TheChek News Flow

Breaking Down Trump’s Entanglements With Crypto

Sector has been one of the biggest winners in the president’s second term

Key Points

• President Trump’s embrace of crypto is boosting the sector, raising ethical concerns related to his business interests and family involvement.
• Representatives of Trump’s family have held discussions about investing in the U.S. arm of the crypto exchange Binance.
• Trump’s sons—Donald Jr., Eric and Barron—are involved in World Liberty Financial, a business launched in September.

President Trump and his family’s embrace of cryptocurrencies have made the sector one of the biggest winners in his second term. Critics have raised ethical concerns given Trump’s vast business interests.

Here’s what to know about his crypto moves:

Trump is hosting a dinner Thursday for holders of his memecoin, $TRUMP. Memecoins are cryptocurrencies whose value is largely based on the popularity of internet memes. First lady Melania Trump’s $MELANIA coin made its debut in January at about the same time as her husband’s.

The coins initially surged in value, but have since tumbled. At one point, $TRUMP had a market value of some $15 billion.

Prices bounced back a bit in late April after Trump announced the coming dinner with the top 220 holders of his memecoin, many of whom are foreigners. Watchdog groups say he is directly benefiting from his office or could trade favors. Administration officials say there are no conflicts of interest.

Representatives of Trump’s family have held discussions about investing in the U.S. arm of the crypto exchange Binance. That would put the president in business with a firm that pleaded guilty to violating anti-money-laundering laws.

Binance executives also met with Treasury Department officials and discussed loosening U.S. government oversight on the company.

The Binance founder and majority owner, Changpeng Zhao, widely known as CZ, recently said his lawyers had formally applied for a pardon. He served four months in prison last year for a related charge.

The Trumps also have World Liberty Financial, a business they launched in September. Trump’s sons—Donald Jr., Eric and Barron—are all involved in the effort, and the family controls about 60% of the equity.

World Liberty Financial recently launched a stablecoin, which is a popular type of cryptocurrency that pegs its value to a fiat currency, such as the U.S. dollar. The firm got a big boost from a $2 billion deal in which a state-backed United Arab Emirates investor will put money into Binance using the World Liberty stablecoin. The project initially struggled to find buyers for the tokens it was selling, but then gained popularity around Inauguration Day.

The Chinese-born crypto executive Justin Sun spurred the momentum by investing $75 million in the project. In February, the Securities and Exchange Commission asked a court to pause a lawsuit accusing Sun and his companies of fraud. A spokesperson previously said Sun’s investments aren’t politically motivated.

Don Jr. and Eric have invested in a bitcoin-mining firm called American Bitcoin, which is aiming to go public through a merger with another bitcoin miner. Mining entails solving complex equations using computer servers to unlock bitcoin, the most popular digital asset.

Trump’s team is trying to shepherd two crypto bills through Congress in the coming months: one creating the first regulations for stablecoins, and another dictating which crypto products are regulated as securities by the SEC and which are regulated as commodities by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The Senate is expected to vote on its version of the stablecoin bill soon. Some Democrats have cited Trump’s potential conflicts of interest and stablecoin activity as reasons they oppose the legislation.

Trump made one of his biggest crypto policy moves in March, when he established a national digital-asset stockpile similar to the U.S. gold reserve, giving the sector a stamp of approval. The stockpile will consist of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies seized by law enforcement.

The Treasury and Commerce departments could make additional purchases of bitcoin as long as they didn’t cost taxpayers money, according to the executive order creating the crypto reserve. The government won’t buy other tokens in the stockpile.

US threatens maximum tariffs as it takes tougher line on trade talks

Treasury secretary Scott Bessent says rates will jump to the high levels set on ‘liberation day’ if countries do not negotiate

The US says it will impose the maximum tariffs it has threatened against countries that do not negotiate “in good faith” as it strikes a more aggressive tone in trade talks.

