SerpApi.Org
America’s most influential trade official stood with the sheep chewing their way through the thistle and pine of the Manti-La Sal National Forest one mile above the idyllic Sanpete Valley, which, he promised local farmers, had found itself on the winning end of his favorite economic weapon: tariffs.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer spoke over the bleats of a freshly shorn lamb, searching the sagebrush for its mother. Greer crossed his arms, shuffling in a pair of brown skate shoes and black Ray-Ban sunglasses. Despite the urban attire, rural Utah is exactly where he wanted to make his point.
“Our issue is trying to protect American production,” Greer told Carson Jorgensen, who grazes nearly 5,000 head of sheep on national forest land. “If the mine or the ranch or the factory goes down, all the service providers in the town, they go down as well.”
Greer had a sympathetic audience — sheepmen who had seen the industry cut in half since the 1980s. Upon learning that Greer had requested a formal investigation on July 13 into whether surges in lamb imports risked damaging domestic markets, some of the grizzled farm operators cried tears of joy.
The hike above Mt. Pleasant was just one of five sites Greer prioritized in his trip out West, featuring talks with Utah manufacturers and miners who Greer said model President Donald Trump’s made-in-America mantra. Presented with concerns from other Beehive State businesses, Greer doubled down on his direction.
The man tasked by the president with reordering the global economy is on a personal mission that extends beyond boosting the gross domestic product and strengthening U.S. supply chains. In four short years, he hopes to upend a decades-old status quo to preserve what he sees as an American way of life.
Even before Trump retook the White House, Greer was crafting the upcoming administration’s plan to ignite a trade revolution. He took the lead brokering dozens of deals following Trump’s announcement of a worldwide tariff regime, which he quickly rebuilt after the Supreme Court ruled that Trump had overreached.
Greer’s zealous conviction for his boss’s populist worldview, coupled with a remarkable ability to translate it into policy, has earned him access to the president’s most intimate circle of advisers. It’s a position he never imagined as a cashier in Paradise, California — and a role he still struggles to wrap his mind around.
“I feel like Forrest Gump showing up at all these things with the President,” Greer joked during an exclusive interview with the Deseret News.
On Sunday, Greer sat by Trump watching the FIFA World Cup final between Spain and Argentina, alongside the competition’s co-hosts — Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. Greer was busy thinking about the future of North American trade, not soccer.
Greer, who graduated from Brigham Young University with a degree in international studies, flew to Mexico City on Wednesday to head the third round of meetings to revise the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which he helped develop as chief of staff to then-U.S. Trade Representative Bob Lighthizer in 2020.
When asked if he was the busiest trade representative in U.S. history, Greer said he had wondered the same thing. He thought the only other time that might come close is when the U.S. created the World Trade Organization and entered into the North American Free Trade Agreement in the early 1990s.
The pace has been dizzying. After traveling more than 100,000 miles in 2025, it has only sped up.
Just in the past week, Greer announced a new 25% tariff on Brazilian machinery, wood, alcohol and clothes; signed a reciprocal trade agreement enforcing labor laws with Jordan; and defended the president’s new 50% tariff on Canadian industries where Greer said the U.S. had faced discriminatory treatment.
There is more to come: On Friday, the global 10% tariff Greer implemented after the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s “Liberation Day” baseline duties will expire. To replace this policy, Greer is expected to announce a 12.5% tariff on 60 countries based on his office’s findings of unfair trade practices.
At first glance, Greer is an unlikely spokesperson for the president — a soft-spoken technocrat in a Cabinet bursting with billionaires and broadcast personalities. But increasingly, the country’s aggressive, and erratic, shake-up of cross-border commerce can be traced back directly to him.
In a statement to the Deseret News, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt framed Greer as someone who cares more about getting outcomes than credit.
“Jamieson Greer is the most brilliant trade lawyer in the country and has executed President Trump’s ambitious trade agenda with perfection,” Leavitt said. “Most importantly, he is a wonderful person and highly respected by everyone at the White House, including the President himself.”
He is also a true believer.
Greer sees international trade as having almost spiritual implications, shaping — or shattering — the communities at the heart of America. His violation of conservative free-market norms rests on the premise that if American trade does not benefit workers, then it has made America anything but free.
Who is Jamieson Greer?
Greer, 45, was born in Gridley, California, the “kiwi capital” of the U.S.A. At age two, his family moved to the northern California mountain town of Paradise.
Initially a gold rush settlement that expanded with the logging industry, Paradise was home to fewer than 25,000 people when the Greers moved into a mobile home for a job at a nearby plastic injection plant that Greer says never materialized because of state-subsidized competition coming from East Asia.
