Fox Business correspondent Charles Gasparino on Wednesday pushed back on Fox News defending President Donald Trump’s pause on most reciprocal tariffs, saying the move did not appear to be part of a bigger plan or the “Art of the Deal.”
“The ‘Art of the Deal’ is all over the Twitter-sphere right now, as people say,” Sandra Smith said, a reference to Trump’s book that he says outlines his tough style of business negotiations. “I mean, maybe this is the way [Trump] planned it.”
“I want to tell you right now that Donald Trump outsmarted the world. Trust me: I’m an American, I support my president,” Gasparino said. “But that’s not really what happened here, from what I understand.”
Trump earlier in the day said that he was curtailing wide-ranging reciprocal tariffs on all countries, which he announced the prior week. All nations will get a baseline 10% tariff increase instead of much higher levies that had ranged as high as 50%. And China will continue to get high tariffs, with the U.S. raising their levies to 125%.
The stock market made historic gains in response, to begin to rebound after days of precipitous drops. The S&P 500 gained by 9.52%, its biggest one-day gain since 2008; the Dow Jones Industrial Average increased by 7.87%, its largest single-day uptick since March 2020; and the Nasdaq Composite zoomed up by 12.16%, its healthiest one-day increase since January 2001.
Some Trump allies contended the president did not change course due to the stock market tanking last week. They argued he paused reciprocal tariffs because he got what he wanted: negotiations from other countries on trade deals.
But Gasparino reported that Trump was actually responding to the cratering bonds market.
“What happened in the bond market overnight — the spike in yields on the 30-year and the 10-year bond, which showed that people were dumping our bonds,” Gasparino said. “If you have a mass sale of bonds, that means people are losing confidence in the U.S. economy, on the ability to do deals with us, and, from what I understand, this is what forced the hand of this 90-day reprieve.”
