Marty Davis has held many roles over his career, from Minnesota farmboy to kitchen-countertop mogul. But recently, his ties to President Trump have turned this wealthy CEO into a business lightning rod.

Davis owns and runs Cambria, a private Minnesota company that manufactures the quartz used for kitchen and bathroom countertops. It's a $500 million company that employs roughly 1,800 people — and that's just one piece of his billionaire family's dynasty, which once included both a local dairy empire and the budget carrier Sun Country Airlines.

A plain-spoken Midwesterner, Davis publicly embraces the role of a small-business owner who grew up working in the family dairy factory and married his high school sweetheart. In a recent interview with NPR, he repeatedly invoked Main Street, American manufacturing jobs, and what he calls "free and fair trade."

"Free and fair trade has to prevail, or the American manufacturer will be gone, and these jobs will leave," Davis says. "And they are jobs that really promote a healthy middle class."

But now Davis has picked a bitter fight with Cambria's competitors, who tell a radically different story: They claim that this wealthy CEO and Trump donor is destroying jobs, especially at small businesses, and unfairly raising prices for middle-class homeowners.

That's because Davis has repeatedly — and successfully — asked the U.S. government to impose more tariffs on quartz. These taxes are essentially increasing costs for many of Cambria's competitors and other businesses, who rely more on imported materials — and who say they have no choice but to pass these higher prices along to homeowners and consumers.

Some say they're now bracing for deeper cuts at their businesses.

"I don't believe that our customers will absorb the full cost … so I could potentially see loss of jobs overall," says Kyle Keck, general manager for Marble Uniques, an Indiana small business that cuts imported quartz slabs and other stone countertops to order, and that employs about 30 people.

Keck's family-owned business has joined a larger industry coalition fighting Cambria's latest request for quartz tariffs. The coalition represents large importers that compete with Cambria, as well as small businesses like Keck's and home builders that buy quartz.

A war of words over jobs, affordability — and Trump

Now this industry drama over the costs of making kitchen countertops has spilled into public view. Both Cambria and its competitors have hired high-powered law firms and communications agencies to plead their case to the U.S. government — and in the court of public opinion.

Both sides in this bitter trade dispute are claiming that they're the ones really looking out for everyday Americans — more than their business profits. Each side has enlisted other U.S. businesses to issue warnings about the jobs at stake and the mounting affordability crisis for U.S. home buyers. And each side claims that it's trying to protect more than 100,000 U.S. jobs across the quartz industry.

But Cambria's rivals say that Davis has an extra, unfair advantage: his close ties to President Trump. Davis has thrown headline-grabbing fundraisers for the president, including one $100,000-per-person event in 2020 shortly before Trump was diagnosed with COVID-19. More recently, Davis tells NPR he's "invested in" Trump's social-media company, Trump Media and Technology Group.

Now Trump will get the final say over whether or not to impose more tariffs on quartz, as Cambria has requested. The prospect has Davis' business rivals accusing him of unfairly weaponizing the president's favorite trade tool — and throwing Davis' political weight around — to create an uneven playing field for everyone else in the quartz industry.

"Very few of us have the time or the resources to advocate on a political level," Keck says. "It certainly feels like these larger corporations are kind of cornering that market."

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Cambria helped popularize quartz countertops

The Davis family founded Cambria in 1999, and then spent decades helping to make quartz into one of the most popular materials in kitchen design. Quartz slabs are a factory-made alternative to granite and marble; Cambria mines the raw quartz in powder and pebble form in Canada and then ships the stuff to its Minnesota factory, where it's mixed and shaped into gleaming slabs. They can be customized far more easily than natural stone countertops — allowing customers to pick dazzling colors and finishes — and they're also more resistant to stains and scratches.

Today, quartz is in high demand — and Cambria is the top U.S. manufacturer. It sells its quartz countertops to luxury hotels and millionaires renovating their mansions, and to well-heeled customers splurging at Home Depot.

