“A hostile and political act.” Those were the words White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt used in a late April briefing to discuss something Amazon was reportedly considering.

A new line item at the website’s checkout might show customers how much the price of any given item was being increased by Leavitt’s boss, President Donald Trump, with his broad, ever-shifting, and multitiered tariffs.

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Why do this now, she asked, given that the company gave no itemized notice “when the Biden administration hiked inflation to the highest level in 40 years?”

Leavitt was far from alone in the Trump administration in pushing back against transparency by the e-commerce giant. Trump himself called Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos to complain. Amazon quickly folded.

“The team that runs our ultra-low-cost Amazon Haul store considered the idea of listing import charges on certain products,” the company said in a statement the day of the Leavitt press conference. “This was never approved and is not going to happen.”

Amazon is the No. 2 retailer in the United States based on sales. The largest retailer and the largest private employer in the country is Walmart.

Walmart has not yet proposed a line item specifying the exact amounts that tariffs are adding to receipts. But company management did say on an earnings call in the middle of May that price hikes are coming, with tariffs largely the culprit.

This announcement did not sit well with the president.

“Walmart should STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain,” Trump wrote on his own Truth Social page.

He continued typing: “Walmart made BILLIONS OF DOLLARS last year, far more than expected. Between Walmart and China they should, as is said, ‘EAT THE TARIFFS,’ and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!”

Who pays for tariffs?

The status of specific tariffs is in flux with a May 28 decision after a panel of U.S. federal judges blocked a set of across-the-board charges, which appeals courts then temporarily reversed.

But barring a change of heart by the president or intervention by Congress, consumers will have a lot of places to look for rising prices in the coming months. Trump’s “baseline” 10% tariffs and many more country-specific tariffs are expected to work their way through America’s supply chain after the warehouses full of pre-tariff stock are emptied.

Companies that are at least considering hiking prices because of increased tariff costs include other large retailers Target and Best Buy, tech companies such as Apple, Japanese automakers, American automakers, toymakers, shoemakers, and power tool makers.

Grocery chains also warn that people should expect to pay more for items that simply aren’t grown in the continental U.S. in great quantities, such as bananas, pineapples, and coffee beans.

The administration’s various threats and suspensions of tariffs will create a lot of noise in the economic data that may take some time to sort through.

Yet this isn’t the first time Trump has hiked tariffs. His first term efforts were subject to rigorous economic analysis that could help people understand things better this time around.

“The Impact of the 2018 Trade War on U.S. Prices and Welfare” was the title of a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by economists Mary Amiti, Stephen J. Redding, and David Weinstein, of the New York Federal Reserve, Princeton University, and Columbia University, respectively.

The paper found that America in 2018 “experienced substantial increases in the prices of intermediates and final goods, dramatic changes to its supply-chain network, reductions in availability of imported varieties, and complete pass-through of the tariffs into domestic prices of imported goods.”

Trump’s tariffs at the time, which were far more targeted and less extensive than this year’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, led to “a reduction in U.S. real income of $1.4 billion per month by the end of 2018,” the paper found.

As to the question of who paid for those tariffs, the NBER captured those results with the headline “US Consumers Have Borne the Brunt of the Current Trade War.” That result is not at all controversial to economists, who assume that most of the cost of tariffs is passed on to the consumer.

Angry posts on social media are unlikely to change that basic outcome this time around. Companies may not list the price of tariffs separately, but consumers can see the rising prices just the same.

Even in states where targeted tariffs could be well received, surveys show that people are skeptical. A Michigan statewide poll taken around the time of the Amazon blow-up, for the Detroit Regional Chamber, found that 51.3% of Michiganders oppose Trump’s tariffs while 43.4% of the state’s residents support them.

Notably, the survey also found a double-digit increase in fear of a coming recession.

Spinning the economy

Though the Trump White House’s response to news of tariff price hikes has been colorful, it is still broadly in line with many past administrations trying to duck blame by controlling the narrative.

Former President Joe Biden’s administration and its Democratic Party support structure, for instance, tried to deflect criticism over persistent, high inflation by arguing that the problem was really corporate greed pushing up prices.

“While Trump is hellbent on rigging the economy for the ultra-wealthy and his billionaire donors at middle-class families’ expense, President Biden and Democrats up and down the ballot are fighting to stop corporate price gouging and grow the economy from the bottom up and middle out,” then-Democratic National Committee press secretary Emilia Rowland⁩ said in a June 2024 statement, just days before Biden’s disastrous debate against Trump, which led to the incumbent’s withdrawal from the race.

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Rowland also showed how the bully pulpit and the levers of government are often used to create the impression of doing something. She cheered Biden for “taking on Big Tech and Big Pharma,” “cracking down on junk fees,” and “fighting to make housing more affordable.” In other words, the Biden campaign wanted to talk about just about anything but the significant inflation that saw the dollar lose about 20% of its value over a single term.

The current press secretary would love to talk about the hollowing out of the greenback in these crypto-forward times. But present-day tariff-driven price hikes? Not so much.

Jeremy Lott is the author of The Warm Bucket Brigade: The Story of the American Vice Presidency.