As a teen, Greer worked at the cash register of a local McDonald’s. His mom was a teller at Wells Fargo and his father jumped from job to job until he landed at the school district. The only attorney Greer knew in Paradise had to work as a beekeeper and a bookbinder to make ends meet, he said with a laugh.
It wasn’t until he attended BYU that his perspective grew to include international ambitions. There he decided to become a lawyer and to serve a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which he did in Belgium, becoming fluent in French, which he later used to study law in Paris.
Provo became a defining place for Greer, even more so than Europe, because that is where he formed his life trajectory and where he met his wife, Marlo. Like many with a working class background, Greer saw the military as a path to opportunity. He joined the Air Force as a JAG officer, serving in Kansas, Turkey and Iraq.
Greer’s idea of public service underwent a dramatic expansion when he was hired to litigate for Lighthizer’s high-profile Washington, D.C., firm — Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP — representing U.S. steel producers who claimed to have been hurt by the strategic actions of foreign governments.
Under the tutelage of Lighthizer, the intellectual mastermind behind the Republican Party’s turn to nationalist economics, Greer concluded that lopsided free trade was a serious national security threat. How come D.C. failed to treat it that way? he asked. With Trump’s victory, it was about to.
When Trump entered the White House in 2017, he brought Lighthizer, and Greer, along with him. But the heady work of representing Lighthizer before top diplomats never distanced Greer from the parts of the country he aimed to support with the trade agreements he put in place around the world.
On the morning of Nov. 8, 2018, Greer left the Oval Office to find missed calls from his sister. Their parent’s home was on fire. A malfunctioning transmission line had ignited the poorly managed forests around Paradise. By the time the blaze subsided two weeks later, it had killed 85 people and destroyed 18,000 structures.
Greer contacted the office of Jared Kushner, Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law. “I said, ‘You know, Jared, a lot of people in that town voted for the president,’” Greer recounted. “I think it would be a good idea if the president went and visited.” A week later, Greer was on Air Force One flying to Sacramento.
He remembers showing pictures to the president of the McDonald’s where he had worked, and the church meetinghouse where he had been baptized, both reduced to rubble. “It was just the most surreal moment of my life,” Greer said — which became even more surreal as Greer’s parents welcomed Trump on the tarmac.
Since bringing the president to his family in Paradise, Greer has brought his family to the middle of the action.
Greer returned to private practice between Trump terms, becoming a go-to “America First” trade lawyer. But his ability to be “picky about (his) clientele” came to a quick end when, on a family road trip to Iowa for Thanksgiving in 2024, he got a call from Mar-a-Lago. With a nod from his wife, Greer caught the 5 a.m. flight to Florida.
After helping Trump to formulate the Truth Social post announcing his new role, Greer jumped headlong into the non-stop chaos of a presidential transition.
A week into Trump’s 2nd stint — and one month before he was even confirmed — Greer was interrupted while teaching his Valiant 9 Sunday School class when the president began to threaten Colombia with tariffs if it refused to receive deported immigrants. Daily calls with the president have been the norm ever since.
Greer says he and his wife were clear-eyed about the kind of sacrifices his appointment would mean for their family. As a Cabinet member in charge of trade, Greer’s job entails delivering Trump’s demands to top dignitaries of every country, and carefully conveying the results to congressional committees.
His secret, he said, is “to get up earlier than the other guy.” This allows him to prepare before anyone else arrives — and, if he’s lucky, to see his family at night.
He has tried to bring his wife and children — four girls, and one boy, ranging from 9 to 19 — to official events whenever he can. He finds it helps them to see why dad is so busy. But just as much, Greer said, it helps policymakers on both sides of the aisle to see that family is the ultimate force driving his public service.
“It’s good for the leaders to be exposed to my family and understand at the end of the day, we’re all just people trying to do our best for the country and to develop and execute a policy to dig us out of a hole that we’ve been in for a long time,” Greer said. “It really humanizes the experience to have my family involved.”
Why tariffs?
Greer testified before the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday. In a hearing one year earlier, he had touted dozens of trade talks initiated by Trump’s “Liberation Day” declaration that America would tax global imports in a way that hadn’t been tried for nearly a century. Now, the message was more complicated.
In February, the Supreme Court tossed out the centerpiece of Trump’s worldwide tariff, which relied on a novel use of authorities granted under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Greer had been prepared for the ruling, deploying multiple backup plans before the day was over.
