WASHINGTON – Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Monday reframed the administration’s looming August 1 trade deadline, suggesting that the implementation of massive new tariffs is not an end point for negotiations but rather a deliberate tactic designed to “put more pressure” on countries to agree to terms more favorable to the United States.
Bessent’s remarks introduce a new layer of strategic ambiguity into the White House’s trade policy, appearing to soften the “hard deadline” stance articulated by other senior officials. He indicated that the administration is more concerned with the quality of a final deal than with the timing, signaling that once the steep levies take effect, they will become another powerful tool in the ongoing trade wars.
The comments come as investors and importers are struggling to decipher the administration’s true intentions, torn between bracing for the economic shock of tariffs as high as 40% and betting that President Donald Trump will postpone them yet again.
“We’ll see what the president wants to do,” Bessent said on CNBC when asked if the deadline could be extended for countries engaged in productive talks. “But again, if we somehow boomerang back … I would think that a higher tariff level will put more pressure on those countries to come with better agreements.”
This perspective contrasts with recent comments from other top administration officials who have insisted that August 1 is a firm cutoff. Just a day earlier, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick stated that “nothing stops countries from talking to us after August 1, but they’re going to start paying the tariffs on August 1.”
Bessent’s framing suggests that the administration views the tariffs themselves as a new phase of the negotiation, not a failure of it. “Our trading partners were told that the rates could boomerang back toward the April 2 levels,” he said. “We can continue talking then, but again, we’re proceeding apace with the negotiations, but we’re not going to rush for the sake of doing deals.”
The president’s tariff deadline has shifted multiple times since his initial, dramatic announcement of steep levies on trading partners on April 2, casting persistent doubt on whether the August 1 date will hold. Bessent’s comments on Monday will likely fuel that uncertainty, reinforcing the view that the deadline is a flexible tool to keep trading partners at the negotiating table.
In a clear signal that the administration is prepared for talks to continue well past the deadline, Bessent emphasized that the ultimate goal was a superior agreement for the United States.
“The important thing here is the quality of the deal, not the timing of the deals,” he said.
