When President Donald Trump slapped a 50% tariff on Brazilian imports this summer, executives at Taurus Holdings did what many others have done: They turned to a Trump-aligned lobbyist named Brian Ballard.
Taurus makes handguns and rifles, marketing itself as “the industry’s undisputed price leader.” It exports most of its products from Brazil to the U.S. So a tariff-generated price hike of 50% for American buyers loomed as an existential threat, and the company needed help in Washington, D.C.
Through Ballard’s firm and others with close ties to Trump administration figures, Taurus and other gunmakers are now trying to appeal to the president for relief by invoking the concerns of his political base. Trump’s tariffs may bring more blue-collar factory jobs to the U.S., their argument goes, but the levies shouldn’t lead to higher firearms prices for his gun-buying supporters.
Win or lose, that argument reflects the outsize role that one person, Trump, plays in granting tariff relief. And it helps explain why a loose affiliation of lobbyists with close ties to the president, Ballard foremost among them, is in line to make a lot of money. The confusion around the tariffs — and the opaque process for granting exclusions — give those who can advertise such ties an edge in signing clients, lobbyists and trade lawyers say.
Lobbying on tariffs and other trade-related issues hit an all-time high in the first half of 2025, with total spending of $908 million, up 28% from the first half of 2024 and 35% from the same period in 2023, according to a Bloomberg analysis of federal disclosures.
Ballard’s firm, Ballard Partners, saw its revenue surge 305%. It represents almost 300 clients, including Amazon, The Walt Disney Co., Harvard University and the National Football League, and it won more business from new clients than any other firm from April through June this year. Tariffs are the most important reason, Ballard says.
“Tariffs seem to be always front and center,” he said in an interview. “For us, for business, it’s a big issue.”
Ballard says he doesn’t own any firearms personally. “I look at a deer and I go, ‘I’d rather watch you than shoot you.’” Regardless, he says the Second Amendment’s protection of gun rights offers his client a compelling case.
Taurus has also noted that it has one U.S.-based factory and argued to policymakers that tariffs will challenge that plant as well. A representative for the company declined to comment.
In their efforts to keep tariffs at bay, large clients like Apple have turned to lobbying shops with ties to the Trump administration and family. So have industry associations and smaller manufacturers.
Every new administration sees at least some change in terms of which lobbyists wield the most influence. Trump’s presidencies have been somewhat different, according to lobbyists, lawyers and corporate representatives in Washington: They’ve brought in new players who attracted clients quickly and upended the established business model. Firms like Ballard Partners and Miller Strategies — founded by Jeff Miller, who served as finance chair for Trump’s second inauguration — began rising during Trump’s first term and have accelerated since his return.
Joining them are recent arrivals such as Checkmate Government Relations, which has pulled in more than $5 million since it first registered to operate in Washington, D.C., late last year. More than a fifth of that income came from companies like Hanesbrands and Novo Nordisk looking for help with tariff and trade-related issues, federal filings show.
Firms with close ties to administration officials or the Trump family feature prominently on the list of lobbying firms that have disclosed the fastest-growing revenue this year, according to Bloomberg’s analysis. They include Mercury Public Affairs, where Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, had served as a co-chair; Checkmate, led by a hunting buddy of Donald Trump Jr.; Continental Strategy, led by Carlos Trujillo, a former Trump campaign adviser; and Valcour Global Public Strategy, founded by Matt Mowers, who served in the State Department during the first Trump administration.
Lobbying disclosures capture only some of the money being spent to try to influence the administration. Federal law requires only those who spend 20% or more of their time lobbying to disclose their business. In practice, a vast amount of “shadow lobbying” is done by consultants and lawyers who file no disclosures.
Trump has insisted there are no exclusions to be had from his tariffs, yet the record shows he has granted relief repeatedly, despite the lack of a formal process for companies to apply for it. Bloomberg reported this summer that his administration had allowed exclusions for imported products whose value exceeded $1 trillion last year. That figure has only grown since.
