US companies are struggling to figure out how to respond to Donald Trump’s trade war, concerned about the impact of the president’s tariffs on the economy but wary of speaking out for fear of retaliation by the White House, according to executives and board members.

Corporate leaders are unsure of how far to go in re-engineering their businesses in response to Wednesday’s tariffs, amid doubts over how long Trump will stick to his current course and hope that they can lobby him to ease some of the policies.

Complicating matters is a climate of fear created by the White House’s recent targeting of law firms including Paul Weiss. 

“You don’t want to be the barking dog for everyone else because you’re going to be the one who will get shot,” said one person who leads the board of a US company.

Another executive on a corporate board said the best approach was to make the case to Trump and his team privately that these policies could hurt his core constituents through higher prices and job losses.

“It is going to be velvet glove lobbying at his more thoughtful policy advisers and that clearly includes Scott,” said another executive on a US board, referring to US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent.

Disney chief executive Bob Iger voiced concern on Thursday at an internal editorial meeting at ABC News, according to people who heard the remarks.

He said that it would not be easy for US companies to shift their production to the country because of specialised workforces and differing skillsets across borders. Iger cited the example of Apple’s Foxconn facilities in China, where the tech giant makes the vast majority of its devices. 

Iger also cautioned that Disney itself would be affected. With steel prices likely to rise, the company’s costs of building cruise ships would go up, he said.

Trump’s tariff blitz and China’s retaliation roiled commodity markets, causing crude prices to settle at three-year lows of $65.58 on Friday, with oil traders betting the US administration has no immediate plan to reverse punitive trade measures.

On Friday shale magnate Harold Hamm, executive chair of Continental Resources, told the Financial Times he remained supportive of Trump and his efforts to make fundamental reforms and rebuild US manufacturing by tackling unfair trade practices overseas.

“But it is also true that you cannot drill, baby, drill if you are producing oil and gas below the cost of supply. Shale producers hope the current market turbulence is a temporary situation so they can deliver on the president’s agenda to unleash American energy dominance,” said Hamm, who is also executive chair of industry group Domestic Energy Producers Alliance. 

A private equity executive at one of the industry’s largest firms said many companies had analysed and gamed out tariffs to see their impact on their bottom lines and drawn up solutions to be prepared for “liberation day”, when the tariffs were announced.

But that preliminary work was thrown out because the formula the White House used to calculate the tariffs came nowhere near people’s expectations.

Scores of investment firms have or are planning to outline their views on tariffs to clients, many of whom are overseas investors who were shocked by the scope and direction of the levies.

Carlyle Group on Monday will host a “special global investment environment update” call with top investors, in which co-founder David Rubenstein and two other executives are expected to outline a playbook to deal with the tariffs.

Some corporate leaders appealed for calm and did not discount the possibility that the market overreacted. 

“While it has been pretty harsh and drastic, we all know stocks have a tendency to overreact and underreact,” said Herman Bulls, vice-chair at commercial real estate group JLL and a board director at USAA, Host Hotels, Fluence Energy and Comfort Systems. 

“This is not a surprise in terms of the direction,” Bulls said. “This was talked about during the campaign and when he won.”

The tariffs announcement came midway through the “retail round-up” conference hosted in New York by JPMorgan Chase for executives, investors and analysts in the retail sector.

Home Depot chief financial officer Richard McPhail was among executives who indicated there would now be potentially tense negotiations about shifting the burden of tariffs on to suppliers rather than US consumers.  

“In normal course, we are having always-on conversations about cost with our vendors,” he said. “When it comes to tariffs, that’s just another cost in the equation that we have to understand mutually.”

Another retailer, Guess, this week suggested that it could switch away from suppliers in Asia to Latin America, where the tariffs announced tend to be more moderate. 

But corporate advisers said there remained too many questions over US policy for companies to be able to commit to large-scale adjustments. 

“I think they will stop short of making major supply chain moves because this is not even the beginning of the end,” said Kristin Bohl, a customs specialist at PwC US.

“It’s not even the end of the beginning. There’s far too much uncertainty for a CEO to decide that he or she is going to pick up operations out of country A and move them to country B.”

Reporting by Joshua Franklin, Stephen Foley, Anna Nicolaou, Antoine Gara, Jamie Smyth, Patrick Temple-West and Claire Bushey

WASHINGTON (AP) — Not even 24 hours after his party lost a key Wisconsin race and underperformed in Florida, President Donald Trump followed the playbook that has defined his political career: He doubled down.

