“Tariff Man” isn’t imposing any new tariffs. Yet.

Donald Trump won’t slap the world with draconian import duties on “day one,” as he threatened repeatedly on the campaign trail. Instead, he’s approaching the trade issue “in a measured way,” as one senior administration official put it, in remarks to The Wall Street Journal.

For the international community, the most pressing questions around Trump’s first week (back) in the Oval Office revolved around trade. “Will he, or won’t he?” the world wanted to know, vis-à-vis tariff menacing.

The answer’s that he probably will at some point, but for now, he’s just going to send a memo. Not to trade partners. They already got their memo in the form of Trump’s rally bombast describing the “rape” of America. But rather to US government agencies, which are instructed to “study” America’s trade relationships, with a special focus on China, Canada and Mexico.

Essentially, Trump wants a progress report on the USMCA and also on his “big,” “beautiful” unfinished 2020 deal with China (recall that the ink on “phase one” of that agreement was barely dry when the pandemic hit). Federal agencies are supposed to review compliance with those arrangements, and they’re also tasked with “fixing” perennial trade deficits, an ask which plainly suggests Trump (still) doesn’t understand what a trade deficit actually is. (There’s nothing to “fix.”)

As the Journal‘s reporting noted, the absence of new levies on day one means there’s still no consensus among Trump’s advisors on the optimal approach to implementing his trade agenda. Indeed, it’s not even clear what his trade agenda actually entails.

There are two camps in the administration: Pragmatists and hardliners. Scott Bessent’s a pragmatist, Stephen Miller’s a hardliner. On the trade issue, the pragmatists want a tailored approach that aims to address identifiable (read: actual) problems, whereas the hardliners want a national emergency declaration which, long story short, would allow Trump to claim unilateral authority to regulate imports without having to explain subsequent actions to anyone.

That debate spilled out into the open a few weeks ago, when The Washington Post sketched the contours of a targeted approach (Trump called that reporting “fake news”) and CNN detailed a plan to establish a new tariff program under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act (reporting Trump didn’t deny, or at least not as vociferously as he denigrated WaPo‘s story).

Apparently, the internal debate wasn’t resolved by Inauguration Day, so Trump settled on a memo which, in addition to assessing compliance with existing deals struck during his first term, calls for a review of tariff exemptions for low-value items and a closer look at currency manipulation.

I’d be remiss not to point out the striking (and amusing) similarities between descriptions of the memo and similar decrees handed down by the CCP, which frequently instructs government agencies to conduct comprehensive “studies” and report back to the Standing Committee. More poignant still is the parallel between the moderate-hardliner split within the Trump administration and similar divides observable within every autocratic regime that isn’t an out-and-out dictatorship.