On Sunday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent revealed that President Trump is intent on reviving tariffs that were paused if countries don’t “move along” by August 1.

Bessent appeared on CNN‘s “State of the Union” with host Dana Bash, who asked what was going to happen when the initial 90-day pause on foreign tariffs expired in three days.

“I’m not going to give away the playbook, because we’re going to be very busy over the next 72 hours,” Bessent answered. “President Trump’s going to be sending letters to some of our trading partners, saying that, if you don’t move things along, then, on August 1, you will boomerang back to your April 2 tariff level. So I think we’re going to see a lot of deals very quickly. “

“So there’s basically a new deadline?” Bash asked.

“It’s not a new deadline,” Bessent replied. “We are saying this is when it’s happening. If you want to speed things up, have at it. If you want to go back to the old rate, that’s your choice.

Bessent explained that the “playbook” is “to apply maximum pressure. We saw that the E.U. was very slow in coming to the table. Three weeks ago, on a Friday morning, President Trump threatened 50 percent tariffs, and, within a few hours, five of the European national leaders had called him. And Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the E.U., was on the phone.”
“We are close to several deals,” Bessent continued. “As always, there’s a lot of foot-dragging on the other side. And so I would expect to see several big announcements over the next couple of days.”

“The thing about being the deficit country, Dana, is, when you are the deficit country, you have the leverage,” Bessent asserted. “These are surplus countries that they have exported more to us than we export to them. So we have the leverage in this situation.”

When Bash posited that small business owners have told her they are living with uncertainty because of the tariffs, Bessent replied, “I’d say two things, is, the other thing they would probably have been telling you is, it was the uncertainty around taxes. So, with the One Big Beautiful Bill, they now have great certainty on taxes. … When I’m out talking to businesses, they want trade and taxes. So we have certainty on taxes now. All businesses know that they will be getting 100 percent expensing for new plant and equipment. On tariffs, again, it is the 18 important trading relationships. And we’re moving through those.”

After his key role in getting President Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget bill passed, House Speaker Mike Johnson outlined his plans for the future, with more reconciliation bills on the way, and offered a succinct, caustic response to Democrats claiming they were happy to run against the bill in 2026.

“What deals were made?” Fox News’ Shannon Bream asked Johnson on Sunday. “There a couple of members who’ve said they were given assurances outside of this bill of other things  that they would get down the line.”

“I don’t make deals,” Johnson replied bluntly. “Never have since I became Speaker, which is why I’m still surviving with the gavel. You have to find out where people’s red lines are and navigate through that, with what we’ve had is the smallest margin in US history at most points along the way, but we got it done.”

“No side deals,” he reiterated. “What the extra time was, we needed that for people to process. Remember, we got the Senate bill on a Tuesday. They modified a lot of what we did in the House. We worked on it for over a year, so we needed a couple of days there or everybody to process what all those changes were and ensure that they knew exactly how that was gonna be implemented by the administration.”

Dean referred to rumored “promises” that had been made outside the bill. Johnson explained, “We’ve been talking about that publicly and privately for a year and a half. We had always planned to do the first big reconciliation bill, which is the big beautiful bill — now it’s done, a huge leap forward for our priorities — but then also we’ve been planning a second reconciliation bill for the fall — it would be attached to the next fiscal year — and then potentially one in the spring. That’s my plan: three reconciliation bills before this Congress is over. I think we can do that, and so you’ll see more of us advancing these common sense principles to deliver that America First agenda for the people. That’s what they elected us to do. This was a huge leap forward.”

“Democrats say they are excited to run on this bill,” Bream said, prompting Johnson to gibe, “Yeah, right.”

Bream then quoted a DCCC memo saying that Republicans would lose the majority in 2026 because of the big, beautiful bill and the more people knew about it, the less popular it became. “They’re also talking about Democrats holding rallies outside of rural hospitals  and nursing homes this summer to tell people they are going to lose their care,” she stated.

“As I said on the House floor the other day, it takes a lot longer to build a lie than to tell the simple truth,” Johnson said. “Our Republicans are going to be out across the country telling the simple truth, and guess what? It will be demonstrated. Everyone will have more take home pay. They’ll have more jobs and opportunity. The economy will be doing better. And we will be able to point to that as the obvious result of what we did.”