Mere hours after the Trump administration’s latest tariff scheme launched on July 24, the government was sued again by the same small businesses that had already defeated prior White House tariff shenanigans, most notably at the Supreme Court. As Bloomberg Law reported, these companies are part of an “increasingly vocal cohort of business owners who emerged as the face of mom-and-pop tariff resistance.” What about Walmart, Ford Motor and the other titans of corporate America paying many millions of dollars in new import taxes? They’ve mostly kept quiet.
Much of this silence, the report explains, is strategy: Large U.S. firms don’t like the tariffs but have routed their objections through industry associations and legal filings to avoid blowback from the government or partisan customers. Doing so arguably makes good business sense, given U.S. President Donald Trump’s repeated targeting of companies that criticized his tariffs, publicized their price effects or sought refunds following the White House’s Supreme Court loss.
When a single presidential tweet can cause a company’s stock to crater, it’s often smarter to let smaller, more sympathetic firms “carry the water,” explained one trade lawyer.
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