A billionaire Trump loyalist warned of an “economic nuclear winter” as the administration’s devastating new tariffs sent U.S. stock futures and Japan’s Nikkei into a nosedive on Sunday.
Bill Ackman, a Democratic Party donor-turned-MAGA firebrand, begged President Donald Trump for the second night in a row to pause the rollout of his retaliatory tariffs that wiped out $6.6 trillion in market value last week.
“The president has an opportunity on Monday to call a time out and have the time to execute on fixing an unfair tariff system,” Ackman said in a series of posts on X. “Alternatively, we are heading for a self-induced, economic nuclear winter, and we should start hunkering down.”
Dow futures dropped 3.3 percent Sunday evening, S&P 500 futures fell 3.8 percent, and the Nasdaq-100 futures shed 4.8 percent as the Trump administration remained defiant on its tariffs in the face of a market meltdown.
“Sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One as he returned from a golfing weekend.
“We need the greatness of America to actually be built in America,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CBS News, adding that Trump is “tired of being ripped off by the rest of the world.”
In Japan, trading for Nikkei stock futures was briefly halted in a circuit breaker after Trump’s tariffs triggered a 7 percent wipeout. South Korea’s Kospi index also tumbled about 5 percent and Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 index sank about 6 percent.
Ackman cautioned the Trump administration against losing the trust of its biggest trading partners, which he said could take decades to regain.
“By placing massive and disproportionate tariffs on our friends and our enemies alike and thereby launching a global economic war against the whole world at once, we are in the process of destroying confidence in our country as a trading partner, as a place to do business, and as a market to invest capital,” he wrote.
Other conservative figures have similarly turned on the president over his chaotic tariff rollout.
Sen. Ted Cruz slammed the tariffs as a “massive tax increase on the American people,” while the prominent conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute raised their eyebrows over the weekend at the questionable math belying Trump’s levies.