Trump’s move on Wednesday to place stiff new tariffs on imports from nearly all U.S. trading partners marks an all-in bet by the Republican that his once-fringe economic vision will pay off for Americans. It was the realization of his four decades of advocacy for a protectionist foreign policy and the belief that free trade was forcing the United States into decline as its economy shifted from manufacturing to services.

The tariff announcement was the latest and perhaps boldest manifestation of Trump’s second-term freedom to lead with his instincts after feeling his first turn in the Oval Office was restrained by aides who did not share his worldview. How it shakes out will be a defining judgment on his presidency.

The early reviews have been worrisome.

Financial markets had their worst week since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, foreign trade partners retaliated and economists warned that the import taxes may boost inflation and potentially send the U.S. into a recession. It’s now Republican lawmakers who are fretting about their party’s future while Democrats feel newly buoyant over what they see as Trump’s overreach.

Democratic activists planned to participate in rallies across the country Saturday in what was shaping up as the largest demonstrations since Trump returned to office in January. “The winds are changing,” said Rahna Epting, who leads MoveOn, one of many organizing groups.

Trump is unbowed.

He has promised that the taxes on imports will bring about a domestic manufacturing renaissance and help fund an extension of his 2017 tax cuts. He insisted on Thursday as the Dow Jones fell by 1,600 points that things were “going very well” and the economy would “boom,” then spent Friday at the golf course as the index plunged 2,200 more points.

In his first term, Trump’s tariff threats brought world leaders to his door to cut deals. This time, his actions so far have led to steep retaliation from China and promises from European allies to push back.

Even some Trump supporters are having their doubts.

Frank Amoroso, a 78-year-old resident of Dewitt, Michigan, said he is concerned about short-term rising interest rates and inflation, although he believes the tariffs will be good for the country in the long run.

Amoroso, a retired automotive engineer who voted for Trump, said he would give the president’s second-term performance a C-plus or B-minus. “I think he’s doing things too fast,” he said. “But hopefully things will get done in a prudent way, and the economy will survive a little downfall.”

Rep. French Hill, R-Ark., in a telephone town hall with constituents on Thursday night, expressed reservations about the broad nature of the tariffs.

Hill, who represents a district that includes Little Rock, said he does not back tariffs on Canada and Mexico. He said the administration should instead focus on renegotiating a U.S. trade agreement with its two neighbors.

“I don’t support across-the-board tariffs as a general matter, and so I don’t support those, and I will be urging changes there because I don’t think they will end up raising a bunch of revenue that’s been asserted,” Hill said. “I wish I thought they did, but personally I don’t think they will. But I do support trade diplomacy.”

Still, much of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” coalition remains publicly supportive.

Doug Deason, a prominent Texas-based Republican donor, said he loves the president’s tariff plan, even if it causes some economic disruption.

“He told us during the election there would be pain for every American to get this ship turned around,” Deason said. “It is hard to watch our portfolios deteriorate so much, but we get it. We hope he holds course.”

As Trump struggles with the economy, Democrats are beginning to emerge from the cloud of doom that has consumed their party ever since their election drubbing in November.

They scored a decisive victory in Wisconsin’s high-profile state Supreme Court election on Tuesday, even after Elon Musk and his affiliated groups poured more than $20 million into the contest. New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker then breathed new life into the Democratic resistance by delivering a record 25-hour-long speech on the Senate floor that centered on a call for his party to find its resolve.

Booker told The Associated Press afterward that a significant political shift has begun even as his party tries to learn from its mistakes in the 2024 presidential election.

“I think you’re seeing a lot more energy, a lot more determination, a lot more feeling like we’ve got to fight,” Booker said. “You can’t sit back any more. You can’t sit on the sidelines. There’s a larger, growing movement.”

Booker, a 2020 presidential candidate, acknowledged he is not ruling out a 2028 run, although he said he is focused on his 2026 Senate reelection for now.

There is broad agreement among Democrats — and even some Republicans, privately at least — that what Trump has unleashed on the global economy could help accelerate the Democratic comeback.

Ezra Levin, co-founder of the progressive resistance group known as Indivisible, has been critical of Democratic officials’ response in recent weeks to Trump’s leadership. But on Friday, he was somewhat giddy about the political consequences for Trump’s GOP after the tariffs announcement.

“Raising prices across the board for your constituents is not popular,” Levin said. “It’s the kind of thing that can lead to a 1932-style total generational wipe out of a party.”

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Peoples reported from New York. Associated Press writers Andrew DeMillo in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Isabella Volmert in Dewitt, Michigan, contributed to this report.