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The rich turn on Trump's trade war [1]
['Daily Kos Contributor']
Date: 2025-05-05
For a fleeting moment on Tuesday, it looked like corporate leviathan Amazon might actually hold President Donald Trump accountable for the fallout from his disastrous global trade war.
The story started with an unconfirmed report from D.C. gossip-and-scoops outlet Punchbowl News that the mega-retailer would list the added cost of Trump’s tariffs alongside prices on its website, potentially mobilizing millions of consumers against the White House. It didn’t take long for Trump’s team to go nuclear, with White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt accusing Amazon of a “hostile and political act” and implying that the company was secretly pushing “Chinese propaganda.”
That venom must have come as a shock to MAGA ally and Amazon magnate Jeff Bezos, who played a starring role at Trump’s inauguration in January. Bezos and Trump patched up their differences after a personal phone call later that day, but the incident refocused the media on an inconvenient truth: A growing number of Republican business leaders are now vocal opponents of the administration’s tariff chaos—and the criticism is driving Trump nuts.
“Without faith that our government knows what it is doing, it’s impossible for businesses to thrive,” an executive confided to CNBC in early April. If Trump’s business allies had doubts about the president’s economic literacy before, Wednesday’s announcement that the U.S. economy shrank by 0.3% in the first quarter turned those doubts into an open panic. In response, Trump blamed … former President Joe Biden, who hasn’t played a role in federal policy in over four months.
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This week’s Trump-induced market slump adds to the billions of dollars many of his biggest corporate backers have already lost—except, of course, for a select few who received advance notice of the administration’s market-moving policy changes. Trump’s back-and-forth tariff policy has caused so much heartburn in corporate boardrooms that even normally silent CEOs like Walmart’s Doug McMillon and other big-box CEOs are confronting Trump to his face about how disastrous his economic policies are for the wealthy and the working class alike.
Trump may be able to ignore the courts, but he’s having a tougher time ignoring the executives lighting up the White House phone lines. In recent weeks the White House has responded to discontent in the business world by backtracking on some of Trump’s core tariffs, including scaling back tariffs for American automakers and exempting popular consumer technology like smartphones and computers. But satisfying some CEOs has only angered others who feel Trump is unfairly playing favorites with his tariff exemptions.
Bezos quickly emerged as one of the earliest critics of Trump’s tariff flip-flopping. In a post to X back in February, the part-time Washington Post owner pledged to dedicate his newspaper’s opinion page to the “very reasonable topic” of tariffs, including covering the “damaging and distorting effects if tariffs are used to pick winners and losers.”
President Donald Trump, left, poses for a photo with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
All that wobbling has also sent a message to the world that Trump can be easily rolled on even his most fundamental policy priorities. Chinese officials responded to Trump’s latest round of rollbacks by flatly refusing to engage with White House trade negotiators, a move which sent America’s troubled financial markets into yet another tailspin. Trump’s repeated, failed attempts to get Chinese President Xi Jinping on the phone have only weakened the business community’s confidence in his ability to close the deal.
Trump is now at risk of falling through the ice with some of his most reliable supporters. A survey of 329 CEOs conducted last month by Chief Executive magazine found that nearly 70% of respondents disapprove of Trump’s tariff policies. That survey also generated some of the business world’s most pointed critiques of Trump to date.
“Tariffs and the uncertainty of next steps that will be taken by President Trump will lead to very difficult economic times over the next year or two,” Mitchell Metal Products President and CEO Tim Zimmerman said to Chief Executive. CEO confidence in America’s economic future is now scraping multi-year lows, after climbing during Biden’s tenure.
“I am in support of moving more manufacturing back to the U.S., [but] this is not how to do it,” said Peter Ensch, CEO of food and pharmaceutical sanitation company Sani-Matic. “Initiating a trade war with our closest allies and business partners is simply bad business. The President is absolutely clueless about the amount of time it will take to accomplish this.”
Related | Trump still thinks his tariffs are great—despite literally all evidence
Business leaders across the country are realizing too late that Trump’s campaign trail boasts about triple-digit tariffs weren’t just tough talk. Now their businesses and the entire American economy are teetering on the brink of a trade war that may drag on for months. Worse still, many of the CEOs surveyed by Chief Executive magazine don’t believe Trump will admit defeat even if the country plunges into an economic crisis.
“I hope I’m wrong, but I expect the ‘pain’ to be here for a while. I do not trust the administration to self-correct,” TrailBlazer Consulting CEO Maura Dunn told the magazine.
Those executives will be able to retreat to their vacation homes to ride out the looming economic turbulence. The middle- and working-class Americans whose retirements are evaporating won’t be so lucky. And through it all, Trump still thinks what he’s doing with tariffs is genius, despite the fact that it was predicted his policies would tank the economy. So much for the Art of the Deal.
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