Trump Berates Walmart and Mattel for Warning About Tariff Price Increases

President Trump is telling some of the nation’s largest companies that they should eat the cost of his tariffs, as a growing number of businesses signal that they must raise prices to blunt the impact of a persistent global trade war.

As a result, the man who ran for the presidency by boasting about his business acumen is now openly sparring with corporate America, seeking to dictate how Walmart, Mattel, and other retailers and manufacturers respond to some of the highest levies seen in decades.

Since the spring, the United States has imposed a 10 percent tariff on nearly every nation, with steeper duties reserved for specific products and countries, including a minimum 30 percent tax on Chinese imports.

While the White House insists the president’s strategy is working — generating new revenue and forcing nations to negotiate — some companies have started to report early signs of financial strain. Their warnings have affirmed economists’ long and widely held belief that tariffs fall hardest on U.S. companies and consumers, not the allies and adversaries that Mr. Trump seeks to punish.

But the White House repeatedly has dismissed this evidence, while the president himself has increasingly needled companies for trying to ameliorate the financial fallout.

“He maintains the position that foreign countries absorb these tariffs,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told reporters at a briefing on Monday.

The latest example arrived over the weekend when Mr. Trump trained his ire on Walmart, just days after the low-cost retailer told investors that it might have to increase prices soon. Doug McMillon, the chief executive, said on Walmart’s latest earnings call last week that it probably would not be able to “absorb all the pressure” from the president’s tariffs for much longer.

In response, the president demanded in a post on social media on Saturday that Walmart “EAT THE TARIFFS,” rather than pass any new costs on to customers. He argued that Walmart had generated billions of dollars in profit last year, so it could afford to shoulder any added expenses.

“I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!” Mr. Trump said.

Asked on Sunday about the president’s strategy, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Walmart would, in fact, “eat some of the tariffs,” noting that he had spoken with Mr. McMillon over the weekend.

Mr. Bessent pointed to the fact that the retailer did not raise prices during Mr. Trump’s first term when he began imposing tariffs on China. And the Treasury secretary brushed aside some of Walmart’s warnings as a standard disclosure to investors, a position that Ms. Leavitt echoed on Monday.

“The C.E.O. of Walmart made those comments about tariffs on an earnings call, where C.E.O.s, I believe, are legally obligated to give the most dire warnings and forecasts to their investors and stakeholders,” she said.

The law requires that companies be forthcoming with shareholders about the financial risks they face. Nevertheless, it was unlikely that Walmart had adjusted its strategy.

Mr. McMillon’s call with Mr. Bessent had been scheduled before the president’s threat, and the chief executive made no new commitments about pricing, said a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal details of the conversation.

“We have always worked to keep our prices as low as possible, and we won’t stop,” Molly Blakeman, a spokeswoman for Walmart, said in a statement. “We’ll keep prices as low as we can for as long as we can given the reality of small retail margins.”

The company warnings again underscored the economic risks in Mr. Trump’s aggressive approach to trade, as he seeks to use sky-high tariffs to recalibrate U.S. relationships, raise billions of dollars in revenue and boost domestic manufacturing.

So far, the administration has completed an early framework for an agreement with Britain, and it has worked with China to mutually lower the punishing tit-for-tat tariffs that essentially halted trade between the world’s largest economies.

But the White House remains far from realizing its vision for dozens of individual trade deals, and Mr. Trump has threatened repeatedly to restore the much larger “reciprocal” tariffs that he announced in early April. Those levies were suspended for 90 days to give other nations time to reach trade deals with the United States.

The longer it takes to reach those deals, the greater the odds that Mr. Trump’s trade war could weigh down the U.S. economy. On Monday, financial markets tumbled anew amid concerns about the president’s agenda and its effects on the country’s fiscal future.

For now, consumer prices have remained mostly steady, cooling slightly in April in what may prove to be a final lull before the president’s trade war begins to contribute to inflation. Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, pointed to that data in a statement on Monday, stressing that the administration’s policies are working. He said the United States “has the leverage to make our trading partners ultimately bear the cost of tariffs.”

“There’s some uncertainty. We’re going to watch it very, very closely about how this ends over the next two or three months when the tariff rates get set,” Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, told reporters earlier Monday. He said any tariff-related price increases, if they occurred, were not a sign of inflation but a “one-time” effect.

Some of the earliest fallout could arise in the retail sector, where companies including Lowe’s and Home Depot will report their latest earnings this week. Facing tight margins, many in the industry have expressed fear that elevated import costs could cause them to raise prices on consumers, a message they have shared privately with Mr. Trump since he announced his tariffs.

“Across the retail space, you’re going to see firms increasingly be overt about the pressure they’re feeling,” said Gregory Daco, chief economist for the consulting firm EY-Parthenon. He added that there was an “increasing likelihood they’re going to pass on at least part” of the higher costs to consumers.

Publicly, the White House has blasted companies for trying to tie price increases to tariffs.

When a disputed report surfaced in April that Amazon would begin displaying tariff-related costs on its widely popular marketplace, the Trump administration accused the e-commerce giant of a “hostile and political” act. Mr. Trump later spoke with Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, and the company denied that the policy was going into effect.

The next month, the president took aim at Mattel, which had warned that it might raise the price of its popular toys, including Barbies, as a result of tariffs. Mr. Trump threatened to impose a 100 percent tariff on Mattel’s products, saying it “won’t sell one toy in the United States.”

The president previously dismissed concerns about higher toy costs. He mused at one point that “children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls,” and that dolls might “cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.”

Mr. Trump’s push to limit what companies can charge their customers is also a sharp deviation from the 2024 campaign, when he attacked Vice President Kamala Harris after she embraced a federal ban on price gouging by grocery stores and food suppliers. Mr. Trump blasted the plan as “Soviet-style” controls.

Mr. Trump also turned his attention to Ford Motor when it appeared poised to raise prices on some of its vehicles on the heels of a report to investors showing it would face $1.5 billion in tariff costs this year. He nonetheless shrugged off the automaker’s plans, describing them as a negotiating tactic — and predicted that it “wouldn’t sell any cars” as a result.

“Tariffs are the most misunderstood thing maybe in any form of business,” Mr. Trump said at a White House event this month in response to a question about the public’s patience for price increases.

But he maintained that those costs would not fall on to consumers. “Oftentimes, the country picks them up. Oftentimes, the company picks it up,” Mr. Trump continued. “The people don’t pick it up, OK? The people don’t pick it up.”

Colby Smith, Shawn McCreesh and Karen Weise contributed reporting.