Trump Tariff Scheme A Great Opportunity For Even More Presidential Corruption

WASHINGTON — In addition to hitting Americans with trillions of dollars in new taxes and cratering the stock market, Donald Trump’s arbitrary tariff regime offers yet another opportunity for a president who has already shown his willingness to use his office for personal gain, critics fear.

The new tariffs, which started taking effect on Saturday, already have exemptions for specific industries, establishing the precedent for corporations or even entire countries to win carve-outs for themselves.

And, government watchdogs and other experts worry, with Trump having long demonstrated a willingness to take official actions in return for private or political benefit, a vast new field of potential corruption has opened.

“There are concerns around additional graft and cronyism,” said Melinda St Louis, global trade director at Public Citizen.

Rajeev Goel, an Illinois State University economist, co-authored a 2023 paper finding that multilateral trade agreements help fight “public sector corruption” by creating transparent, level playing fields for buying and selling goods across borders.

“The current tariffs are doing the reverse of what we studied earlier,” he said.

“If you define corruption as making side deals with the Trump administration for special exemptions, that is certain to happen on a grand scale, and may well be the intent of the tariff imposition itself,” said Bill Megginson, a finance professor at the University of Oklahoma’s business school and a co-author of a 2025 paper that studied political “distortions” of Trump’s first-term tariffs.

Trump’s White House, responding to HuffPost queries about whether he would be amenable to quid-pro-quo arrangements that benefit him in exchange for exemptions from the new tariffs, said he was only interested in helping the country.

“The only people President Trump is currying favour with are the American people who have faced the devastating consequences of backward, ‘America Last’ trade policies that have led to millions in job losses, vulnerabilities to our national security, and a weakening of our dominance,” White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said in a statement.

Trump, though, has over the years established a history of such transactional behavior and of mixing his official duties with his personal financial interests ― actions that are the very definition of corruption. Thursday evening, for example, Trump traveled at taxpayer expense to Miami to attend a closed-door dinner for the Saudi-backed LIV golf tour — a business entity he profits from.

Trump not long ago called cryptocurrencies “a scam,” but changed his position last summer after industry leaders began making massive donations to help get him elected. As president, Trump is creating a “strategic” Bitcoin reserve, giving the US government’s imprimatur to an “asset” that has zero intrinsic value. He also pardoned the creator of a website designed for the sale of drugs and other contraband after promising crypto enthusiasts he would do so if they voted for him.

In his first term, Trump pushed Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to open an investigation into his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, using congressionally approved military aid as leverage. Had a federal official who did not have presidential immunity done the same thing, he would have been charged with extortion, former prosecutors have said.

And unlike previous presidents who made a point of separating themselves from their private businesses and financial holdings during their time in office, Trump has done the opposite. In his first term, his party and officials in his administration made his hotel just blocks from the White House a gathering place for meetings with both foreign and domestic interest groups. Foreign delegations would book rooms and, occasionally, even large blocks of rooms during their stays.

At one point, Trump even tried to hold the G7 summit of leaders from the world’s largest democratic economies at Doral, his troubled golf resort near the Miami airport.

Trump began his second term with an even more flagrant use of his office for his personal gain by selling a crypto “coin,” a vehicle that those seeking his favour could use to enrich him without a public trace.

Then, in office, among his first acts were to fire all the independent inspectors general at executive branch agencies and to order the Justice Department to suspend enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which made it illegal for Americans to bribe officials overseas.

“It’s going to mean a lot more business for America,” Trump said.

Public Citizen’s Melinda St Louis said that if Trump starts making exclusions to the tariffs based on appeals from well-connected businesses, it will be no different from what he did in the first term.

That, in fact, is the topic of the paper Megginson and his co-authors published earlier this year titled “The Political Economy of Tariff Exemption Grants.” It found that companies requesting waivers from tariffs in Trump’s first term were twice as likely to succeed if their CEOs had donated to Republicans than if they had donated to Democrats.

“The big takeaway for us is that the US institutions are not robust to an administration choosing to impose utterly complex and confusing tariffs, and then deciding to extract benefits in exchange for exemptions,” said Veljko Fotak, a finance professor at the University of Buffalo and a paper co-author.

Norm Eisen, the top ethics lawyer in Barack Obama’s White House, agreed that Trump’s tariff scheme is an easy vehicle for corruption. “By asserting these imperial whims, Trump opens himself up to unseemly influence attempts from foreign countries to try to get tariffs reversed,” Eisen said. “It can be as simple as buying his meme digital coin or as complicated as providing patronage or favors for his foreign or domestic properties. It is a grave corruption risk on top of many others that have hit.”

A report by Public Citizen last month pointed out that sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska won an exemption from Trump’s aluminum tariffs not long after Trump met privately with Deripaska’s friend, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. That waiver was reversed after a public outcry.

Indeed, even a Department of Commerce inspector general’s report in 2019 found evidence of an “unofficial appeals process” for waivers and undocumented discussions between petitioners and government officials. “We believe these issues give the perception that the Section 232 exclusion request review process is neither transparent nor objective,” the report stated.

St. Louis said the process of carve-outs in the new tariffs is already exhibiting signs of those same issues, pointing to the exemption for the fossil fuel industry — which Trump reportedly demanded come up with $1 billion for his reelection last year.

She said the arbitrary rates based on balance of trade as well as the potential for corruption make her question the administration’s purported goal of helping American workers. “Whether or not this helps workers, it seems to be kind of a con, in our view,” she said.

As for the oil and gas industry, they have already expressed their appreciation. “We welcome President Trump’s decision to exclude oil and natural gas from new tariffs,” the American Petroleum Institute said in a statement.