Announcing 100% tariffs on imported pharmaceuticals on Sept. 25, Trump included a carve-out for any company that was building a U.S. manufacturing plant. On Tuesday, Pfizer said it had received a three-year reprieve from the tariffs by agreeing to cut some of its drug prices by as much as 85%. Those moves followed a Sept. 5 expansion of the list of products exempt from the president’s signature “Liberation Day” tariffs. The July 30 executive order that provoked Taurus’ lobbying scramble by imposing new tariffs on Brazilian imports included a list of almost 700 exempted products, from airplanes to Brazil nuts.
White House spokesperson Kush Desai said decisions on tariff exclusions boil down to one criterion. “President Trump has been clear: You don’t have to worry about tariffs if you make your product in the United States of America,” he said. “The only special interest guiding the president and the administration’s decision-making is the best interest of the American people.”
New approaches
Part of Taurus’ pitch has been that some portion of its production is already domestic: It has a manufacturing plant in Bainbridge, Ga. Its parent company, CBC Global Ammunition, also announced in May that it would invest $300 million in a new gunpowder factory in Oklahoma, creating 350 jobs. That factory buildout is the sort of good news — a tacit endorsement of Trump’s pledges to strengthen American manufacturing — that lobbyists recommend companies offer as an opening bid when seeking tariff relief.
In Ballard, Taurus found a lobbyist with a certain pedigree: He built his reputation as a MAGA fundraiser whose Florida-based firm did substantial business in the nation’s capital when Trump became the 45th president in 2017. He once employed Wiles, whom he calls a “good friend,” and Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney general.
Helping to press Taurus’ case is a Ballard partner, Hunter Morgen, who worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign as a speech writer and policy researcher and served as an aide to White House trade adviser Peter Navarro during the president’s first term.
Just weeks after hiring Ballard, Taurus made its pitch for tariff relief to Vice President JD Vance’s staff, a session the company’s CEO later briefed investors on. Vance’s office declined to comment.
Ballard’s firm won’t comment on specific meetings with administration officials. Trump himself rarely meets with any lobbyist to discuss specific business, Ballard says.
“If he doesn’t believe you’re right, it doesn’t matter what you’ve done or who you are, or what the corporation is,” Ballard says.
Widely adopted approaches from Trump’s first term, such as taking out ads on Fox News at times the president was thought to be watching, aren’t working this time around, Ballard says. What does work, according to the MAGA-oriented firms, are real relationships with Trump and his small circle.
“Obviously like anybody else, he’s more comfortable with people who are friends,” Ballard says. “But, maybe because of his wealth and his success, he does what he thinks is right.”
Ches McDowell, the 35-year-old managing partner at Checkmate Government Relations, has quickly built a reputation for having access to Trump’s circle, a connection forged when the North Carolina lobbyist arranged a bear-hunting trip in December 2016 for Donald Trump Jr. (Alongside McDowell, Checkmate employs the son of Chris LaCivita, who was a senior adviser to Trump’s 2024 campaign, and a nephew of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s health and human services secretary.)
“No one gives a (expletive) about what’s fair to you — it’s got to be fair to America,” McDowell said in a text message exchange. Lobbyists are encouraging clients to advertise job creation and investments in the U.S. that will reflect well on the Trump administration’s trade strategy, he said. “You’ve got to play ‘Let’s Make a Deal’ and make the boss a winner,” he said.
To put it simply, “If you want to get something done, the old-school lobbying approach doesn’t work anymore,” McDowell said.
Common strategies
Every new presidency triggers a wave of partisan hirings on Washington’s K Street. Established firms bring on former lawmakers and officials of the party newly in power, to better promise clients they can guarantee access and influence. Trump’s tariff strategies have broadly benefited lobbyists in general, including partners at long-established firms that have no pronounced tie to the president.
Washington still teems with white-shoe lawyers and arguments awash in policy analyses about trade flows and economic growth. Yet lobbyists and their corporate clients told Bloomberg News that in Trump’s second administration, partisan and professional links pale in comparison to bona fide personal connections. Asked how he’d managed to stand up a trade-lobbying practice quickly, one rising lobbyist laughed and said simply that he had the cellphone number of a close Trump adviser.
Interviews with more than a dozen lobbyists, trade lawyers and industry representatives reveal common strategies: Don’t come to the administration asking for relief from the pain of tariffs; doing so implies criticism of the trade policy that Trump has called his “favorite word.” Offer to make deals or present good news about investing in U.S. manufacturing, said two Republican lobbyists who served in Trump’s first term. Be prepared for disappointment, said a third.
