This week in Washington, the rare convergence of the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and the White House Correspondents’ dinner has been an event planner’s nightmare—part party gridlock, part panel-discussion overload—and a networker’s fever dream. This is, after all, a city where tidbits of access, insight, and actionable information are as prized as hard currency. As the late Democratic political-consulting legend Robert Squier famously told Maureen Dowd in the nineteen-eighties, in D.C., unlike New York, “cocktail parties are work.” The late-April glut of convenings this year has had an especially potent effect of magnifying the latest news cycles emanating from Donald Trump’s chaotic White House: Will the President fire Jerome Powell? Or Pete Hegseth? Is he making a peace deal with Russia? A tariff deal with China? A nuclear deal with Iran? Or, as currently seems entirely possible, none of the above?

On Tuesday, hundreds of anxious finance types gathered at a JPMorgan & Co. conference on the sidelines of the I.M.F.-World Bank meetings to hear Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury Secretary. With stock markets plunging after Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement of huge new tariffs on China, some investors seized on Bessent’s reported remarks at the private session, in which he said a long-term trade war with China is not “sustainable” and suggested that the U.S. and China could eventually make a deal to end it. Stocks rallied after Bloomberg reported Bessent’s comments, a day after the markets had dropped amid fears that Trump might finally go through with it and fire Powell, the Federal Reserve chairman he has long attacked.

I happened to meet soon after with two people who had attended the JPMorgan conference, and they were surprised at how much the markets were reading into the Treasury Secretary’s remarks. Bessent, they told me, had made a point of noting that China and the U.S.—despite having imposed tit-for-tat tariffs of more than a hundred per cent on each other’s goods—are not even engaged in talks right now, never mind anywhere close to a formal deal. Bessent also acknowledged that the Trump Administration will not have any trade deals finalized anytime soon with the dozens of other countries he’s targeted for “reciprocal” tariffs, but instead it hopes to merely have “memorandums of understanding” with some of them by the new deadline he’s set of early July. Bessent also told the audience that there could be two to three years of economic limbo, presumably while the Trump-induced economic tumult played itself out. None of this was in the initial market-moving report by Bloomberg.

Neither were the comments by Jamie Dimon, the C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, who followed Bessent onstage. The two people who attended the conference recounted that Dimon offered blunt talk, telling the investors that he hoped Trump would fire Bessent’s internal rival, the protectionist hawk Peter Navarro, who is currently serving as a White House trade adviser; that Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs plan was “stupid”; and that a recession was now all but guaranteed. Vibe check: bad.

No wonder, then, that Trump, with all those global banker types in town, was in major spin mode on the economy. Later on Tuesday afternoon, in an apparent effort to soothe jittery markets, Trump said that he had no intention of firing Powell and blamed the media for suggesting that he did. “The press runs away with things,” the President said, days after starting the whole news cycle in a post on his Truth Social network that said, “Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough!” By Wednesday, however, Trump was back at it, criticizing the Fed chairman again and demanding that Powell lower interest rates ASAP.

As for the China deal that Trump and Bessent now seemed to be hoping for, Trump said on Wednesday that talks were “actively” happening—even as Bessent repeated publicly what he had said in private on Tuesday, that there were no such discussions as yet and that “both sides are waiting to speak to the other.” By Thursday, China was openly mocking the U.S. President. “Fake news,” the Foreign Ministry’s spokesman, Guo Jiakun, said of Trump’s alleged talks. “China and the United States have not held consultations or negotiations on the tariff issue, let alone reached an agreement.” Got all that? The bottom line, as so often with Trump, is that there’s no there there. At least for now.

When Trump returned to office nearly a hundred days ago, he immodestly promised a slew of deals—from peace in the Middle East to ending Russia’s war in Ukraine in his first twenty-four hours. After Trump unveiled his tariff plans at the start of April, then gave the countries that he’d targeted an additional three months to work out terms before the tariffs come into effect, Navarro talked up the possibility of “ninety deals in ninety days.” None of these “big, beautiful deals” that Trump likes to brag about, however, have so far been forthcoming.

