Shein Bet Big on Donald Trump. It Lost Big, Too
The ultra-fast-fashion company Shein spent years carefully curating its corporate identity. Its apparent goal was to create a brand born from social media, distinct from any single place but whose products were everywhere. Shein has been more successful in some aspects of this pursuit than in others. The company grew into a global online shopping juggernaut, thanks in large part to its extremely low prices. But its efforts to remain anonymous and inoffensive have been undone by allegations of labor abuses, environmental criticisms and, despite moving its headquarters to Singapore, persistent concerns about its Chinese ownership.
Its latest shape shift took place largely behind the scenes in Washington, DC, where the company took a sharp turn over the past few years into the world of MAGA. Many companies have shamelessly courted President Donald Trump, hoping to curry favor with a uniquely transactional American leader, but few appear to have gone as far as Shein. The company counts Kash Patel, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as a shareholder in its parent company, WIRED reported in February. Deputy US attorney general Todd Blanche, the second highest-ranking official at the Department of Justice, disclosed that Shein was previously one of his legal clients.
Jamieson Greer, the US Trade Representative (USTR) who serves as the president’s top adviser on matters related to international trade, also advised the company before joining the Trump administration, according to a former Shein employee as well as internal documents reviewed by WIRED. And a host of lobbyists drawn from the orbit of Trumpworld continue to push the company’s talking points across DC. Shein, which did not register hiring a single lobbyist until 2022, spent $3.9 million on federal lobbying last year, according to public records. In the first quarter of 2025, it has doled out $940,000.
“As is standard practice for global businesses, Shein routinely seeks counsel from a range of advisers on priority policy areas for the business,” a company spokesperson told WIRED. “We welcome the opportunity to work with policymakers and industry peers wherever we operate to make sure our unique, on-demand business model, and strict supply chain policies are well understood.” The USTR office did not respond to requests for comment.
But despite the company’s overtures, Trump has dealt Shein a series of devastating blows since returning to office. His administration imposed punishing tariffs on Chinese imports that threaten to erode the company’s price advantage and simultaneously moved to close a crucial trade loophole called the de minimis provision that allowed the ecommerce giant to flood the US with low-cost packages shipped into the country duty-free.
These unwelcome developments come as Shein has struggled in its bid to go public. It is now reportedly seeking a place on London’s rapidly shrinking stock exchange after being shut out of the US market. The company is under pressure from investors to slash its valuation to around $30 billion, a steep decline from a valuation of $100 billion in 2022, according to Bloomberg.
Ahead of the November US presidential election, Donald Tang, an East-West dealmaker who previously failed to strike it big in Hollywood and now serves as Shein’s executive chairman, was making the rounds in Washington, dropping in to chat with China hawks skeptical of the company. “He was totally, chapter and verse, singing the MAGA hymn of ‘I love Trump. I love America,’” says Michael Sobolik, a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute think tank who has been critical of Shein and other Chinese companies’ lobbying efforts and met with Tang in June.
By then, Shein—once naive about how things work in Washington—had learned to play the uniquely American game of naked influence peddling. An eight-page Shein internal document from June 2023 reviewed by WIRED titled “U.S. Public Affairs Campaign Working Group List,” outlined what the company’s vast team of public and government relations professionals and some lobbyists was tasked with working on, including focus areas like US-China relations and media outreach.
Greer was then working as a partner at the law firm King & Spalding, and his focus area was described as “legal advice around international trade policy.” Two other King & Spalding partners are also listed on the document as providing guidance to Shein on related issues, such as crafting potential congressional testimony and handling investigations launched by lawmakers. King & Spalding continues to work with Shein, according to a person familiar with the situation. The law firm did not respond to requests for comment.
During Trump’s first administration, Greer served as chief of staff to the trade representative, and then went on to join King & Spalding in 2020, according to an announcement from the firm. It is unclear when his work for Shein began or how it was structured. A mandated financial disclosure that Greer filed in December 2024 before he was confirmed does not mention Shein or any of its related companies.
It does note, however, that Greer provided services to 51 additional clients that remained confidential because “disclosure of the client identity and the fact of representation would reveal a client confidence or secret.” In a separate ethics agreement about potential conflicts of interest, Greer promised to “not participate personally and substantially in any particular matter” involving parties represented by King & Spalding for one year after his resignation without prior authorization.
A former Shein employee, who asked not to be identified because of fear of retaliation, says that Greer previously advised Leonard Lin, Shein’s president for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa and global head of public affairs. One project Greer worked on, the former employee says, was assisting Lin with drafting a response to questions about Shein’s business practices raised by a bipartisan group of senators.
