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President sets Aug. 1 for trade progress
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This is Washington Edition, the newsletter about money, power and politics in the nation’s capital. Today, White House correspondent Josh Wingrove looks at the president’s latest tariff threats and deadline. Sign up here and follow us at @bpolitics. Email our editors here.

A New Deadline

It’s Liberation Day all over again, but with a longer fuse.

President Donald Trump unleashed a volley of letters with his latest trade threats today, writing to the leaders of South Korea, Japan, South Africa and others with the tariffs he planned to slap on goods from their countries — eventually.

It was a fresh sign, if one was needed, of Trump’s zeal for tariffs, though it was quite familiar. The threatened duties were either the same as the president’s original April 2 “Liberation Day” announcement, or rounded up or down to a multiple of five. (Pity Japan and Malaysia, which each saw a percentage-point increase in service of Trump’s longstanding fondness for round numbers.)

The onslaught was, in many ways, vintage Trump. It amounts to a rebranding of previous threats to try to raise pressure and steer attention away from another underlying development: the extension of his July 9 deadline for deals — itself an extension — amounts to acknowledgment his administration was falling far short of promised imminent trade agreements.

So the spike in tariffs due to take effect this week is pushed back a few weeks more, regardless of which country got a letter, with rates still paused at 10%. And it opens an overtime period for talks.

More: Tracking Every Trump Tariff and Its Economic Effect

The letters are invitations to negotiate. Trump also is using them to urge other countries to simply build factories in the US, though that’s cold comfort for low-wage nations relying on industries that satiate America’s consumer economy with cheap goods. He threatened to retaliate, raising any new rate higher if countries respond to it.

The European Union, which is looking to wrap up a preliminary agreement with the US this week, is not expecting a letter from Trump.

The fine print is important: the latest country-by-country tariffs threat is different from those on sectors, like autos and steel. That’s crucial for Japan and South Korea, whose car exports are already facing a 25% duty that’s unaffected by Trump’s latest threat.

So Trump has bought more time, but his appetite for concessions remains unclear. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s search for clarity on tariffs will drag on, along with, presumably, Trumpworld’s haranguing of him. And we’ll do this all again in three weeks. —  Josh Wingrove

Don’t Miss

Trump's pressure on the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates may be making it harder for the central bank to do so, and it could undermine the credibility of his pick to succeed Jerome Powell as Fed chair.

Trump plans to travel to Texas this week to survey first-hand the devastation from extreme floods that have left at least 91 people dead and scores still missing, 

The president’s escalating immigration crackdown has sparked a new round of lawsuits alleging illegal seizures by masked federal agents, as well as violations of US privacy rights and environmental laws.

Trump border czar Tom Homan said immigration agents will ramp up arrests in New York City as part of a broader crackdown on sanctuary jurisdictions that limit cooperation with federal authorities.

The administration is stitching together a wide network of immigrant-detention sites, expanding capacity by thousands of beds through agreements with local jails and private contractors across the US.

Pediatricians are getting requests from worried parents to accelerate childhood vaccinations because of concerns about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s leadership of Health and Human Services.

The State Department is revoking the foreign terrorist designation of an Islamist rebel group that played a key role in the downfall of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime in Syria. 

Planned Parenthood is suing the Trump administration over its new multitrillion-dollar tax and spending law, claiming it unconstitutionally targets the group.

Watch & Listen

Today on Bloomberg Television’s Balance of Power early edition at 1 p.m., hosts Joe Mathieu and Kailey Leinz interviewed Sarah Bianchi, former deputy US trade representative, about Trump's move to impose 25% tariffs on goods from Japan and South Korea and US negotiations with other trading partners.

On the program at 5 p.m., they talk with Carla Hills, former US trade representative, about the impact of the president’s tariff announcement.

On the Big Take podcast, Bloomberg’s White House and government editor Mario Parker joins Sarah Holder to discuss what Trump’s sweep of major victories on legislative, military and legal fronts could mean for the rest of his term — and for the future of executive power. Listen on iHeart, Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Chart of the Day

Social Security is promising more than it can pay. Recent long-term projections from the Congressional Budget Office show Social Security tax revenues remaining flat at just under 14% of taxable payroll, while scheduled benefits are projected to rise above 20% by the end of the century. Under current law, once the trust fund is exhausted — expected around 2034 — benefits would be automatically reduced to match incoming revenues. The impact would fall hardest on workers born in the 1970s and later, who could see benefit cuts of 20% or more in their first year of retirement. With longer life expectancies, reductions in lifetime benefits might reach hundreds of thousands of dollars. — Gregory Korte

What’s Next

Data on consumer credit in May will be released tomorrow.

Minutes of the Federal Reserve’s June meeting will be released Wednesday.

Initial and continuing jobless claims for last week are reported Thursday.

The consumer price index data for June will be released July  15.

Retail sales in June will be reported on July 17.

Housing starts and building permits for June are out on July 18.

The University of Michigan’s preliminary reading of consumer sentiment in July will be released July 18.

Seen Elsewhere

  • A murderer in the US has roughly a 50-50 chance of getting away with the crime, which experts say emboldens criminals and leads to more crime and violence, the New York Times reports.
  • The Justice Department debunked conspiracy theories around convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, saying he didn't keep a “client list” of powerful people and did committed suicide in prison, Axios reports.
  • More than a dozen continuing-care retirement facilities, which charge steep up-front fees, have gone bankrupt since the pandemic, wiping out life savings of more than 1,000 families, the Wall Street Journal reports.

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