Trump to Walmart: Make less money

President Donald Trump lashed out at Walmart (WMT+0.77%) on Saturday, pressuring the retail giant not to raise prices after it warned that his trade war policies would force it to do so.

“Walmart should STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain,” Trump said on his social media site Truth Social. “Walmart made BILLIONS OF DOLLARS last year, far more than expected. Between Walmart and China they should, as is said, ‘EAT THE TARIFFS,’ and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!”

Trump’s insistence that Walmart “eat the tariffs” undercut his repeated assertions that tariffs are paid by foreign countries. Tariffs are paid by the companies that import goods from countries, and then those companies generally pass along at least some of that added cost to their customers.

Walmart executives warned this week that higher prices are coming as soon as this month if new duties on Chinese goods take effect.

“We would expect price increases if those tariffs are enacted,” Walmart CFO John David Rainey Rainey told CNBC on Thursday. Consumers are “going to start seeing higher prices,” he said.

The warning landed just weeks after Walmart pulled its guidance on April 9, seven days after Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff rollout that upended global trade.

“We will do our best to keep our prices as low as possible,” Walmart CEO Doug McMillon on the company’s earnings call this week. But he warned that the retailer couldn’t “absorb all the pressure” from the traiffs.

Walmart has acted as a deflationary force in the U.S. economy for decades, using its massive scale and supply chain dominance — especially with low-cost Chinese manufacturing — to push prices down across retail. By demanding rock-bottom prices from suppliers and passing the savings on to consumers, it helped suppress inflation in categories across the board, from socks to shampoo.

Now that era may be over. “The magnitude and speed at which these prices are coming to us is somewhat unprecedented in history,” Rainey said on Thursday.

In the same way its pricing once set the tone for the broader retail sector, pressuring rivals to follow suit, Walmart’s shift to raising prices allows other retailers and major brands to follow suit.

Speaking to The Wall Street Journal (NWS-0.54%), Harvard economist Jason Furman called it a turning point: “This isn’t Walmart taking advantage. It’s Walmart having no choice.”

“That tells me that they are more afraid of their own customers and their reactions than they are of Donald Trump and his reaction,” Furman added.

—Catherine Baab contributed to this article.