Some observers have pointed to Trump's 1987 book "The Art of the Deal" as a compass to the administration's current tariff playbook, and Trump himself has said his strategy has brought other economies to his door to renegotiate trade terms.
Others have suggested the decision to pause tariffs in response to the nosediving market indicates a chaotic economic strategy.
David Bieri, a former central and investment banker, now professor of economics at Virginia Tech, told DW it was unclear what Trump's pause would mean for the US and global economy, but that it was simplistic to say the administration was making up policy on the fly.
Instead, he described the actions as a kind of "sonar" where Trump was testing the rest of the world to see how it would respond to his tariff-centric approach to trade.
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"This is not him, as far as I read it, signaling a U-turn that he's deviating from his agenda of tariffs," said Bieri. "It's simply giving people a bit of a breather, or a form of strategic dominance to constantly tweak the rules of the game.
"In negotiating tactics, this is very common, because it means you're setting the tone — you're putting people on the back heel, constantly."
Bieri said there's too much at stake to argue that Trump is manipulating the stock market. Instead, he said Trump's plan is an attempt to address America's changing role in the global economy, and historically high levels of debt, Kuebler wrote in his analysis.
"For the better part of 50 years, America's role in the global economy has been changing," he said.
"And there has been a lag in which America's institutions are able to straddle the gap between what their role is globally, versus what their role is domestically ... where [the US] is both a provider of global financial security and [economic] stability and with a rapidly changing domestic economy."
After a tumultuous week on the markets, many will continue to guess at Trump's possible next moves — especially with escalating tit-for-tat tariffs between the US and China now playing out. If the US is seeking to redefine its global economic role, Bieri said it leaves the door open for other economies to fill the leadership void, the German media reported
"Whether they [the US] is going about in the right way remains to be seen, but it is clear that America's position as one where ... its subsidization of global public goods — goods that everybody enjoys and nobody really wants to contribute towards the enjoyment — that's all been on American shoulders," he said.
"If these times are over, one of the questions might be: who will step up in terms of global leadership? Do we want to leave it to China to slip into that vacuum? And what of the EU"?
