Spooked By Trade Wars, Trump Officials Hoard Supplies: ‘It Would Be Stupid Not To!'
Donald Trump's trade wars with China and other nations are widely expected to cause sharp economic pain, but some experts have warned consumers not to hoard supplies and goods before prices skyrocket, arguing that mass stockpiling could backfire spectacularly.
Well, many Americans aren't listening to that advice, according to survey data this year, instead preparing for the possibility of store shelves being bare amid a Trump-inflicted recession. Funnily enough, this includes a number of government officials and staffers working directly for the man who launched these massive new trade wars, all on the grounds of bad tariff math and the flimsy premise that he would bring economic 'liberation' to America and make the country 'wealthy again.'
Two Trump administration officials and a Trump aide tell Rolling Stone that they have done some stockpiling of their own in recent weeks or months, and that they know others working in Republican politics — inside and outside of the administration — who are doing the same. One of the Trump officials says they have already run to Target to bulk-buy toilet paper, some types of food, and other household supplies.
When asked why they're doing this, the Trump aide — who says they and their partner have done similar household-supply hoarding lately, and are also 'stashing cash' reserves in their D.C.-area home — simply replies: 'Because it would be stupid not to!' The aide adds that they still believe in Trump's tariffs regime, though, citing the supposed advantage of 'short-term pain' in exchange for long-term 'prosperity.'
The trend is symptomatic of a larger panic taking place within the Trump-dominated Republican elite. A significant share of the GOP luminaries on Capitol Hill, members of the Republican donor class, and some top-ranking officials in the Trump administration are privately (and sometimes publicly) extremely fearful that Trump's trade warfare is going to throttle the U.S. economy and further drive down his and the party's approval ratings ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
But because Trump commands a towering personality cult among the Republican base and rules over his party with catty malice, these GOP bigwigs mostly have to just go along with it and smile. They'll tell the American people one thing (Trump's got this, they'll claim), and behave privately another way (hoarding toilet tissue for themselves, and occasionally trying to talk the president off his Peter Navarro-shaped ledge).
In the corridors of power within Trump's own administration, there is a growing belief that the Chinese government indeed has the upper hand in this stage of the trade standoff, and that Trump is strategically flailing and looking for easy wins that don't actually exist, multiple sources with knowledge of the matter attest. Many in the GOP's upper echelons are keeping their fingers crossed that the president will find some outs and declare imaginary victory before his economic war inflicts too much damage on the average American voter.
Nobody — not even Trump, it seems — knows how long this is going to last. The American public has been trying to tell the president that they won't put up with it for very long.
'U.S. consumer confidence plummets to Covid-era low as trade war stokes anxiety,' the Associated Press reported on Tuesday, referencing the last time Trump was in office overseeing a crisis that also involved numerous Americans hoarding toilet paper, amid a supply chain crisis. (A similar supply shock is on its way.)
In recent days, multiple high-quality polls have separately shown the president's approval rating sinking, in some data to the thirties. The poor numbers have infuriated Trump enough for him to call for criminal investigations of pollsters.
He has reason to be upset. Widespread dissatisfaction with the American economy is a primary reason Trump won, and why the last president had his legacy ripped apart. As CNN reported on Monday: 'A 59 percent majority of the public now says President Donald Trump's policies have worsened economic conditions in the country, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS, up from 51 percent in March and on par with the worst numbers Joe Biden saw during his presidency.'
On Tuesday, after it was first reported by Punchbowl News that Amazon planned to 'display how much of an item's cost is derived from tariffs — right next to the product's total listed price,' the Trump White House slammed it as a 'hostile' act, and a reportedly 'pissed' Trump quickly got Amazon founder Jeff Bezos on the phone. The president later claimed, 'Bezos was very nice' and 'solved the problem very quickly. Good guy.'
By Wednesday morning, when news broke that the American economy had shrank and, per The Wall Street Journal, that 'the 0.3 percent decline in GDP fell short of the 0.4 percent growth that economists surveyed' predicted, the president did the only thing he could think to do: He took to the internet to try to pin the blame for the mess he's made on former President Joe Biden.
'We will get back to the GDP, etc., moving forward, and we remain convinced and confident this president knows exactly what he is doing. He is the ultimate dealmaker,' Trump's Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins insisted to a Fox News host, who really did not sound like he was buying what she was selling.
Rollins' appeal to good vibes aside, as indicators have worsened by the week, some close Trump allies and conservative-economics stalwarts aren't bothering to dissuade the American people — and Trump officials, evidently — from hoarding certain goods and products. In fact, some are openly saying it's a perfectly rational response to the Trump administration's tariff salvos.
'We had a pretty good consumer spending report a few days ago and the hunch is that people are buying in advance of the tariffs; that sounds plausible,' says Stephen Moore, a conservative writer and Project 2025 contributor who has advised Trump on economic matters for years.
'That's just logical consumer behavior,' he adds. 'The tariffs in the short term will probably bump prices up, [so] it might make sense to buy in advance of that. This is like a tax increase; basically, you buy before the tax increase takes effect … But the problem is that now it is getting too late to buy in advance because tariffs are already having an effect. Consumers are gonna change their behavior based on these things, if it's something that's imported. If Trump starts to get a few of these deals done, then it'll alleviate some of that pressure, but I don't know where they are on that right now.'
Moore is just one example of a long-established figure in the national GOP ecosystem and right-wing media who continues to counsel and support Trump, despite his and other conservative diehards' misgivings about the tariffs. For years, the president, unlike more traditional Republicans, has viewed massive tariffs as a net-positive for the country and as his perfect negotiating tool in high-stakes international trade standoffs. He also believes he can impose his tariff blitzes unilaterally as president, a legally dubious claim that is currently working its way through the courts.
'When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win,' Trump tweeted in 2018, when he was president the first time and toying with trade warfare on a smaller scale than now. 'When we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don't trade anymore — we win big. It's easy!'
Senior officials from Trump's first administration are about as convinced by that argument today as they were when they worked for him.
'If we continue down this path, I think it's going to be pretty bleak for the economy,' says Marc Short, who once served as Trump's White House legislative affairs director and as a top aide to Mike Pence. 'There's likely going to be significant job losses and potential supply problems in your stores. I do think the president is very adept at claiming victory and reversing his policies, so there's a question about how long this actually goes. But if you look at the data on trucking and shipping right now, I think by the end of May you're going to see more shortages and supply disruptions.'
Short continues: 'On Tuesday morning, there was data that showed how the monthly trade deficit ballooned to one of the highest levels ever, and the tariffs in theory were about fixing that deficit. But it's only gotten worse. I think this could mean a lot of Americans — not just White House staff — are out there ordering supplies ahead of what they expect to be a rougher period. Thankfully we live in a relatively free economy that's dynamic, but in the past we [in the Republican Party] have criticized central planners on the left. But I think there are currently central planners in this White House who think they can control what Americans buy and sell through their trade policies.'
He concludes: 'I don't think it works.'
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