Trump administration vows to stay the course on tariffs despite market carnage.

President Donald Trump's top economic advisers brushed off recession fears Sunday and said dozens of countries are looking to negotiate for better deals, after stocks tumbled last week following the announcement of stiff tariffs against nearly all of America's trading partners.

In a media blitz on Sunday morning news shows, Trump administration officials pushed the message that Trump's tariffs are the right way forward, despite the market chaos. Last week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, S&P 500 SPX and Nasdaq Composite COMP all saw their biggest weekly percentage drops since March 2020, at the start of the pandemic.

Speaking on NBC's "Meet the Press," Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent dismissed worries that Trump's policies would lead the U.S. into a recession. "There doesn't have to be a recession," he told NBC News host Kristen Welker. "Who knows how the market is going to react in a day, in a week... We're going to hold the course."

Bessent also said more than 50 countries have approached the Trump administration about lowering the U.S. tariffs imposed on their goods, which are set to take effect this week. But he warned that quick deals seem unlikely.

"They've been bad actors for a long time, and it's not the kind of thing you can negotiate away in days or weeks," he said, claiming decades of "bad behavior" toward the U.S. "You can't just wipe the slate clean."

In an appearance on CBS News' "Face the Nation," Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick called the tariffs a national-security issue, and said they will not be postponed.

"They are definitely going to stay in place for days and weeks," he told host Margaret Brennan. "The president needs to reset global trade," again claiming that the rest of the world has been "ripping us off."

Lutnick claimed the tariffs will force factories to relocate to the U.S., providing American jobs, though he admitted many of the factories would be automated.

"The key is, who's going to build the factories? Who's going to operate the factories? Who's going to make them work? Great American workers," he said. "Remember, the army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones, that kind of thing is going to come to America. It's going to be automated and great Americans - the tradecraft of America is going to fix them, is going to work on them."

But former Clinton administration Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, appearing on ABC's "This Week," argued that the Trump administration's tariff plan is contradictory.

"If it's a crowbar, and other people eliminate their tariffs, and we eliminate ours, and it's just making a deal, then we don't raise any revenue nor do we get any businesses to relocate to the United States," he said. "If it's a permanent revenue source and trying to get businesses to relocate to the United States, then we're going to have these tariffs permanently. So the president can't have it both ways."

Speaking on ABC's "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos, Kevin Hassett director of the White House Economic Council, pointed to so many countries "coming to the table" as evidence that U.S. consumers will not be hurt by the tariffs.

"You're saying that consumers are going to bear the costs and it's going to drive inflation up," he said, responding to a question about potentially higher prices. "But if U.S. consumers are bearing the cost, there's no reason for the countries to be angry. So, the fact is, the countries are angry and retaliating and, by the way, coming to the table," he said. "I don't think that you're going to see a big effect on the consumer in the U.S."

But at the same time, he said that "there might be some increase in prices."

Hassett also dismissed recession fears, despite concerns from economists, lawmakers and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, who said last week that he expects higher inflation and slower growth.

"I don't think that the inflationary spiral that we saw last term is a high risk right now," Hassett said, pointing to "really, really strong jobs numbers last time" and that he thinks "inflation comes from runaway spending that is monetized by the Fed."

But Summers called higher inflation "almost inevitable."

"This is the biggest self-inflicted wound we've put on our economy in history," Summers said on "This Week."

He also warned there was likely to be more stock-marker turbulence ahead, pointing out that the steep losses on Thursday and Friday were the fourth-worst two-day drop since World War II. "A drop of this magnitude signals that there's likely to be trouble ahead," Summers said.

Bessent seemed nonplussed by the massive market selloff. "I've been very impressed with the market infrastructure, that we had record volume on Friday and everything is working very smoothly," he said on "Meet the Press." "Look, we get these short-term market reactions from time to time."

Hassett also denied that Trump is trying to tank the market so the Fed will lower interest rates, after Trump amplified a social-media post that claimed the market drop was part of a deliberate strategy.

"The president's allowed to have an opinion," Hassett said. "It is not a strategy for the markets to crash. It's a strategy to create a golden age in America for the American worker. That's his strategy."