Treasury secretary Scott Bessent on Sunday said that tariff rates would go back to the levels that President Donald Trump announced on April 2, when he declared his intention to “liberate” the US from an unfair trade system. 

Countries would receive letters from Bessent outlining those maximum tariff rates if “they’re not negotiating in good faith”, the Treasury secretary told NBC. 

“Some countries were at 10 per cent, some were substantially higher,” he added. If “you don’t want to negotiate then it will spring back to the April 2nd level”. 

The harder line illustrates how fraught the tariff negotiations have become, and contrasts with recent boasts by President Donald Trump that countries were rushing to negotiate with Washington. 

Trump on April 2 said that a levy of 10 per cent would apply to nearly all imports, but he also announced sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs in retaliation against levies on US exports.

Following last month’s announcement, US tariffs on Chinese goods reached a whopping 145 per cent. But the two countries on Monday signed a deal to cut tariffs on each other’s goods for at least 90 days, with the extra levies the US imposed on China this year falling to 30 per cent and China’s declining to 10 per cent.

South-east Asia’s export hubs were also hit with high levies on April 2, when Trump claimed the US would be freed from the yoke of unfair trade restrictions. Cambodia was given a “reciprocal” rate of 49 per cent, closely followed by Laos with 48 per cent and Vietnam with 46 per cent.

Mexico and Canada, which have often sparred with Trump over trade, dodged the reciprocal tariffs. Duties of 25 per cent for goods that do not comply with the terms of the 2020 USMCA trade deal with the US remained in place.

The UK earlier this month became the first country to strike a deal with Trump since he unleashed his trade war, securing cuts to tariffs on car and steel exports but failing to reverse a flat 10 per cent levy that applies to most goods.

Bessent on Sunday also railed against Walmart, which has said it will raise prices due to tariffs imposed by Washington. 

The Treasury secretary said he had spoken to Walmart’s chief executive and that the retailer will “eat some of the tariffs”, echoing comments from Trump on social media on Saturday. Walmart declined to comment on Bessent’s comments, but said over the weekend that it has “always worked to keep our prices as low as possible”.

Bessent also sought to quell concerns around Moody’s decision on Friday to cut the US credit rating from its top-notch triple-A level to Aa1, citing rising levels of government debt and a widening budget deficit.

“Moody’s is a lagging indicator. I think that’s what everyone thinks of credit agencies,” Bessent said, as he sought to pin the blame on former president Joe Biden. 

“It’s the Biden administration and the spending that we have seen over the past four years,” Bessent added. “And we are determined to bring the spending down and grow the economy.”

Sitting in their Zurich headquarters, On’s sanguine co-CEO, Martin Hoffmann, and his colleague and On co-founder Caspar Coppetti, have reason to be relaxed. Another quarter of unexpected growth has notched another $3 billion to their brand’s value.

There is an elephant in the room, however. It’s not taking up much room though, given the elephant is a newly-empty seat at the CEO table.

Hoffmann will soon take on the role of On’s CEO alone when his co-CEO Marc Maurer leaves the company in June. Maurer said he planned to embark on a “new chapter” in his professional life after more than 14 years at the company.

Maurer and Hoffmann both joined On from Swiss food retailer Valora in 2012 and 2013, respectively, as COO and CFO, with Maurer wooing his friend over to what was then a little-known running startup. The pair has operated as co-CEOs since 2021.

From July, though, Hoffmann, a financial whizz by trade and by nature, will take the reins of On alone, without Maurer to lean on.

“I had a really strong relationship with Marc and a deep, deep friendship,” Hoffmann told Fortune following the release of On’s first-quarter earnings.

“I will miss that, but we have been super close, basically in all parts of the business, together with different focuses. But there are no blind spots, and we are not changing strategy.”

Hoffmann, whose priority will shift from his current dual role as CFO, admits he loves numbers as much as he does people. For a company better known for design, innovation, and cool collaborations with Gen Z idols, finance will need to take a backseat.

“The strength of On is not the numbers, it’s the team,” said Hoffmann.

