U.S. President Donald Trump. Photographer: Scott Olson/Getty Images.

President Donald Trump plans to announce trade deals and deliver tariff warnings today and tomorrow, as countries negotiated through the weekend to avoid the highest punitive measures on their exports to the United States before a Wednesday deadline. Heading into the final days before the July 9 end of Trump’s 90-day reprieve of so-called reciprocal tariffs, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said 18 major trading partners are the priority, with several big agreements expected to be announced. He also acknowledged the sheer number of ongoing discussions is complicating the final stages.

However, the timeline for the talks appeared to be reset. For weeks, the administration warned that Trump would impose levies on July 9 for countries failing to secure an accord, reverting to the tariff levels announced on so-called “Liberation Day” on April 2. Now U.S. officials are signaling that trading partners will have until August 1 before the tariffs kick in. That gives them the option of three more weeks for deal-making.

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“There’s a lot of congestion going into the home stretch,” the Treasury chief said on Fox News Sunday while declining to characterize August 1 as the new official deadline. “If you want to speed things up, have at it,” he said on CNN about countries that receive a letter. “If you want to go back to the old rate, that’s your choice.” Speaking on CNBC this morning, Bessent said he expected “several” announcements in the next 48 hours. “What President Trump is concerned about is the quality of deals, not the quantity,” he said.

The European Union (EU) said that progress has been made on a deal and that the bloc is still working toward the Wednesday deadline. Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen spoke on Sunday and had a “good exchange,” a spokesman for the EU’s executive arm said Monday in Brussels.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz over the weekend discussed how to resolve the U.S. trade dispute in separate phone calls with Von der Leyen as well as counterparts from France and Italy, a government spokesman told reporters in Berlin on Monday. “Time is running out,” Merz’s chief spokesman Stefan Kornelius told a regular government news conference in Berlin, adding that Germany continues to support the Commission’s strategy in the negotiations with the United States. “It’s a complex matrix of factors that need to be taken into account.”

Emboldened by a legislative win and a U.S. stock market hitting a record high last week, Trump is flexing his tariff authority as a tool to pursue domestic economic gains and taunt geopolitical rivals. In a social media post on Sunday, Trump said he’ll announce that “the UNITED STATES TARIFF Letters, and/or Deals, with various Countries from around the World, will be delivered starting” at noon Washington time.

His latest threat was a 10 percent import tax on “any country aligning themselves with the Anti-American policies of BRICS.” He added, in a Truth Social post, “There will be no exceptions to this policy,” just as BRICS nations—led by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—were gathering in Rio de Janeiro for meetings starting Sunday.

Alongside the EU, officials from Japan were in discussions with Washington through the U.S. holiday weekend. The Trump administration has stated for weeks that multiple accords are imminent, but so far only a limited framework with the UK, a truce with China, and Trump’s brief outline of a pact with Vietnam have been announced.

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