A new book chronicling the inner workings of Donald Trump's second term has surfaced a previously unreported clash between the president and his Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, over the accuracy of trade data used in tariff negotiations with India. According to excerpts now circulating, Trump grew visibly frustrated in an internal meeting after questioning the reliability of the numbers Lutnick's department had presented on the US-India trade relationship, reportedly dismissing the figures as unreliable in front of other officials.
The book, written by veteran political journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan and titled "Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump," pulls back the curtain on how trade policy toward India has been negotiated inside the administration. Lutnick has been one of the key figures steering tariff strategy since Trump returned to office, and India has been a frequent subject of that strategy given the scale of bilateral trade between the two countries.
The disclosed friction comes against the backdrop of a US-India trade framework agreement reached earlier this year, which both governments had presented as a step toward resolving long-running disputes over tariffs on goods ranging from steel to agricultural products. Disagreements over whose data should anchor those negotiations, as described in the book, suggest the path to that framework was less smooth internally than the public rollout indicated.
Neither the White House nor the Commerce Department has issued a detailed rebuttal of the book's account. The episode adds to a string of reported internal disputes over tariff strategy that have surfaced through various accounts of the administration's trade decision-making this year, underscoring how contested the underlying numbers driving major tariff decisions can be even among the president's own team.
