Bill Ackman urges Trump to pause ‘economic nuclear war on every country’

Donald Trump supporter and billionaire fund manager Bill Ackman has said the president is losing the confidence of business leaders and should pause his trade war – which could cause an economic collapse while damaging his supporters the most.

“The president has an opportunity to call a 90-day time out,” Ackman said on Sunday in a post on X, to resolve trade issues via negotiation.

“If, on the other hand ... we launch economic nuclear war on every country in the world, business investment will grind to a halt, consumers will close their wallets and pocket books, and we will severely damage our reputation with the rest of the world that will take years and potentially decades to rehabilitate.”

Though Trump made imposing tariffs a part of his victorious 2024 electoral campaign, which Ackman endorsed, the billionaire fund manager’s X post said: “This is not what we voted for.”

Ackman’s post came after Trump’s tariffs wiped $6tn off US stocks. Asia and Europe’s markets slumped, too.

The Trump tariffs are 10% across the board, with higher rates aimed at about 60 countries.

Late Sunday on Air Force One, Trump told reporters he had spent the weekend speaking to leaders from Europe and Asia who tried to convince him to lower his tariffs – some that are as high as 50% and are due to take effect this week.

But Trump said that those counties would need to pay “a lot of money on a yearly basis” for him to reconsider.

In his post, Ackman also said: “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.”

Staying the course would mean “heading for a self-induced, economic nuclear winter, and we should start hunkering down”, Ackman’s post also said. “May cooler heads prevail.”

There were no immediate indications that pleas such as Ackman’s would persuade Trump. During his Air Force One talk with reporters on Sunday, he said: “I don’t want anything to go down. But sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.”

• Reuters contributed reporting