By Julia Harte
(Reuters) -President Donald Trump’s April 9 decision to hike tariffs on China hit as Steve Egan, a promotional product distributor in Tampa, Florida, was in the middle of ordering 5,000 rubber ducks from a Chinese vendor.
The ducks were for a local non-profit that wanted to hand them out at parades and special events. Overnight, the ducks’ cost jumped from 29 to 45 cents apiece, according to Egan.
That order is now on hold by the customer until the tariff situation is resolved, along with orders from other clients for thousands of other items, from hats to poker chips.
“I kind of feel like we’re back in COVID times because everything’s in limbo,” said Egan, 64, who voted for Trump in November.
His first-quarter sales in 2025 were 70% lower than the previous year, although they ticked up in April.
Trump’s barrage of tariffs against global trading partners has reverberated around the United States over the past few months, affecting the livelihoods of myriad Americans, including many who said they voted for him.
Tariffs were the most common policy cited by 25 Trump voters across the country interviewed by Reuters about the president’s first 100 days in office and what had most impacted their lives. They said they saw the effects at their workplaces and in their investments, especially their 401(k) retirement plans.
Reuters will be periodically interviewing many of these same voters between now and the 2026 midterm elections to track how they are affected by the Trump administration’s policies.
Several of the voters interviewed for this piece also cited the sweeping cuts to federal agencies and new immigration restrictions, which have slowed U.S.-Mexico border crossings to their lowest level since 2000.
Most of the 14 voters who mentioned tariffs expected them to eventually yield the results the Trump administration promised: creating manufacturing jobs at home and enabling the United States to negotiate better trading terms with other countries.
Trump was elected on a pledge to cut inflation and boost the economy but has started to lose support, particularly on economic issues, according to Reuters/Ipsos polling. Just 37% of respondents to the six-day poll that concluded on Monday approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, down from 42% in the hours after his January 20 inauguration.
Outside economists have warned the tariffs could trigger inflation, heighten the risk of a U.S. recession and cost the average U.S. family thousands of dollars in raised prices.
Among the 14 voters, most said they were willing to give the tariffs time to achieve the results Trump has promised. Those timelines ranged from a few months to several years, reflecting the varying degrees of confidence these voters have in the president they helped elect.
The 25 voters were selected from 429 respondents to a February 2025 Ipsos poll who said they voted for Trump in November’s presidential election and were willing to speak to a reporter. Although not a statistically representative portrait of all Trump voters, their ages, education backgrounds, races/ethnicities, locations and voting histories roughly corresponded to those of Trump’s overall electorate.
White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement that “everyday Americans” remembered how tariffs during Trump’s first presidential term had helped drive economic growth. “The entire Trump administration is aligned on once again delivering a historic economy while continuing to secure our southern border and streamline our bloated government,” he added.
“WHAT WOULD CHANGE MY MIND”
At a Walmart in northeastern Indiana, retail worker Jon Webber, 44, said his employee stock value dropped and fewer people seemed to be buying luxury items – which usually see a surge in the spring – soon after Trump began issuing tariffs against China and other countries in February.
Webber said he agreed with Trump that the government needed to “start making everybody kind of pay their own due,” referring to the president’s claims that other countries have “taken advantage” of the United States in trade deals by setting tariffs at higher rates than those imposed on them by the U.S. government.
Still, if by early fall the tariffs aren’t yielding economic benefits and the president hasn’t fulfilled other campaign-trail pledges such as expanding U.S. oil and gas production, “that would be what would change my mind to say, ‘maybe Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing’,” Webber said.
The 25% tariff on auto imports that Trump announced on April 2 caused a buying surge at the Denver-area dealership where Ron Dailey, 63, sells mainly Japan-made cars, as customers raced to purchase vehicles before higher prices kicked in. The uncertainty sown by the tariffs has upset some of his colleagues, Dailey said.
Dailey said he trusts that Trump knows what he’s doing with the tariffs, however. “I’ve seen my retirement portfolio affected by what’s going on, but I’m trying to see the bigger picture, that it’s not just about me,” he said.
Only 1 in 5 respondents in the Reuters/Ipsos poll that ended Monday agreed that “in general, when the U.S. charges tariffs on imported goods, it is good for me personally.”
FEDERAL CUTS, BORDER SECURITY
While tariffs dominated views of Trump’s first 100 days, they were hardly the only thing on his voters’ minds.
In Prescott Valley, Arizona, Joyce Kenney, 73, has been glad to see the Trump administration deporting immigrants it has flagged as criminals and gang members. “I wish the Democrats would keep their nose out of it and let us do what we voted on,” she said, referring to legal efforts to pause some of the deportations.
Amanda Taylor, 51, hasn’t seen any changes to her work at an insurance firm near Savannah, Georgia, though she said her husband’s federal government job has become more uncertain due to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts to the federal workforce.
She hoped Trump would improve the economy when she voted for him in November, but now she views his tariffs with mounting concern while “trying to trust the process.”
“I don’t understand why Trump, you know, puts tariffs in and then rolls them back right away. That’s a little odd,” she said.
Some of the voters interviewed by Reuters said they would give Trump as long as it took for his tariffs to improve the U.S. economy.
“He has four years for me to prove himself,” said Kate Mottl, 62, a secretary at a police department in the Chicago suburbs. “I know that people are concerned about the stock market dropping as drastically as it did, but it’s also been coming back up.”
But the price hikes and market swings set off by the tariffs are already causing a few who helped elect Trump voter’s remorse. “Yeah, I voted for him, but I felt like at the time he was better than the alternative,” said Egan, the Tampa-based product distributor who was trying to buy rubber ducks. “And now I sit here and go, ‘who else do we have to choose from?’”
Egan had been planning to buy some rural property in anticipation of his imminent retirement. After the hit to his business and investments, however, he might “put that major purchase on hold for a few months and see how things go through the summer,” he said.
(Reporting by Julia Harte; editing by Paul Thomasch and Claudia Parsons)
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