If one doesn’t spend too much time listening to puffery of Trump and his paid staff—he is “the best dealmaker in the world,” his State Department spokesperson, Tammy Bruce, said on television the other day—the President’s struggles to deliver should not be a surprise, given his actual modest record of dealmaking. Trump’s first term was as notable for the deals he pulled out of, such as the Iran nuclear accord and the Paris climate agreement, as it was for those he made, a record that consisted largely of the Abraham Accords, which normalized ties between Israel and several of its Arab neighbors, and negotiated by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and an updated trade agreement that his first Administration struck with Canada and Mexico, and which Trump has now effectively repudiated by demanding that both countries agree to additional concessions. In 2018, Trump boasted about an alleged nuclear breakthrough with North Korea so much that he even personally asked Japan’s then Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, to nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize; the problem was, there was no deal. And no Peace Prize, either. Now that he’s President again, you don’t hear him talk so much about his great friend Kim Jong Un.

As Trump scrambles to put some points on the board in his second term, many of his moves have been familiar ones—the shifting demands, the negotiating via social media, the messy public feuds among his advisers, the endless hype. (In the MAGAverse, these are generally explained away as brilliant maneuvers by Trump to gain “leverage.”) On Ukraine, Trump has been sounding increasingly desperate as his efforts to broker an end to the Russian invasion have floundered. On Wednesday, after his Administration threatened to walk away if a deal did not materialize forthwith, Trump came right out and claimed, “I think we have a deal with Russia,” and excoriated Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, for refusing to go along with it. The terms publicly outlined by Trump and his Vice-President, J. D. Vance, include a long list of concessions that would be forced on Ukraine: ceding its territory that Russia currently occupies, agreeing to a prohibition on Ukrainian membership in NATO, formally recognizing that Russia now owns the Crimean Peninsula, which was illegally annexed by Vladimir Putin in 2014.

The Crimea cave by Trump is particularly notable, since it would represent a major policy shift from his first term. After a disastrous meeting between Trump and Putin in Helsinki, in July, 2018, Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, took advantage of the bad news cycles to issue a solemn declaration that the United States would never, ever go along with Putin’s theft of Crimea. (“The United States rejects Russia’s attempted annexation of Crimea and pledges to maintain this policy until Ukraine’s territorial integrity is restored,” it reads.) In another extraordinary possible reversal, Politico reported on Wednesday that Trump’s Russia envoy, Steven Witkoff, has pushed to lift sanctions on Russia’s Nord Stream 2 energy pipeline to Germany—despite the fact that Trump, often cited his opposition to the pipeline during his first term as proof that he wasn’t in the tank for Putin.

If nothing else, both episodes underscore Trump’s willingness to disavow policies that he himself had previously advocated—hardly an asset for a dealmaker. If you’re Canada or Mexico, why bother going through the pain of negotiating another agreement with Trump, given how he treated the last one? On Ukraine, Trump’s demand to Zelensky on Crimea would require Zelensky to disregard Ukraine’s constitution, which states that territory within its established borders must remain “indivisible and inviolable.” (Not that anyone would expect a constitutional argument to hold much sway with Trump.)

By Thursday, Trump’s bullying of Zelensky and sucking up to Putin had not worked. The Russian leader, instead, seemed intent on embarrassing Trump by not only refusing to accept the U.S. President’s many concessions but by continuing to escalate the war; Russian missile attacks on Kyiv overnight had killed at least nine civilians. “Vladimir, STOP!” Trump pleaded in a Truth Social post, calling his attack “not necessary” and “very bad timing.” He added, “Lets get the Peace Deal DONE!” By the afternoon, he was back to sucking up to Putin, announcing to reporters in the Oval Office that Russia did not need to make additional concessions to Ukraine beyond stopping the war, since otherwise Ukraine would lose all of its territory, and that was “a pretty big concession.” Witkoff was expected to be back in Moscow on Friday; the dance has a few more rounds to play.

Next week, Trump will hit the hundred-day mark on his second Presidency. A new spate of polls to mark that moment has found him with the lowest approval ratings in decades for a leader at this point in his term—lower, even, than where Trump stood with the public eight years ago. Is that because what Trump is doing is wildly unpopular, whether it’s blowing up the global economy or cutting off funding for cancer research? Sure. But don’t underestimate the chaos factor, either. Time for the greatest dealmaker of all time to put up or shut up ♦