“It certainly undermined what we were trying to do,” Greer told the Deseret News. “Before the Supreme Court case came down, we actually were in a very good place. We had made a bunch of deals, tariff rates were set up, like people kind of knew where we were going, the foreign countries knew.”
The legal setback did not dampen the president’s determination to implement tariffs. Greer has begun launching investigations into trade practices — leveraging rarely, or never-before-used statutes that, while slower, will produce tariffs with firmer legal footing.
Greer does not regret their initial approach. The president picked IEEPA out of several options offered by Greer, and there are still many more on the table. On Wednesday, Greer told Senate committee members the “specific authorities” the administration appeals to may change, but the “trade strategy” will remain constant.
Senators grilled Greer about high overhead costs from tariffs hurting farms, families and factories. A Federal Reserve report found 90% of tariff impacts fell on U.S. companies and consumers, not importing-countries. A We Pay Tariffs survey found 85% of small business cut profits and raised prices to absorb tariff costs.
Traeger Grills, headquartered in Salt Lake, was hit hard by overlapping tariffs ranging from 25-50% for products manufactured in China, and steel sourced outside the U.S. Traeger ate as much of the costs as they could before profits ran out and they were forced to let go hundreds of employees, CEO Jeremy Andrus said.
“It’s been a genuinely volatile 18 months for anyone running a business through it,” Andrus told the Deseret News. “We were right in the middle of the bullseye of everything bad in global trade when it hit.”
The tariffs forced the company to innovate new ways to streamline and diversify away from China. After interviewing Greer during a World Trade Center Utah event last week, Andrus said he is open to seeing where Greer’s longterm vision lands. He is willing to navigate some pain “for the greater good of the country,” he said.
Greer will tell anyone who will listen that his plan is already “bearing fruit.” But the statistics are split.
Exports have reached record levels, new foreign direct investment has spiked and manufacturing wages continue to creep up. But the Department of Labor found that manufacturing jobs have declined by a net total of 75,000 since Trump entered office, though they are now trending upward by roughly 3,000 per month.
The president is keenly aware of the impacts tariffs have on regular Americans, Greer said. Trump once asked Greer to relay exactly what his wife told him about the cost of beef at the grocery store. One of the biggest misconceptions about Trump, according to Greer, is that he makes tariff decisions “off the cuff.”
Not only does the president consult stakeholders from all over the economy before taking actions, he plays an intimate role in enforcing them, Greer said.
On one occasion, Greer received a call at 2 a.m. the night before he was scheduled to meet with the Malaysian prime minister to discuss a trade agreement. Trump put Greer, still in his pajamas, on speaker phone in the Oval Office. Trump insisted that Greer put him on the phone with the prime minister the next day at 1 a.m. his time.
“He said, ‘Just call me. I’ll watch my phone,’” Greer told the Deseret News.
The next day, Greer called. Trump answered, and after 10 minutes with the prime minister, the deal was closed.
Regardless of work ethic, the Trump administration is working against economic reality, economist Michael Kofoed believes. Greer, of all people, must be familiar with the historic miscalculation proposed by Utah Sen. Reed Smoot, an apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ, to use tariffs to protect the state’s sugar industry, Kofoed said.
Instead of helping workers, it increased costs, raised prices, prompted layoffs and dug the country deeper into depression.
“We have seen the data and it is not a free lunch,” said Kofoed, who grew up in Syracuse, Utah. “What bothers me about populists, on the left or the right, is that they want to tell us that they’re going to put root beer in the water fountains, but they are very careful to never tell us about the cost of those decisions.”
This misses something key about what drives Greer, according to Stephen Vaughn, who worked with Greer at the White House and two law firms. Greer is aware of the pain associated with redirecting the flow of international trade, Vaughn said. He just believes the pain of doing nothing is far greater for the average American.
For Greer, this is an existential fight to reaffirm faith that America’s capitalist system can produce social mobility for all Americans, not just efficiency for those who can afford to outsource to China, Vaughn told the Deseret News.
Last Thursday, Greer found himself inside a Liberty Safe fabrication plant, powered by U.S. steel, cloth and sheetrock. It acts as a central artery for Payson, Utah, employing 175 residents. In gray skinny jeans, he asked animated questions to welders and machinists amid the deafening sound of an assembly line.
When one told him that imports of safes from southeast Asia had actually grown in recent months, Greer’s face fell. This was surely the result of “structural excess capacity” devised by foreign actors to undercut American workers, he said. The solution, Greer insisted, to keep Liberty Safe strong, is more tariffs.
