In the days after the election of the President Donald Trump won presidential raceNicole Bivens Collinson’s phone almost stopped ringing.
Collinson, who helps lead the international trade and government relations division at the lobbying firm Sandler, Travis & Rosenberg, said she has fielded “dozens and dozens and dozens” of calls from worried U.S. companies seeking to protect themselves from Trump’s tough tariff plans. loopholes and exceptions.
“Absolutely everybody is calling,” Collinson told CNBC. “It’s non-stop.”
During the 2024 campaign, Trump made universal tariffs a central tenet of his economic platform, imposing a 20% tax on all imports from all countries, with a particularly harsh 60% rate on Chinese goods.
This hyper-protectionist trade approach has rattled economists, Wall Street analysts and industry leaders, who have warned that all the tariffs could make production and, in turn, consumer prices more expensive as they recover from the pandemic. – period inflation jumps.
“The threat of tariffs has worried retailers and many other U.S. businesses,” David French, senior vice president of government affairs at the National Retail Federation, told CNBC. “Our members are working on contingency plans after President Trump secures the nomination.”
Ron Sorini, director of the lobbying firm Sorini, Samet & Associates, echoed that sentiment, noting that he receives at least two to three calls a day from companies expressing concerns about the proposed tariff hike, particularly in China.
″[Companies] ask where they should go and how to remove the components [of China]? How do they take out the whole supply chain?” Sorini said.
When Trump presented his first set Chinese tariffs In 2018, securing the exemption has become a golden ticket in corporate America, a way to protect a company’s China-based supply chains rather than pay the high price of relocation.
And it paid to know the right people to get that golden ticket.
A 2021 research paper It found that requests for Trump’s first-term tariff exemptions were more likely to be approved when they came from lobbying firms whose employees had made political contributions to the Republican Party.
Now, with Trump poised to retake the White House in a matter of weeks, tariff hikes are becoming more of a reality.
And in corporate America, the race is on to find the right lobbyists to rub shoulders with the right people and give them the upper hand in providing them with tariff loopholes.
“Firms are preparing,” SUNY Buffalo finance professor Veljko Fotak, one of the authors of the 2021 study, told CNBC. “The real winners of this process will be lawyers and lobbyists.”
It is not known what the tariffs will look like under the next Trump administration and whether exemptions will exist at all.
“Until that clarity comes, businesses will need to plan for different scenarios,” Tiffany Smith, vice president of global trade policy at the National Foreign Trade Council, told CNBC.
In response to CNBC’s request for comment about the Trump team’s concerns about the exemptions plan and the companies’ tariff proposals, Trump transition team spokeswoman Caroline Leavitt doubled down on the president-elect’s campaign promises.
“The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin, giving him a mandate to fulfill his campaign promises. He will deliver,” Leavitt told CNBC.
Meanwhile, companies are scrambling to defend against Trump’s more aggressive trade approach. These include stockpiling goods in the short term, preparing for price increases so that the cost of import duties can be passed on to customers, and trying to move production out of China.
Thursday, Steve Madden promised China has reduced its imports by 45% ahead of Trump’s tariff plans over the next year.
But exiting China is a significant undertaking for many U.S. companies, especially small businesses that don’t have the purchasing power or leverage to easily move production.
“I would insist that people look at the impact on small businesses. These are the people who are really hurting. There has to be a way to help companies like that,” Sorini of Samet & Associates told CNBC. “Because they really can’t do it on their own.”