Last Sunday started out quietly by Donald Trump’s standards. His first tweet was about the appointment of a new head for the US immigration and customs enforcement agency. His second lamented the outcome of the Kentucky Derby horse race, after the original winner was controversially disqualified.
Then came the bombshell: in two more posts, the US president turned the screws on Xi Jinping, his Chinese counterpart, in their high-stakes negotiations to end a year-long trade dispute between the countries. If Beijing did not stop trying to “renegotiate” previously agreed provisions of the draft agreement, the president wrote, US tariffs would rise on Chinese goods worth hundreds of billions of dollars by Friday. After months of suggesting that the trade talks were going well, the president’s suggestion that a deal was in peril rattled global markets and unnerved policymakers worldwide.
According to senior administration officials and people briefed about the negotiations, Mr Trump’s irate messages did not come out of nowhere.