Former Trump communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin on Thursday warned that the White House has a “policy problem” due to how the president’s widespread tariffs could wreak havoc on a range of U.S. industries.
“I’m skeptical that the White House is prepared for how much hardship Americans could feel in a matter of weeks because of these tariffs. We certainly are not yet feeling the full effects of them,” Griffin told CNN’s John Berman.
Earlier in her CNN appearance, Griffin was asked to weigh in on Trump’s “communication strategy” with the tariffs following his remarks that children may have to deal with having “two dolls instead of 30″ because of his trade policy.
“I can picture the White House press shop gasping when they heard that line,” Griffin said before suggesting that Trump should instead lean into the GOP-pushed short-term pain, long-term gain talk.
In the same week that the president marked the 100th day of his second term, the Department of Commerce announced that the U.S. economy shrank by 0.3%, its first drop since 2022.
Trump’s import taxes on a range of nations have fueled global market turmoil in recent weeks, only for the president to pause some tariffs and tweak others — outside of his massive 145% tariff on goods coming from China.
Griffin noted that Trump met with CEOs of several top U.S. retailers last week, companies that can “absorb some of these costs because they’re huge.” The tariffs, she argued, will more deeply impact small businesses as well as the automobile and agriculture industries.
She then turned to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins telling CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday that the department is preparing to bail out farmers should they be hurt by Trump’s trade policy.
“That’s not a winning first 100-day message,” said Griffin, adding that it’s “remarkable” Rollins is advertising the potential for bailouts as a Republican.
“So I think that there is ― there is a policy problem on the tariffs that the president does seem to be responding to, pulling some of these back and making them a little bit more targeted,” she said.
“But the messaging is also a disaster.”