No plan to extend 90-day pause on tariffs, Trump says will send letters to countries: ‘We’re allowing you to shop in US …’

“We’ll look at how a country treats us — are they good, are they not so good — some countries we don’t care, we’ll just send a high number out,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News aired on Sunday.

What will the letters say?

The letters are to be sent out before July 9. As per Trump’s plan, those letters are expected to mention: “Congratulations, we’re allowing you to shop in the United States of America, you’re going to pay a 25% tariff, or a 35% or a 50% or 10%.”

Trade deal talks with countries

Trump also said trade pact negotiations continue, but “there’s 200 countries, you can’t talk to all of them”.

“We’re not going to make deals with everybody. Some, we are just going to send them a letter, say thank you very much… My people don’t want to do it that way. They want to do some of it, but they want to make more deals than I would do,” Trump said in the interview.

Earlier on Friday, the President, speaking at a White House press conference, had downplayed the deadline. He said it would be difficult to work out separate deals with each country. This was in reference to his administration’s goal reaching 90 trade deals in the 90 days.

At the same event, he also said that the US and India “may” sign a trade deal, under which the country would “open up”.

“Everybody wants to make a deal and have a part of it… we just signed with China yesterday. We are having some great deals. We have one coming up, maybe with India. A very big one. Where we’re going to open up India. In the China deal, we are starting to open up China,” he added.

On April 9, Trump announced that he is applying a 90-day pause on new tariffs. In a Truth Social post, he wrote that he had “authorised a 90 day PAUSE, and a substantially lowered Reciprocal Tariff during this period, of 10%, also effective immediately.”