A billionaire GOP megadonor has ripped into President Donald Trump over his latest tariffs, calling them a “huge policy mistake.”
According to a report from Bloomberg, Ken Griffin said that families making $50,000 annually are being told “it’s going to cost you 20 percent, 30 percent, 40 percent more for your groceries, for your toaster, for a new vacuum cleaner, for a new car.
“Even if the dream of jobs coming back to America plays out, that’s a 20-year dream. It’s not 20 weeks. It’s not two years. It’s decades.”
The 56-year-old, speaking at an event celebrating the 100th anniversary of the University of Miami, called on the Trump administration to row back on its aggressive program of tariffs.
Though Griffin donated over $100 million to Republican-leaning political action committees over the last presidential cycle, he did not directly give to Trump’s campaign, according to OpenSecrets data.
It is not the first time Griffin has ripped into Trump’s tariffs—in February, the billionaire hedge fund manager warned the measures would not help the U.S. at the negotiating table.
He said at the time that imposing import levies on global trading partners would cause them to distrust the U.S., blunting America’s competitive edge.
Griffin is among growing number of billionaire Trump loyalists including Stanley Druckenmiller, Bill Ackman, and Ken Langone who have spoken out against the administration’s latest tariffs.
Druckenmiller, whom Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has described as a “mentor,” posted to X, “I do not support tariffs exceeding 10%.”
Langone, in an interview with the Financial Times on Monday, was critical of the president’s “bulls–t,” and claimed Trump was being “poorly advised” on the issue.
As for the administration’s 34 percent tariffs on China, Langone said it was “too aggressive, too soon,” and prevented “serious negotiations” with the superpower to work.
On Sunday, Ackman, a Democratic Party donor-turned-MAGA firebrand, warned of an “economic nuclear winter” after Trump’s latest measures sent U.S. stock futures and Japan’s Nikkei into a nosedive.
For the second night in a row, Ackman begged Trump to pause the rollout of his retaliatory tariffs that wiped out $6.6 trillion in market value last week.
Others, like the very economics professor whose paper on trade policy Trump cited, were stunned by the administration’s calculations.
“My first question, when the White House unveiled its tariff regime, was: How on earth did they calculate such huge rates?” University of Chicago professor Brett Neiman wrote in a New York Times op-ed.
“The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative released its methodology and cited an academic paper produced by four economists, including me, seemingly in support of their numbers. But they got it wrong. Very wrong.”
Elon Musk has also reportedly sparred with the president over the tariffs. The “first buddy” reportedly personally appealed to Trump, sources told The Washington Post, though Musk’s attempts have apparently been futile.
