It’s Safer to Lose Money Than Cross the President

After the Supreme Court held unlawful the emergency tariffs imposed in the months after President Trump’s 2025 inauguration, the government agreed, relatively quickly, to refund the wrongfully collected tariff revenue.

But some large U.S. companies — most notably Amazon — are declining to claim their refunds. This is not, presumably, because these companies don’t want the billion-plus dollars they’re owed; they are apparently calculating that requesting their money back might provoke the president’s disfavor, which could cost more than the abandoned refund.

Trump confirmed those concerns in April, telling CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that it will be “brilliant” if companies decline to seek refunds. “If they don’t do that, I’ll remember them,” said the president, chuckling — as he often does when floating something that should probably be cause for alarm. But the president generally gets high marks for candor and the first year of Trump’s second term provides good reason to assume he’s serious.

Take, for example, the president’s executive orders directing federal agencies to cancel government contracts and suspend security clearances for law firms that employed or represented the president’s adversaries. Or the FCC’s politically charged investigations of networks receiving Trump’s ire and its approval of Paramount’s Skydance merger after the company agreed to a $16 million settlement with Trump. Or the Treasury Department’s interest-laden imposition and lifting of sanctions.

And, of course, the president’s “carrot-and-stick approach” in exercising his pardon power. These and other similar actions show that the president, with the help of executive officers around him, is willing to use the powers of his office to reward his allies and target his foes.

That companies are responding strategically is lamentable, if not surprising. To be sure, companies have rarely made campaign donations out of public-spirited commitment to the airing of political debate. Rewarding political or financial allies has almost certainly been a part of every human society. The same goes for punishing perceived opponents: the Adams administration used the infamous Sedition Act to prosecute its critics and President Nixon’s White House counsel proposed using “the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” There are excessive examples of each.

But the anger at politically motivated enforcement of the law, when it comes to light, suggests most Americans expect and receive largely impartial — albeit inefficient — government. And if President Calvin Coolidge was right that “the chief business of the American people is business,” the possibility that Amazon and others are making rational business decisions in letting the government keep their money, despite an acknowledged obligation to return it, reflects a troubling shift in our political and legal culture.

While complaints about American litigiousness abound, we rightly champion the rule of law over the rule of men. The U.S. economy’s success is due in significant part to the fact that the country provides a relatively stable, fair, and predictable system in which to do business. Foreign investment, contract enforcement, and entrepreneurial risk-taking all depend on the belief that outcomes are determined by law and market forces rather than political relationships. When that assumption erodes, the damage is civic, as well as economic.

The president was no doubt correct, however, in musing that if companies don’t file for tariff refunds, “they’ve got to know [him] very well.” When knowing the man becomes more valuable than knowing the market, the chief business of America is the cultivation of government favor. And when businesses profit more from pleasing the ruler than serving their customers, we all end up with the ruler’s preferences — on our shelves and on our screens.