“My goal was to enable this team to be at their best. And I don’t think this changes. The focus from where I do it will change, but the perspective stays the same.”

Hoffmann could hardly take sole charge of On in a better position.

On Tuesday, the group reported a 43% surge in revenue in the first quarter of 2025 compared with a year earlier, while it increased its revenue and profitability guidance for the rest of the year.

The last quarter marked the second in a row that On beat its revenue expectations.

New brand partnerships, including a February Super Bowl advertisement featuring tennis great and On investor, Roger Federer, and Elmo, have helped the company defy short-run expectations within a wider goal of doubling sales between 2023 and 2026.

On wrapped up its earnings week by hitting a record valuation of $19.65 billion as investors piled into the running brand in the wake of the surprise results, having started the week valued at around $16 billion. On is now the third most valuable publicly traded footwear brand in the world behind Nike and Adidas.

The group’s surge has come as those legacy sportswear companies have regressed. Shares in Nike have plunged more than 15% since the start of the year, while Adidas shares have fallen more than 8%. On, meanwhile, has risen in value by 8% this year. With a current running shoe market share of around 10%, the company’s leadership is laser-focused on driving this even higher.

“Our long-term vision is to be the number one brand in running,” Coppetti told Fortune.

On’s marketing

Getting to the mantle of the number one running brand certainly looks a lot more realistic now than when its co-founders first started experimenting with strapping hose pipes to the bottom of traditional running shoes. It is, however, a different path from the one that brought On to this point.

On evolved as a challenger brand largely through word-of-mouth marketing and an opportunistic boom in running among younger people, whose higher disposable income, social media awareness, and newfound focus on fitness have proved a goldmine for the athletic brand.

“I think we’re benefiting from this health and wellness trend where younger adults… they’re going to the gym rather than going to the bar,” said Coppetti. The group’s successful partnership with Zendaya hasn’t hurt its appeal with young customers either.

“We’re quite obsessed,” Coppetti says about continuing to enhance On’s brand recognition.

The company has been forensic in transitioning from an online model to erecting physical stores, considering exactly where to place each of its 53 stores, right down to the street corner, to maintain its exclusivity while growing.

“We don’t want to overshoot, and that allows us to, for example, be very selective with retail partners we want to work with, or which stores we want to be in, which street, which corner of that street we want to have our store on and it all feeds into this premium positioning,” says Coppetti.

On’s two London stores exemplify that strategy, with one located on the exclusive Regent’s Street, and the other in the trendy east-side shopping zone of Spitalfields. Coppetti notes some 200 people take part in a run club from that store regularly. You can be pretty confident that an On rep will make an undercover appearance at other run clubs, too.

“We actually go out and we go to the major running routes in the big cities, and we go and count people, and we see what products they are wearing, both footwear and apparel,” Coppetti said.

The company does the same at running events. On gets more cut through among short distance runners, up to half marathon distances. It’s hoping to grab more marathon runners when it launches its “super shoes” later this year.

There will be other challenges along the way. Still a nascent brand, On hasn’t yet proved it can ride out demand dips and move beyond fears that it is a “fad” shoe. And despite having operations in the U.S., the Swiss brand is no less exposed to tariffs than its competitors. Still, On is planning price increases this year, unrelated to tariffs, and CEO Hoffmann thinks customers are ready to stay on the ride, however bumpy things get.

“We want to be the most premium global sports brand, and premium is the decisive word here,” Hoffmann says. “And if you are clear about the North Star, we actually have clear direction in kinds of uncertainties like this.”

The world’s only net-positive fusion experiment has been steadily ramping up the amount of power it produces, TechCrunch has learned.

In recent attempts, the team at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) increased the yield of the experiment, first to 5.2 megajoules and then again to 8.6 megajoules, according to a source with knowledge of the experiment.

The new results are significant improvements over the historic experiment in 2022, which was the first controlled fusion reaction to generate more energy than the it consumed.

The 2022 shot generated 3.15 megajoules, a small bump over the 2.05 megajoules that the lasers delivered to the BB-sized fuel pellet.

