Trump's tariff threats are prompting lobbyists to search for loopholes

In the days since President-elect Donald Trump won the presidential race, Nicole Bivens Collinson's phone has barely stopped ringing.

Collinson, who heads the international trade and government relations department at the lobbying firm Sandler, Travis & Rosenberg, said she is answering “dozens and dozens” of calls from concerned U.S. companies seeking to protect themselves from Trump's harsh tariff plans by investigating loopholes and exceptions.

“Absolutely everyone is calling,” Collinson told CNBC. “It’s non-stop.”

During the 2024 campaign, Trump made universal tariffs a central tenet of his economic policy, imposing a 20% tax on all imports from all countries and a particularly high 60% tax rate on Chinese goods.

This hyper-protectionist approach to trade raised goosebumps among economists, Wall Street analysts and industry leaders, who warned that blanket tariffs could make production — and therefore consumer prices — more expensive just as they recover from pandemic-era inflation spikes.

“The threat of tariffs has alarmed retailers and a host of other U.S. companies,” 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 received the nomination.”

Ron Sorini, managing director of the lobbying firm Sorini, Samet & Associates, echoed that sentiment, noting that he fields at least two to three calls a day to express companies' concerns about the proposed tariff hike, particularly in China.

“[Companies] Ask where to go and how to get the components out [of China]? How do they figure out the entire supply chain,” Sorini said.

When Trump imposed his first China tariffs in 2018, obtaining an exemption became a golden ticket for American companies to protect a company's China-based supply chains rather than pay the high price of relocation.

And to get that golden ticket, it paid to know the right people.

A 2021 research study found that requests for Trump's first-term tariff exemptions were more likely to be approved if they came from lobbying firms whose employees had made political donations to the Republican Party.

Now that Trump wants to retake the White House in a few weeks, tariff escalation is becoming increasingly likely.

And corporate America is about finding the right lobbyists to help companies work with the right people to give them an advantage in securing tariff loopholes.

“Companies are prepared,” SUNY Buffalo finance professor Veljko Fotak, one of the authors of the 2021 study, told CNBC. “The real winners of this process will be the lawyers and lobbyists.”

What tariffs will look like in the next Trump administration and whether there will be any exceptions at all is unknown.

“Until there is that clarity, companies will need to plan for different scenarios,” Tiffany Smith, vice president of global trade policy at the National Foreign Trade Council, told CNBC.

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Responding to CNBC's request for comment on the Trump team's exemption plans and businesses' concerns about the tariff proposals, Trump transition team spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt reiterated the president-elect's campaign promises.

“The American people overwhelmingly re-elected President Trump and charged him with fulfilling the promises he made during his campaign. He will hold,” Leavitt said in a statement to CNBC.

Meanwhile, companies have tried to push back against Trump's more aggressive approach to trade. These include short-term stockpiling of goods, preparing price increases so they can pass on the cost of import tariffs to customers, and attempting to move production out of China.

On Thursday, Steve Madden pledged to reduce his Chinese imports by 45% next year in anticipation of Trump's tariff plans.

But for many U.S. companies, exiting China is a significant undertaking, particularly for small businesses that may not have the purchasing power or influence to relocate production so easily.

“What I urgently want is for people to 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 this,” Sorini told CNBC. “Because they really can’t do it on their own.”