Corporate mentions of Trump's tariffs spiked in spring 2025 

US trade policy remains unpredictable in President Donald Trump's second term. He has surprised firms, financial markets, and governments by imposing successive waves of new tariffs on nearly all imports from almost all countries. The Supreme Court struck down his so-called reciprocal tariffs as unconstitutional in February. He followed that ruling by announcing temporary tariffs that expired on July 24, the same day he ordered new tariffs that he said would combat forced labor. Given these policy shifts, US corporate executives could be expected to discuss policy changes in their quarterly earnings calls with analysts, investors, and the media.

Corporate managers typically holds such calls periodically to talk about a firm's financial performance. Transcripts of earnings calls since Trump announced his "reciprocal" tariffs on April 2, 2025 (so-called Liberation Day), do show a surge in corporate conversation about tariffs in the second quarter of 2025. But mentions of tariffs decline markedly in subsequent quarters.

While it's impossible to interpret this pattern with certainty, it could reflect several shifts in the way executives viewed Trump's tariffs. After the initial shock, many firms might have accepted Trump's tariffs as the new norm and adapted to them. They might have grown less concerned about the potential effects of tariffs on the economy and their companies. Some may have decided that silence was the best way to navigate a politically charged topic.

For this analysis, we counted the number of passages containing the word "tariff" in transcripts of 920 earnings calls from January 2025 through July 2026.[1] We sampled 150 companies across the S&P 500, S&P MidCap 400, and S&P SmallCap 600 (large, medium, and small market capitalization, respectively). We found that executives in 85 percent of calls in the sample mentioned tariffs during the second quarter of 2025, peaking in the wake of Trump's Liberation Day announcement. But company mentions of tariffs declined to 34 percent of calls in the second quarter of 2026. The figure shows that the average number of passages mentioning tariffs per earnings call dropped from six in the second quarter of 2025 to one in the second quarter of 2026.[2] These results suggest that firms find White House tariff policy less shocking now than a year ago.

Mentions of tariffs by corporate leaders varied by sector. Executives in the industrials, materials, and consumer discretionary sectors mentioned tariffs the most, which is apt given their dependence on physical goods. In a July 22, 2026, earnings call, Frank Sullivan, the chair of RPM International Inc., a US company making paint and other coatings, said about tariffs: "Our guess is it's going to be another volatile year. We have an administration that seems to not like stability." Leaders in service sectors, including communication services, utilities, and real estate, mentioned tariffs less often. But mentions of tariffs in every sector conspicuously peaked in the second quarter of 2025.

One might expect that smaller market cap companies would worry more about tariffs, given their weaker power to negotiate with suppliers and seek exemptions (which larger companies have successfully lobbied for). But companies in the S&P 500, 400, and 600 behaved similarly, following the general pattern shown in the figure.

Trump may deliver new tariff shocks in the months and years ahead. If he sees declining corporate pushback as acquiescence, he could choose to raise tariffs further, despite potential harms to businesses and consumers. Such a scenario should sharply increase mention of tariffs in future earnings calls.

Notes

1. Questions raised during earnings calls are dropped because they do not necessarily reflect company sentiments; most come during Q&A sections of the calls and are made by sell-side equity analysts. Nevertheless, answers to these questions are counted.

2. The use of "passages" to count the use of the keyword is an arbitrary choice. A robustness check was run using total "tariff" word counts per call, with similar results.