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