None of the shots to date have been effective enough to feed electrons back into the grid, let alone to offset the energy required to power the entire facility — the facility wasn’t designed to do that. The first net-positive shot, for example, required 300 megajoules to power the laser system alone. But they are continued proof that controlled nuclear fusion is more than hypothetical.

The NIF uses what’s known as inertial confinement to produce fusion reactions. At the facility, fusion fuel is coated in diamond and then encased in a small gold cylinder called a hohlraum. That tiny pellet is dropped into a spherical vacuum chamber 10 meters in diameter, where 192 powerful laser beams converge on the target.

The cylinder is vaporized under the onslaught, emitting X-rays in the process that bombard the fuel pellet inside. The pellet’s diamond coating receives so much energy that it turns into an expanding plasma, which compresses the deuterium-tritium fuel inside to the point where their nuclei fuse, releasing energy in the process.

The other main approach to fusion, magnetic confinement, uses powerful superconducting magnets to compress and contain plasma in a space tight enough to create the conditions necessary for fusion. While no magnetic confinement experiments have produced net-positive results, several are being constructed or designed with the expectation that they’ll hit that milestone.

Several startups are pursuing inertial confinement, including Xcimer Energy and Focused Energy.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Militant leader Yahya Sinwar feared progress on peace would doom the Palestinian cause

Top leaders of Palestinian Islamist group Hamas launched their Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel aiming to torpedo peace negotiations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, according to minutes of a high-level meeting in Gaza that Israel’s military said it discovered in a tunnel beneath the enclave.

Days before the assault that left nearly 1,200 dead, Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s Gaza chief, told fellow militants that an “extraordinary act” was required to derail the normalization talks that he said risked marginalizing the Palestinian cause, the document, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, said.

The plan worked—at a terrible price.

Iran-backed Hamas’s onslaught of killing and kidnapping sparked an Israeli military campaign to destroy the militants that has killed more than 60,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health authorities, and left the territory in ruins. That has fueled anger across the Arab world and beyond, halting progress toward normalization, at least for now.

President Trump, visiting Riyadh on Tuesday, acknowledged as much, calling on Saudi Arabia to establish relations with Israel but saying, “You’ll do it in your own time.”

The meeting minutes—from an Oct. 2, 2023, gathering of Hamas’s political bureau in Gaza—cite Sinwar as saying, “There is no doubt that the Saudi-Zionist normalization agreement is progressing significantly.” He warned a deal would “open the door for the majority of Arab and Islamic countries to follow the same path.”

For Sinwar and Hamas, who have called for total destruction of Israel and the creation of a Palestinian state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, this was unacceptable. Sinwar said it was time to unleash an attack that had been in the planning stages for two years.

The goal, he said, is “to bring about a major move or a strategic shift in the paths and balances of the region with regard to the Palestinian cause.” He expected to get help from the other Iranian-backed forces of the so-called axis of resistance to Israel.

Hamas didn’t respond to a request for comment on the authenticity of the document or its contents. Arab intelligence officials familiar with Hamas and its records said the document appears to be genuine, as do others the Israeli military says it found in Gaza.

Those documents, reviewed by the Journal, show mounting concern among Hamas leaders about the progress of U.S.-brokered talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Officials of all three countries were saying in 2023 that differences were narrowing.

This newest cache of Hamas records adds a new link in the chain of events leading up to Oct. 7, 2023, the deadliest day for Israelis since the country’s founding.

The Journal, citing senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah, has reported that another meeting connected to the attack took place on Oct. 2 that year, this one in Beirut involving representatives of Hamas and Iranian security officials. Iran approved the planned attack, those people said.

Other Hamas and Hezbollah officials have disputed that, saying details of the attack, including the scope and the date, were kept tightly under wraps by Hamas’s military wing in Gaza.

