“You can take it or leave it.”

That’s what Donald Trump’s going to tell the penguins of Heard Island and everyone else not important enough to get an invite for bilateral trade negotiations with his administration.

About a month ago, while hanging out with real royalty in the Middle East, Trump acknowledged what should’ve been obvious to The White House when he paused the “Liberation Day” tariffs: 90 days isn’t enough time to negotiate bespoke deals with all of America’s trade partners.

“You’re not able to see that many countries,” he said on May 16. “So at a certain point, I think Scott and Howard will be sending letters out essentially telling people what they’ll be paying to do business in the United States.”

That’s actually not as ridiculous as it sounds. Wait. Let me back up. It is, but if you accept the reality we live in — i.e., a reality where America’s determined to retaliate against every nation, big or small, friend or foe, which erects barriers applicable to trade with the US — and you assume Trump’s “national emergency” has to be resolved before the 90-day pause expires, a “take it or leave it” approach to tariffs on countries which “don’t matter” is probably better than wasting time haggling over the proper tax rate for inconsequential trade flows.

As I put it last month, “the idea is to secure bilateral deals with every country who’s a major US trading partner, thereby covering the vast majority of US trade with a newly-negotiated pact.” “Only ‘unimportant’ countries,” I went on, “will have the rate dictated to them in one of Scott and Howard’s ‘letters.'”

So if this isn’t new, and if it’s only applicable to relatively insignificant trade volumes, why were markets unnerved when Trump said, while attending an event at the recently-purged Kennedy Center, that “We’re going to be sending letters out in about a week and a half, two weeks, to countries, telling them what the deal is”?

Well, for one thing, there was a prevailing sense that Trump might’ve sobered up a bit vis-à-vis the “Liberation Day” tariffs which were widely — and I do mean widely — decried as nonsense.

Trump’s a proud teetotaler, but he’s always drunk on his own Kool-Aid. He’s the Pablo Escobar of “covfefe” and he’s always (always) high on his own supply. But the “Liberation Day” tariffs were an exceedingly rare case where the scope and uniformity of the backlash broke through to Trump’s thoroughly intoxicated (and famously “large”) brain. He’s spent most of the last 10 weeks cleaning up the mess he made on April 2.

If he’s still planning to send out “letters” when the 90-day pause expires, that suggests he’s not, in fact, giving up on the idea of “reciprocal” tariffs designed to eliminate trade deficits, an aim virtually every economist on Earth, regardless of political persuasion, agrees shouldn’t be a goal in and of itself.

That’s a roundabout, circuitous way of saying Trump’s “take it or leave it” remark from Wednesday evening suggests he’s every bit as irrational as he was in early April, and maybe even more so given that US equities have retraced back near record highs.

That’s a good segue into the second reason Trump’s comments on the letters unnerved markets: Traders and investors took this week’s China de-escalation as a sign that Trump wasn’t necessarily inclined to view US equity strength as a green light to dial up tensions in keeping with the “Trump collar” trade.

Instead, some suggested Trump might be looking to facilitate a new melt-up on Wall Street. The renewed threat of unilateral tariffs perhaps suggests Trump’s feeling emboldened again after all, and while I think I think it’s a stretch (and not a small one) to say Trump monitors auction results, you could argue a solid 10-year reopening on Wednesday made him even more confident.

Finally, I think most people assumed Trump would extend the pause, and indeed he almost surely will for the EU. Brussels is struggling to put an acceptable proposal together in time. America, Bessent told lawmakers this week, has 18 “important trading partners” with whom Trump’s “working toward deals.” “It’s likely,” Bessent went on, that the pause will be “rolled forward” for countries “who are negotiating in good faith.”

For everyone deemed to be negotiating in bad faith there won’t be a pause extension nor, apparently, for countries which weren’t invited to negotiate in the first place.

Ultimately, the issue with Trump’s latest pseudo-threat is the same as the problem with most of what he says about tariffs — namely, he stokes uncertainty pretty much every time he opens his mouth.

When Trump says things like, “At a certain point, we’re just going to send letters out,” it reminds markets of something they’d rather forget: That Trump defaults to ad hoc, unilateral policymaking when he’s forced to reckon with the (admittedly vexing) reality that there are no easy solutions to complex problems.

We’re less than a month away from the expiration of Trump’s 90-day “pause” and the US has signed exactly no proper trade deals. All Trump’s managed to cobble together since April 9 is a vague framework with the UK and a tenuous truce with China. That’s it.

Earlier this week, in what must’ve been a stinging rebuke, The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board said “the larger problem with Mr. Trump’s tariff strategy” is that “he doesn’t have one.”