WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has been presented with offers from at least 15 nations for bespoke trade deals following President Trump’s announcement last week of a 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Tuesday.
“We’ve had more than 15 deals, pieces of paper, put on the table — proposals that are actively being considered,” Leavitt said during her regular briefing, without specifying which nations had made the offers
The press secretary also clarified that no agreements had been finalized yet, but predicted deals should be happening “soon.”
“As we’ve said consistently, more than 75 countries have reached out,” Leavitt explained. “So there’s a lot of work to do. We very much understand that, but we also believe that we can announce some deals very soon.”
A White House official predicted to The Post last week that India, Japan and Vietnam were likely to be among the first nations to come to a one-for-one trade understanding with the US.
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is also prioritizing quick agreements with Australia, South Korea and the United Kingdom — indicating a preference for US allies who expressed a desire to negotiate as soon a possible.
Trump, 78, announced April 9 he was holding off on imposing steep duties on dozens of nations around the world until early July to allow his economic team extra time to work out agreements, promising at the time “a deal is going to be made with every one of them.”
Key players in the talks include Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, trade adviser Peter Navarro, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett and US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer — with Trump himself getting the final say.
“We’ve got everybody in the trade team, and even deputies of people in the trade team, talking to just about everybody on Earth, and I think that we’ve got more than 10 deals where there’s very good, amazing offers made to the US that Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and Howard Lutnick and the rest of our trade team of the president are stewing over whether those deals are good enough,” Hassett told Fox News on Monday.
The NEC boss added that it was unclear whether the deals would be announced one at a time or all at once.
China is the only country still in a full-fledged trade war with the US, as Beijing and Washington have ramped up tariffs to 125% on each other’s imports.
Any possible trade deal with the Asian power is up to Beijing, Trump said in a statement shared by Leavitt.
“The ball is in China’s court,” the president said. “China needs to make a deal with us. We don’t have to make a deal with them.
“There’s no difference between China and any other country, except they are much larger and China wants what we have — what every country wants that we have — the American consumer, or to put another way, they need our money.”
Additional reporting by Steve Nelson
