhero comic book writer, dubbed Tariff Man this Saturday. If there is one thing that unites those who sit down at the table with the United States in these months, it is the certainty that he will always have the last word, and that a statement from the president or a message in Truth is enough to derail a negotiation that seems to be going well.

In the first round of tariffs in April, the US administration at least bothered to share a mathematical formula that was dismantled in just a few hours. This Thursday, when asked by a reporter seeking some clarity on the criteria for calculating the tariffs being communicated to countries by letter, Trump abandoned the simulation of mathematics: “The formula is a formula,” he said, “based on common sense, deficits, the treatment we've received over the years, and raw numbers (...), very substantial facts, and also past history. There has never been anyone [before him] in the White House who understood numbers.”

That same afternoon, Canadians learned that nothing can be taken for granted with Trump. Ottawa, which saw Washington break off negotiations two weeks earlier in protest over a digital tax they had to withdraw, was surprised by Trump's announcement of an unexpected 35% tariff, which fell like a bomb 11 days before the deadline the two countries had set. Airlanga Hartarto, Indonesia's finance minister, explained to The New York Times that she learned that her country had been hit with a 32% tariff with the rest of the world when the US president published the letter in his Truth on Monday. The percentage was the same as in April, even though she believed"the negotiation was going well."

Countries that haven't yet received their letter will surely be taking careful note of everything that could go wrong. There are still almost three weeks until the deadline, whether definitive or not, who knows, imposed by Tariff Man. Which, in Trump's Washington, is like saying something like another time, defined, of course, by the same confusion.