Washington, Aug 8: Former US Vice President Mike Pence, in a scathing attack against President Donald Trump’s trade policy, said on Thursday that American companies and consumers are paying the cost of US tariffs.

Pence took to X to highlight that the cost of production of US companies like auto giant Ford has shot up following the increase in tariffs on inputs. US consumers are also ending up paying higher prices for goods due to the tariffs levied by Trump, he added.

The former Vice President emphasised the need for "Free trade with Free nations".

To drive home his point, Pence tagged an article from ‘Reason,’ a US monthly magazine, which stated that Ford had paid $800 million in tariff-related expenses during the second quarter of 2025, despite building most of its cars in America.

“If President Donald Trump's tariffs were boosting the prospects of American-based manufacturing, then Ford Motor Co. ought to be one of the biggest winners. After all, Ford builds more vehicles in the United States than any other automaker — it churned out 1.8 million of them last year — while employing around 57,000 manufacturing workers at plants across the upper Midwest. It's a legacy American brand, doing the sort of blue-collar work in the Rust Belt that the Trump administration believes its trade policies will directly benefit,” the article states.

In reality, the tariffs are crushing Ford. The automaker announced this week that it paid $800 million in tariff-related expenses during the second quarter of 2025 (during which it posted its first quarterly loss since 2023), and that it expects the tariffs to reduce annual profits by about $3 billion. Even for a company that earned an operating profit of $10.2 billion last year, that's a tremendous blow, the article written by Eric Boehm stated.

The Ford management is reported to have held multiple rounds of talks with the Trump administration in an attempt to reverse the setback due to the hike in tariffs.

Mike Pence had earlier stated that President Trump’s tariffs marked the “largest peacetime tax hike on the American people in the history of this country” and contributed to rising costs for consumers.

(IANS)

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