WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is telling some of the nation’s largest companies that they should eat the cost of his tariffs, as a growing number of businesses signal that they must raise prices to blunt the impact of a persistent global trade war.

As a result, the man who ran for the presidency by boasting about his business acumen is now openly sparring with corporate America, seeking to dictate how Walmart, Mattel and other retailers and manufacturers respond to some of the highest levies seen in decades.

Since the spring, the United States has imposed a 10% tariff on nearly every nation, with steeper duties reserved for specific products and countries, including a minimum 30% tax on Chinese imports.

While the White House insists the president’s strategy is working — generating new revenue and forcing nations to negotiate — some companies have started to report early signs of financial strain. Their warnings have affirmed economists’ long and widely held belief that tariffs fall hardest on U.S. companies and consumers, not the allies and adversaries that Trump seeks to punish.

But the White House repeatedly has dismissed this evidence, while the president himself has increasingly needled companies for trying to ameliorate the financial fallout.

“He maintains the position that foreign countries absorb these tariffs,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told reporters at a briefing Monday.

The latest example arrived over the weekend when Trump trained his ire on Walmart, just days after the low-cost retailer told investors that it might have to increase prices soon. Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said on the company’s latest earnings call last week that it probably would not be able to “absorb all the pressure” from the president’s tariffs for much longer.

In response, the president demanded in a post on social media on Saturday that Walmart “EAT THE TARIFFS,” rather than pass any new costs on to customers. He argued that Walmart had generated billions of dollars in profit last year, so it could afford to shoulder any added expenses.

“I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!” Trump said.

Asked Sunday about the president’s strategy, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Walmart would, in fact, “eat some of the tariffs,” noting that he had spoken with McMillon over the weekend.

Bessent pointed to the fact that the retailer did not raise prices during Trump’s first term when he began imposing tariffs on China. And the treasury secretary brushed aside some of Walmart’s warnings as a standard disclosure to investors, a position that Leavitt echoed on Monday.

“The CEO of Walmart made those comments about tariffs on an earnings call, where CEOs, I believe, are legally obligated to give the most dire warnings and forecasts to their investors and stakeholders,” she said.

The law requires that companies be forthcoming with shareholders about the financial risks they face. Nevertheless, it was unlikely that Walmart had adjusted its strategy.

McMillon’s call with Bessent had been scheduled before the president’s threat, and the CEO made no new commitments about pricing, said a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal details of the conversation.

“We have always worked to keep our prices as low as possible, and we won’t stop,” Molly Blakeman, a spokesperson for Walmart, said in a statement. “We’ll keep prices as low as we can for as long as we can given the reality of small retail margins.”

Company warnings again underscored the economic risks in Trump’s aggressive approach to trade, as he seeks to use sky-high tariffs to recalibrate U.S. relationships, raise billions of dollars in revenue and boost domestic manufacturing. So far, the administration has completed an early framework for an agreement with Britain, and it has worked with China to mutually lower the punishing tit-for-tat tariffs that essentially halted trade between the world’s largest economies.

But the White House remains far from realizing its vision for dozens of individual trade deals, and Trump has threatened repeatedly to restore the much larger “reciprocal” tariffs that he announced in early April. Those levies were suspended for 90 days to give other nations time to reach trade deals with the United States.

The longer it takes to reach those deals, the greater the odds that Trump’s trade war could weigh down the U.S. economy. On Monday, financial markets tumbled anew amid concerns about the president’s agenda and its effects on the country’s fiscal future.