Senior officials from Iran and Hezbollah had been discussing attack options with Hamas since the summer of 2021. Iran also gave Hamas weapons, financing and training over a long period, including combat training in the weeks before Oct. 7, according to intelligence officials from several countries.

But Tehran and Hezbollah made it clear to Hamas that they didn’t want to end up in a direct, all-out war with Israel, according to officials from the axis as well as Israeli intelligence.

Many of the figures directly involved in planning the Oct. 7 attacks are now dead. Sinwar was killed by Israeli troops in Gaza last October. Most of Hamas’s other top leaders in Gaza have also been killed, including some who were present at the Oct. 2 political bureau meeting, such as Marwan Issa.

Israel has also killed top Hamas leaders in exile, including Ismail Haniyeh, who was the most powerful person in the movement along with Sinwar. On Tuesday, an Israeli airstrike in Gaza targeted Sinwar’s brother, Mohammed, head of Hamas’ military operations; it wasn’t clear whether he had been killed.

Among the other internal Hamas documents found by the Israeli military and reviewed by the Journal was a September 2023 report that recommended escalating the conflict in the West Bank and Jerusalem to make Saudi-Israeli normalization more difficult.

The report expressed mistrust of Saudi pledges to uphold Palestinian interests, calling them “weak and limited steps to neutralize” Hamas and stop it from fighting back against normalization.

Saudi relations with the Iranian-backed Hamas had been frosty ever since Hamas violently wrested control of the Gaza Strip from rival Palestinian faction Fatah.

An internal briefing marked “secret” from August 2022, written by Hamas’s military leadership, concludes: “It has become the duty of the movement to reposition itself to … preserve the survival of the Palestinian cause in the face of the broad wave of normalization by Arab countries, which aims primarily to liquidate the Palestinian cause.”

In response, Hamas was strengthening its coordination with Hezbollah as well as other Palestinian militant factions, the briefing says.

Saudi-Israeli normalization would mark the biggest change in Israel’s political standing in the Middle East since it signed peace treaties with Jordan and Egypt decades ago. In 2020, Israel also established full diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, agreements known as the Abraham Accords.

But a deal with Riyadh has long been the true prize for Israel—and a major goal for Washington, as it seeks to organize a regional coalition to contain Iran.

The heavy toll of death and destruction in Gaza has changed the political calculus for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The prince has told a number of foreign visitors in the past year that he can’t proceed with normalization unless Israel meets two conditions: halting the war in Gaza, and agreeing to a diplomatic process would eventually lead to a Palestinian state.

But the Oct. 7 attack hardened attitudes in Israel, potentially for years to come. Palestinian statehood has become anathema for most of the Israeli political spectrum.

Also among the documents that Israel’s military said it found is a Hamas job advertisement from October 2022, seeking a person to spearhead diplomatic efforts to derail normalization. It isn’t clear where the advertisement was posted—or how much the job paid.

The vacancy at Hamas’s Department of Arab and Islamic Cooperation sought a university graduate skilled in negotiation and communication. Part of the job description: “Marketing the movement’s programs to confront normalization,” including by getting grassroots organizations in the Arab world to boycott entities that supported normal relations with Israel.

A look at different methods for valuing stocks and what that might suggest going forward

Key Points

The market has absorbed the early blows of President Trump’s tariffs, making up all its lost ground. Yet that rekindles a Wall Street worry from earlier this year: By the typical measures, stocks look very pricey right now.

Following outsize gains in recent years, some analysts entered 2025 concerned that high valuations left share prices especially vulnerable to any hint of trouble in the economy. And so far, stocks have delivered slightly worse returns than bonds this year—even after their recent rebound.

Here is a look at how expensive stocks are currently, and what that might mean for their future performance:

Price/earnings ratios

There are myriad ways to value stocks. The most well-known is the price/earnings ratio.

The most common applications of this metric compare stock prices with a company’s past 12 months of corporate earnings, analysts’ expectations for its next 12 months of earnings or so-called cyclically adjusted earnings: the average annual earnings of the past 10 years, adjusted for inflation.

