In the days since President-elect Donald Trump won the presidential race, Nicole Bivens Collinson’s phone has barely stopped ringing. Collinson, who helps lead the international trade and government relations division at the lobbying firm Sandler, Travis & Rosenberg, said she is fielding “dozens and dozens and dozens” of calls from anxious U.S. companies looking to protect themselves from Trump’s hardline tariff plans by finding loopholes and exemptions. “Absolutely everyone is calling,” Collinson told CNBC. “It is nonstop.” Over the course of the 2024 campaign, Trump made universal tariffs a core tenet of his economic platform, floating a 20% tax on all imports from all countries with a specifically harsh 60% rate for Chinese goods. That hyper-protectionist trade approach sent chills up the spines of economists, Wall Street analysts and industry leaders who warned that across-the-board tariffs could make production — and in turn, consumer prices — more expensive, just as they were recovering…
