Former US Vice President Mike Pence, in a scathing attack on President Donald Trump’s trade policy, said on Thursday that American companies and consumers are bearing the brunt of US-imposed tariffs.
Pence took to X (formerly Twitter) to highlight that production costs for US companies like auto giant Ford have surged following increased tariffs on inputs. He added that US consumers are also facing higher prices for goods due to these tariffs.
The former Vice President underscored the need for “free trade with free nations.”
To drive home his point, Pence tagged an article from Reason, a US monthly magazine, which stated that Ford had paid $800 million in tariff-related expenses during the second quarter of 2025 — despite manufacturing most of its vehicles in America.
“If President Donald Trump’s tariffs were boosting the prospects of American-based manufacturing, then Ford Motor Co. ought to be one of the biggest winners. After all, Ford builds more vehicles in the United States than any other automaker — it churned out 1.8 million of them last year — while employing around 57,000 manufacturing workers at plants across the upper Midwest. It’s a legacy American brand, doing the sort of blue-collar work in the Rust Belt that the Trump administration believes its trade policies will directly benefit,” the article states.
In reality, the article argues, the tariffs are hurting Ford. The automaker announced this week that it had paid $800 million in tariff-related expenses during the second quarter of 2025 — a period in which it posted its first quarterly loss since 2023 — and expects the tariffs to reduce its annual profits by about $3 billion. Even for a company that earned an operating profit of $10.2 billion last year, this represents a significant financial setback, the article by Eric Boehm noted.
Ford’s management has reportedly held multiple rounds of talks with the Trump administration in an attempt to reverse the impact of the tariff hikes.
Mike Pence had previously described President Trump’s tariffs as the “largest peacetime tax hike on the American people in the history of this country,” and said they had contributed to rising costs for consumers.
IANS