When the whole S&P 500 is looked at, all three currently show investors paying a high price for every dollar of earnings compared with what they have paid in the past.

Wall Street analysts often like to flip the price/earnings ratio upside down, creating an earnings-to-price ratio. Known as the earnings yield, it is expressed as a percentage and sometimes used as a rough guide to the annual return that investors can expect over an extended period.

Investors can then compare stocks’ earnings yields with yields on U.S. Treasurys. That offers a sense of how much investors are being

compensated to hold riskier investments over ultrasafe government bonds.

Based on real cyclically adjusted earnings, the S&P 500’s earnings yield is currently around 2.8%, or 1.4 percentage points above the inflation-adjusted 10-year Treasury yield, according to data from the economist Robert Shiller. That gap, sometimes known as the excess CAPE yield, is well below its historical average, suggesting investors are so eager to buy stocks that they are willing to accept a smaller premium for the risk of losses.

Just because stocks look expensive by these measures doesn’t mean they are about to plunge. In periods such as the Roaring ’20s and the 1990s tech bubble, frothy markets defied gravity for years.

Still, those rallies eventually ended, leading to years of price declines. There is, as a result, a fairly tight relationship between valuations and what stocks have historically returned over longer periods, such as 10 years.

Measures of relative valuation, like the excess CAPE yield, have been especially good at predicting the relative performance of stocks versus bonds. A smaller excess yield has typically led to a smaller return compared with bonds over the next 10 years; a bigger premium has led to a bigger excess return.

Aswath Damodaran, a professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University, is widely known on Wall Street as “the dean of valuation.” He says one drawback of a standard S&P 500 earnings yield is that it doesn’t account for future earnings growth, effectively treating stocks like bonds with fixed annual payments. He has seen little evidence that valuations can be used to time swings in the market.

Damodaran has devised his own estimate of the risk premium that stocks offer over bonds. His incorporates analysts’ expectations for companies’ earnings growth. Right now, that calculation suggests that stocks are more reasonably priced than other metrics—although Damodaran says that he uses it as a tool to value individual stocks, rather than a guide to buying or selling the overall index.

Others are happy to employ valuation metrics in their investment strategies.

As a reasonable guide to future returns, valuations are one tool that investors can use to build portfolios that match their risk tolerance and to make adjustments over time, said Victor Haghani, founder of Elm Wealth. It might make sense for a young person to own 100% stocks, but most people by the middle of their careers want something less volatile, he said.

An investor who put $1 into the S&P 500 some 60 years ago could have outperformed the market by switching completely to 10-year Treasurys when the excess CAPE yield fell to particularly low levels, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of the data compiled by Shiller.

For example, investing in bonds after any month that the excess CAPE yield averaged less than 1.75%—and stocks otherwise—would have yielded a real annualized return of 6.6%, or 0.5 percentage point more than holding stocks the entire time.

U.S. Allies Are Still Waiting for Tariff Relief Even After Speedy China Truce

Talks with Japan, South Korea and European Union bog down over auto tariffs and U.S. reneging on past deals

The U.S. hammered out a trade truce with its foremost geopolitical rival in record time. Reaching agreement with longtime allies is proving more of a slog.

The U.S. drew up a list of 18 key trading partners to focus on in negotiations following President Trump’s April 2 tariff blitz, when he slapped “reciprocal” tariffs on almost all U.S. imports.

Yet aside from one quick agreement with the U.K. and now the tariff rollback with China, none have so far yielded the kind of breakthrough that would bring relief for painful import levies.

For some of the biggest targets on that list, such as Japan, South Korea and the European Union, one sticking point is cars. The U.S. has so far been reluctant to drop a crippling 25% tariff on imported autos, which particularly hits these allies.

The U.K. did secure a lower auto tariff in its rapid-fire agreement with U.S. negotiators—but only on the first 100,000 vehicles imported each year, far fewer than the carmaking powerhouses send to the U.S. each year.