“In the first term, we had an entire business line built on tariff exemptions,” said Sam Geduldig, a managing partner at lobbying firm CGCN, which is close with the White House. “In the second, we tell potential clients we don’t think we can help you — and for what it’s worth, no other firm can either.”
Some in the administration relish saying no. After somebody leaked a pitch from traditional powerhouse firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck — an offer to Brazil’s biggest business group to press its case on tariffs for a $50,000-a-month retainer — Navarro, the White House trade adviser, took to his personal SubStack: “Memo to Brownstein-Hyatt. You will NEVER darken my White House door. Don’t want to trip on your slime,” wrote Navarro, one of the chief cheerleaders for Trump’s tariffs. The lobbying firm declined to comment.
Up against such hard-liners, some companies and industries have seen at least some success.
Medical device giant Becton, Dickinson and Co. this spring won an exclusion it had previously been denied under Trump and former President Joe Biden, allowing it to avoid tariffs on Chinese-made circuit boards for an infusion system it sells. That exclusion, which will also benefit other firms importing similar components, came shortly after Becton hired BGR Group’s David Urban, a veteran Republican lobbyist who served as an adviser on Trump’s 2016 campaign.
“We’ve been spending a lot of time on that topic, lobbying both in D.C. … as well as in China,” Becton CEO Thomas Polen told an investor conference in May.
The National Fisheries Institute, an industry group, hired Miller Strategies just four days after Trump’s inauguration, rekindling a relationship from his first term when it won exclusions on American seafood processed in China.
The NFI has scored some wins, including extensions of those exclusions. But in April, Trump issued an executive order that could lead to yet more tariffs for the seafood industry. So the group is continuing to press its argument that consumers will simply be priced out of their products.
American households now gorging on the cheap imported shrimp from Asia that make up 90% of consumption won’t suddenly shift to more expensive domestic crustaceans due to tariffs, says Gavin Gibbons, the NFI’s chief strategy officer. “They’re just going to buy chicken nuggets.”
“Long way to go”
Executives at Taurus, which had paid Ballard Partners $90,000 this year through June 30, are also still chasing success — with a strategy that’s broader than a single lobbying firm. Trump’s tariffs have set off an online frenzy among gun aficionados; even some domestic gunmakers have been hit because they rely on imported components, like gun barrels.
Taurus has also retained McDowell’s Checkmate, which reported $5.3 million in lobbying revenue in the first half of this year after setting up a D.C. office late last year. Vortex Optics, which makes rifle scopes and other firearms accessories, paid Checkmate $200,000 in the first half to lobby the White House, the Commerce Department and the U.S. trade representative’s office, according to federal disclosures.
Taurus representatives have warned officials in both Brazil and the U.S. that tariffs could disrupt its operations and limit its U.S. output, Salesio Nuhs, the firm’s CEO, said on a recent earnings call. The company relocated its U.S. operations to Georgia from Miami in 2019. Its executives said earlier this year that plans call for churning out 900 handguns per day at the Bainbridge factory.
Among other steps, Taurus boosted inventory and stocked its U.S. factory with components ahead of the imposition of tariffs to blunt their impact, Nuhs said. “We are very agile,” he said, but added later, “We just have to remember the company’s entire structure is in Brazil.”
The company has also sought help from other U.S. officials. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, is “very worried” about Taurus’ tariff dilemma, Nuhs said on the earnings call, which came shortly before Kemp toured its Brazilian factory on Aug. 26. (Photos from that visit show a presentation about how the company would respond to Trump’s tariffs, including a plan to “increase local production in Georgia.”) Kemp’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Meanwhile, Ballard says the company must be patient with Washington. For now, he says, the timing is difficult for Brazilian companies. Trump has linked his tariffs to the prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro for backing a coup after he lost his 2022 reelection bid. Bolsonaro was convicted last month and sentenced to 27 years in prison for plotting the coup. Trump has said he plans to speak with Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva this week.
“We’ve got a long way to go,” Ballard says.
A protracted fight could also be good for business. Asked how long he thinks the tariff issue will endure, he’s quick with an answer: “I hope for forever.”
Bloomberg’s Jade Khatib contributed.