But hours later, Trump partially backed down — escalating his trade war with China but lowering many of the tariffs he had just imposed on the rest of the world. Stock markets soared.

“I guess they say it was the biggest day in financial history,” Trump reveled, less than 90 minutes after his Truth Social post that upended his week-old policy.

It was a shocking turnabout coming after days of Trump’s aides arguing that he was seeking to remake the global economy.

But from Tuesday evening to Wednesday afternoon, Trump and his trade advisers spoke to several Republican lawmakers and top foreign leaders who raised concerns about the faltering global markets and the growing concerns of a worldwide recession, urging him to do something.

By late Wednesday afternoon, Trump was saying he had been thinking about switching course “over the last few days.”

The final decision, he said, “probably came together early this morning, fairly early this morning. Just wrote it up. We didn’t have the use of, we didn’t have access to lawyers,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. “We wrote it up from our hearts.”

“But this was something certainly we’ve been talking about for a period of time, and we decided to pull the trigger, and we did it today, and we’re happy about it,” he added.

Late Tuesday night — after Sean Hannity’s 9 p.m. show ended on Fox News — Trump had an extensive, roughly hour-long phone call with a group of Republican senators who had appeared on the episode, according to three people with knowledge of the conversation. Some of the senators had expressed concern about the tariffs. That evening, Trump was also watching bond markets, “where people were getting a little queasy,” he said Wednesday.

Before the end of the last commercial break during the Hannity interview, Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-Louisiana) asked the host for “15 seconds to speak directly to the president” on tariffs, Kennedy told The Washington Post, because Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) had told Kennedy that Trump would be watching the show. Kennedy and Graham were among those in the group interview with Hannity, along with Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota), and Republican Sens. Tim Scott of South Carolina, Katie Boyd Britt of Alabama, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Ted Cruz of Texas and Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma. Some of the senators expressed a desire for Trump to negotiate with other countries coming to the table on tariffs, and several of them spoke to the president after the show ended.

“I’ll leave it up to you what’s enough, what’s not enough,” Graham said he told Trump Tuesday night, “but I think you can see people are looking for some points on the board.”

Cruz said he told Trump that the administration had two paths forward on tariffs. Trump could use them as leverage to convince other countries to lower their own tariffs, or he could keep the tariffs he had announced last week in place, which would lead other countries to retaliate.

“[The latter] outcome, I expressed to the president, would be a terrible outcome that I think would be very harmful to the country and very harmful to Texas,” Cruz said in an interview. “I also encouraged him, as I did on the Hannity show, to negotiate quickly one or more major trade deals.”

Cruz said that he hoped the conversation had influenced Trump and that the president’s decision on Wednesday was “consistent with what I and the others were urging.”

On Wednesday morning, Trump met in the White House with Thune and spoke on the phone with Swiss President Karin Keller-Sutter, whose nation’s Rolexes and chocolates were hit with a 31 percent tariff overnight and who pushed him to relent on a measure that was bashing her economy. Over the course of her 25-minute call, she underlined the role that Swiss businesses play in generating U.S. jobs and noted that her country last year abolished tariffs on imports of U.S. industrial goods, a spokesman for the Swiss Finance Ministry said. (A person familiar with Thune’s conversation with Trump, speaking on the condition of anonymity to detail the discussion, said Thune was at the White House for reasons unrelated to the tariffs.)

Trump watched Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of banking giant JPMorgan Chase, give an interview on Fox News at about 8 a.m. The executive cautioned that a recession was a “likely outcome” given the economic uncertainty, explaining that he was hearing from most everyone he spoke to that they were “cutting back” as a result.

“I’m taking a calm view, but I think it could get worse if we don’t make some progress here,” Dimon said in the interview, which aired several hours before Trump’s announcement.

“BE COOL!” Trump told the public in a Wednesday morning post on Truth Social, telling Americans not to worry about what was happening. A few minutes later, he posted, “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY.”

Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, meanwhile, fielded a call from the top European Union trade official, Maros Sefcovic, whose bloc on Wednesday approved countermeasures on U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs that were tailored to hit a range of Trump voters, from soybean farmers to plastics manufacturers. E.U. leaders — who represent the biggest foreign market for U.S. goods and services — were readying a bigger retaliation, even as they sought a deal to sweep away as many trade barriers as possible with Washington.

By midday, Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent were sitting in the Oval Office with Trump, hashing out a reversal that would take even some of his own team by surprise. The two men sat with Trump as he crafted the language for “one of the most extraordinary Truth posts of his Presidency,” Lutnick posted on X at 1:30 p.m., 12 minutes after Trump sent his missive out into the world.

“I thought that people were jumping a little bit out of line. They were getting yippy,” Trump said, speaking on the South Lawn of the White House in front of racecar champions, a little more than an hour after he announced the partial tariff reversal. “Nothing’s over yet, but we have a tremendous amount of spirit from other countries.

“We’re going to have something that nobody would have even dreamt possible,” Trump said.

After the announcement, Trump aides raced to declare that it had been the strategy all along.

“President Trump’s master strategy, bold statesmanship and brilliant tactical planning has done more to reform broken international trade in days than anyone has achieved in decades while economically and politically isolating the global architect of economic aggression: China,” Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller wrote on X.

But inside the White House, even some senior-level officials appeared to be blindsided by the reversal. Moments after Trump’s Truth Social post about the “pause,” aides sprang up to confer about how to proceed, moving quickly to call an outdoor press gaggle with Bessent and Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary.

A senior foreign diplomat who has been deeply involved in trade discussions learned of the policy reversal from a reporter’s text message, moments after Trump posted the announcement. The diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly about sensitive negotiations, scrambled to find out more details.

After the post, White House aides huddled to discuss the facts and talking points of Trump’s newly conceived plan. But key details of the new arrangement remained unclear to White House staff in the aftermath, as reporters sought to clarify basic questions, such as whether Canada and Mexico would also be subject to the new 10 percent tariffs, as Bessent had said in the presser, despite their not having been part of Trump’s initial “Liberation Day” plan last week.

Before Trump’s social media announcement Wednesday, the White House’s main orders of business for the day were Trump greeting NASCAR champions and signing executive orders in the afternoon.

But as worrisome economic news flickered across televisions in the West Wing, Bessent and Lutnick joined Trump in the Oval Office to hammer out the wording of his announcement.

Peter Navarro, Trump’s longtime trade adviser who had urged Trump to pursue an aggressive tariff policy, didn’t take part in the Oval Office conversation, a potential sign his viewpoint was losing out. He also received no mention by Bessent and Leavitt when the pair discussed Trump working with Lutnick on a path forward. Bessent and Navarro were widely seen as coming from opposite perspectives during tariff deliberations, though Trump’s advisers have repeatedly said they are operating in unison in supporting all of Trump’s decisions on the matter.

Navarro, who was seen inside the West Wing on Wednesday, took part in a Fox Business interview outside the White House soon after Trump’s announcement, describing the matter as a “beautiful negotiation.” He avoided reporters lingering to ask follow-up questions, though during his Fox interview insisted he was not being sidelined.

“We work together beautifully,” Navarro said. “Scotty’s one of my best friends, we’ve worked together for years now … We’re all doing our job for the president, and this is the result.”

“One band, one sound, my brother,” Navarro said as he ended the interview.

Later, as Trump talked to reporters in the Oval Office, he laid bare his broader strategy as the massive tariffs of last week gave way to Wednesday’s partial reprieve.

“A lot of times it’s not a negotiation until it is,” Trump said. “And that happens.”