In earnings reports this month, Toyota, Honda and Nissan blamed tariffs for souring profit forecasts, while data Friday showed Japan’s economy shrank in the first quarter, underlining its vulnerability to an export decline.

Japan’s top trade negotiator, Ryosei Akazawa, said Japan was still seeking the removal of all tariffs Trump has recently imposed, including those on autos and steel as well as the baseline 10% “reciprocal” tariff. He called these levies “deeply regrettable.”

Seoul is also seeking an exemption from tariffs and its trade minister met Friday on South Korea’s Jeju Island with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer. Noting the local auto-parts industry creates about 330,000 jobs, South Korea’s minister for small and midsize businesses recently pledged support to minimize the damage.

Trade officials from several EU member states said they would push for a better deal than the one the U.K. reached with the U.S., which left tariffs in place for most goods. “I don’t think that’s the level of ambition Europe would be happy with,” said Michał Baranowski, Poland’s deputy economy minister.

Trump on April 2 announced plans to hit U.S. allies and adversaries alike with steep new tariffs aimed at reining in the U.S.’s yawning trade deficit and rebuilding U.S. manufacturing.

Japan received a 24% tariff, while the EU got 20%. The Trump administration said the tariffs reflected not just other countries’ tariffs on imports from the U.S. but also onerous regulations and other nontariff barriers.

The levy on South Korea was set at 25%, while the U.K., with which the U.S. runs a trade surplus, got the baseline 10% rate that Trump wants to be a floor on almost all U.S. imports.

Days after announcing the new levies, the White House decreed most of those new tariffs would be suspended for 90 days, while car and steel tariffs remained in force. A rush to negotiate better terms began.

Japan was the first country out of the block to start talks, and officials were hoping for a quick deal.

Trump has frequently spoken of his regard for former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who presented him with a golden golf club after he won the presidency in 2016. Abe’s widow visited Mar-a-Lago late last year following Trump’s second election victory, and the current prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, was one of the first global leaders to visit the White House after inauguration day.

Unlike China, Japan didn’t retaliate against Trump’s tariffs and Ishiba has been careful to avoid public criticism of the president.

“The Japanese are very careful to not have Trump lose face,” said Shihoko Goto of the Washington-based Mansfield Foundation.

Yorizumi Watanabe, president of Fuji Women’s University in Japan and a former top Japanese trade negotiator, said Tokyo was among the nations most susceptible to U.S. pressure.

“Japan is maybe the easiest one to negotiate because we are totally dependent on the U.S. market and also U.S. defense,” he said.

At the same time, he said, Japan is wary of giving too much away in talks. It already signed a trade pact with the U.S. in 2019 during Trump’s first term in which Japan lowered tariffs on some U.S. agricultural products, such as frozen beef and pork, while the U.S. lowered tariffs on some Japanese goods such as machine tools.

Trump has shown by levying a host of new tariffs that he doesn’t consider the 2019 deal with Japan binding, much as he dispensed with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement he also negotiated during his first term.

In Tokyo, that about-face stung. “Even assuming we reach a new agreement built on a win-win relationship, it’s important to reaffirm that they’re going to observe the rules fully this time,” Yoshihiko Noda, leader of the opposition Constitutional Democratic Party, said in an interview.

Trade experts say Japan could offer to increase imports of U.S. cars and align its car-safety standards with America’s. It could propose buying more corn and other agricultural products, this time including rice, which was excluded from 2019 talks. Japan’s shipbuilding expertise could help the U.S. Navy and rebuild the long-dormant U.S. industry, a Trump priority.

There are hurdles other than tariffs. Analysts say some U.S. trading partners might balk at demands to loosen economic ties with China, or agree to let their currencies appreciate against the dollar. Still, the U.S.-China deal reached in Geneva clears some space for Trump’s team to turn its attention to other countries.

“I’ve been focused on the Asia deals, of which obviously China is the largest,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Tuesday. “We’ve had very productive discussions with Japan,” he said, adding that across Asia “things are going very well.”