President Donald Trump, driven by his son Eric Trump, arrives at Trump National Doral during the LIV Golf Miami tournament, Thursday, April 3, 2025, in Miami.

WASHINGTON — In addition to hitting Americans with trillions of dollars in new taxes and cratering the stock market, Donald Trump’s arbitrary tariff regime offers yet another opportunity for a president who has already shown his willingness to use his office for personal gain, critics fear.

The new tariffs, which started taking effect on Saturday, already have exemptions for specific industries, establishing the precedent for corporations or even entire countries to win carve-outs for themselves.

And, government watchdogs and other experts worry, with Trump having long demonstrated a willingness to take official actions in return for private or political benefit, a vast new field of potential corruption has opened.

“There are concerns around additional graft and cronyism,” said Melinda St Louis, global trade director at Public Citizen.

Rajeev Goel, an Illinois State University economist, co-authored a 2023 paper finding that multilateral trade agreements help fight “public sector corruption” by creating transparent, level playing fields for buying and selling goods across borders.

“The current tariffs are doing the reverse of what we studied earlier,” he said.

“If you define corruption as making side deals with the Trump administration for special exemptions, that is certain to happen on a grand scale, and may well be the intent of the tariff imposition itself,” said Bill Megginson, a finance professor at the University of Oklahoma’s business school and a co-author of a 2025 paper that studied political “distortions” of Trump’s first-term tariffs.

President Donald Trump speaks to reporters on board Air Force One on April 3, 2025.

Trump’s White House, responding to HuffPost queries about whether he would be amenable to quid-pro-quo arrangements that benefit him in exchange for exemptions from the new tariffs, said he was only interested in helping the country.

“The only people President Trump is currying favour with are the American people who have faced the devastating consequences of backward, ‘America Last’ trade policies that have led to millions in job losses, vulnerabilities to our national security, and a weakening of our dominance,” White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said in a statement.

Trump, though, has over the years........

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