In the days since President-elect Donald Trump won the presidential race, Nicole Bivens Collinson’s phone has barely stopped ringing.
Collinson, who helps lead the international trade and government relations division at the lobbying firm Sandler, Travis & Rosenberg, said he fielded “dozens and dozens and dozens” of calls from worried U.S. companies looking to protect themselves from Trump’s hardline tariff plans by finding . loopholes and exemptions.
“Absolutely everyone is calling,” Collinson told CNBC. “It’s non-stop.”
During the 2024 campaign, Trump made universal tariffs a core tenet of his economic platform, floating a 20% tax on all imports from all countries with a special 60% tariff on Chinese goods.
That hyper-protectionist trade approach has fueled economists, Wall Street analysts and industry leaders who have warned that tariffs across the board could make production — and, consumer prices — more expensive, as they recover from the pandemic. – era of inflation surge.
“The threat of tariffs has shocked retailers and a variety of other U.S. businesses,” David French, senior vice president of government relations at the National Retail Federation, told CNBC. “Our members have been working on contingency plans since President Trump won the nomination.”
Ron Sorini, principal at the lobbying firm Sorini, Samet & Associates, echoed that sentiment, noting that he gets at least two to three calls a day to companies concerned about the proposed rate hikes, particularly in China.
“(Companies) are asking where do they go, and how do they get these components (from China)? How can they cut off the whole supply chain?” said Sorini.
When Trump unleashed the first set of Chinese tariffs in 2018, getting an exemption became a golden ticket for American companies, a way to keep Chinese companies in their supply chains instead of paying exorbitant relocation prices.
And to get that golden ticket, you need to know the right people.
A 2021 research study found that applications 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 resetting the White House in a matter of weeks, rate hikes are becoming more of a reality.
And in corporate America, the race will be to find the right lobbyists to help companies go after the right people, to provide benefits to secure tariff loopholes.
“Companies are ready,” 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.”
Whether the tariffs will appear under the next Trump administration, and whether exemptions will be available, is unknown.
“Until that clarity comes, businesses need to plan for multiple 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 on the Trump team’s plans for exemptions and corporate concerns about the proposed tariffs, Trump transition team spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt doubled down on the president-elect’s campaign promise.
“The American people re-elected President Trump by a stunning margin giving him a mandate to follow through on the promises he made on the campaign trail. He will deliver,” Leavitt told CNBC in a statement.
In the meantime, companies have been trying to prepare defenses against Trump’s more aggressive trade approach. This includes storing goods in the short term, preparing for price increases to pass on import duty costs to customers, and trying to move production out of China.
On Thursday, Steve Madden pledged to cut Chinese imports by 45% over the next year in anticipation of Trump’s tariff plan.
But getting out of China is an important task for many US companies, especially small businesses that may not have the buying power or leverage to move production easily.
“What I want is for people to see the impact on small businesses. These are the people who are hurting. There must be some way to help companies like that,” Sorini told CNBC. “Because they really can’t do it on their own.”