The senators wrote in February 2023 to Xu Yangtian, Shein’s founder, seeking more information on the company’s alleged possible ties to supply chains in China’s Xinjiang region, where the Chinese government has been accused of widespread human rights abuses against a local Muslim minority population. The letter followed a report by Bloomberg the previous year that found cotton in some Shein products it commissioned for testing matched materials that had been produced with cotton from Xinjiang.
The response from Shein did not directly dispute the reporting. It outlined the company’s regulatory compliance policies and third-party auditing procedures, at times relying on nearly indecipherable jargon. It stated, for example, that Shein developed a “proprietary material traceability information management system,” to monitor its supply chains. (The letter was signed by Lin, not Xu, who maintains an exceedingly low profile. The Wall Street Journal has referred to him as “the world's most anonymous CEO.”)
Greer’s work for a Chinese company appears at odds with the dark vision he has articulated of Beijing’s intentions to remake the global order and how it uses international trade to accomplish those ends. A month after Shein sent the letter to lawmakers, Greer testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the US-China trade relationship, telling lawmakers that China presented an “existential” threat to the US. Beijing seeks to “dominate global manufacturing and technology to secure CCP leverage and control over the global economy and foreign governments,” he said, referring to the Chinese Communist Party. Last year, he called for a raft of changes to the US trade relationship with China, including ending the de minimis provision.
De minimis, which allows for packages valued under $800 to enter the US duty-free and with limited oversight, exploded in popularity during the Covid pandemic. Customs and Border Protection processed approximately 4 million de minimis shipments a day in 2024, up from 2.8 million the previous year, the vast majority of which originated in China. Overall, the agency says de minimis shipments account for 92 percent of all cargo entering the country. Shein said in the 2023 letter to lawmakers that most of its packages enter the US under the provision.
Adam Savit, director of the China Policy Initiative at the America First Policy Institute think tank, likens Shein’s liberal use of de minimis to broader issues he sees with Beijing's approach to trade. “The problem is China’s abuse of a global trade system that was built on the assumption that all players would abide by certain rules,” Savit says. For example, China does not extend the same de minimis benefits to the US. Trump “abhors lack of reciprocity, and the loophole is one of the most extreme examples,” Savit says.
Shein has already begun raising its prices in response to Trump’s trade policies. It is likely that shipping times will increase too, not just for Shein customers but for anyone purchasing low-cost goods from China. “Because the administration wants to discourage imports from China, you are going to pay duty, and it might take longer to get cleared,” says John Leonard, former deputy executive assistant commissioner at Customs and Border Protection. “It is the execution of a trade barrier.”
In January 2024, Shein brought on longtime retail lobbyist Kent Knutson, previously the head of Home Depot's Washington operation, a hire that marked the start of the company’s more dramatic rightward turn. Three months later, financial disclosures show, Patel, now the FBI director, began working as a consultant for an entity in the Cayman Islands called Elite Depot—the parent organization of Shein. Patel’s deal with the ecommerce giant was structured in an unusual way: He was compensated for nine months of work with stock valued at between $1 million and $5 million.
Patel retained his stake in Elite Depot despite being confirmed as FBI director, giving him a direct financial interest in a Chinese company. If Shein goes public, Patel’s shares would be his to trade on the open market. (Patel was named a senior fellow at the America First Policy Institute during the period he was consulting for Shein. Savit, who authored a highly critical report on the ecommerce company, declined to comment on Patel’s work for Shein and other lobbying done by current Trump administration officials.) A Shein spokesperson also declined to comment on Patel’s stake in its parent organization.
A group of Democratic lawmakers wrote to Patel in February asking for more details about his role at Shein. They have not gotten a response, says a spokeswoman for Senator Adam Schiff, who organized the letter. The number of people willing to work for Shein shows “the low price that DC swamp creatures will sell their souls for,” Sobolik says. He cautions that, despite the company’s setbacks, Shein will be angling for a reprieve when trade talks begin again and is hoping its Trump-friendly connections eventually pay off. “They are going to have to hope and pray that whenever America and China start talking about some sort of an off ramp, that they are one of those bargain chips,” he says.
Less than a year before Patel began working as a consultant for Shein, his Trump administration colleague, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, was warning his then senate colleagues about the company, arguing it “steals intellectual property, infringes copyrights, exploits US trade law, and uses fabric linked to Uyghur slave labor.” Rubio was particularly critical about Shein’s efforts to influence lawmaking. “Shein is hiring DC lobbyists to protect the trade loopholes that allow it to avoid accountability,” he wrote in a letter to his Senate colleagues. “No one should be fooled by Shein’s efforts to cover its tracks.”
Correction 5/7/2025, 11:08 AM ET: This story has been updated to correct the amount of money Shein spent on lobbying in the first quarter of 2025. It spent $940,000, not $1.49 million.