But homeowners with tighter budgets also like quartz. Those customers shop for cheaper countertops often made out of imported quartz slabs that are mined and manufactured abroad. Once in the U.S., these imported slabs are cut and sold by big companies and mom-and-pop fabricator shops, like Keck's Marble Uniques.

Davis blames his importer rivals for unfairly driving down the price of the product he helped popularize in the United States. In their petition to the government, Cambria and a few other domestic manufacturers argued that the governments of China, India, and other foreign countries that supply quartz are ignoring U.S. trade laws and flooding the U.S. market with artificially cheap products, intentionally priced to force domestic manufacturers out of business.

"It's so unfair when you have to compete against a foreign government, not another company," Davis says.

Davis accuses his importer rivals of benefiting from the trade tactics of these foreign governments. He particularly singles out MS International, a large California-based distributor that sells quartz and other home-design materials.

MSI claims about $2.5 billion in annual sales, or five times Cambria's. It's one of Cambria's biggest business competitors — and it helped organize the opposition to Cambria's latest tariffs request.

In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for MSI says Cambria's latest tariffs request "pits a small handful of [big] corporations that brought this ill-advised trade petition against thousands of of fabricators, distributors, retailers, installers, homebuilders, and American workers."

But Davis says he had no choice but to start asking the government for help.

"We're a family business, and we've gone through peaks and valleys before," Davis says. "But it's damaging when you have to compete with economics that are false and a totally unfair, unlevel playing field."

'A dirty little secret of U.S. trade policy for decades'

In 2018, during Trump's first term, Cambria successfully petitioned an independent federal agency called the U.S. International Trade Commission to impose tariffs and other trade penalties on companies that import quartz from China. Over the next few years, Cambria also got the same agency to tax quartz imports from India and Turkey.

Such requests are pretty common for U.S. manufacturers — and have been long before Trump entered politics. American steel and aluminum companies in particular have used this process to seek economic protection from cheaper foreign imports, according to Scott Lincicome, a trade expert at the libertarian Cato Institute.

"This has been a dirty little secret of U.S. trade policy for decades," Lincicome says. "It is a machine designed to churn out import protection."

Now Cambria has gone back to the same well — and this time it's gotten the trade commission to slap tariffs on quartz from almost all countries, not just a few specific nations. In September, Cambria and other domestic manufacturers submitted a petition asking for what's known as a "global safeguard" action.

Last month, the trade commission ruled in favor of Cambria's petition. Then it recommended tariffs of up to 40 percent on imported quartz slabs for a four-year period, as well as quotas on how much can be imported.

Now Trump gets the final say. The trade commission will send its recommendations to the president by Monday — and he gets to decide whether to accept or reject these new tariffs. 

Not that Lincicome, at least, has much doubt about what Trump will do. "You can be pretty confident that the president is going to apply whatever protection is recommended," he says.

Davis' ties to Trump have handed his opponents a PR weapon

Cambria's opponents see this business dispute as bigger than quartz. They claim it's another example of "crony capitalism" in a Trump administration that has picked winners and losers based on which of America's wealthy CEOs have built close ties to the White House.

Cambria is "being opportunistic, and thinking that they can take advantage of the current politics around tariffs to get a competitive advantage in the marketplace," says Ken Gear, CEO of Leading Homebuilders of America, a trade group that lobbies on behalf of home builders and that is part of the coalition opposing Cambria's latest request for tariffs.

In his interview with NPR, Davis shrugs off these accusations — and he points out that Cambria has gotten bipartisan support for its tariff requests.

Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who's now running for governor of Minnesota, testified on Cambria's behalf at a February trade commission hearing. (Her spokesperson declined to comment.) And Cambria has successfully sought trade protections from President Biden's Commerce Department as well as both Trump administrations.

"This is nonsense, that we're gaming the system or trying to use Trump's influence," Davis says. "Trump's got bigger fish to fry than quartz in America."

But Davis' close ties to Trump have, at the very least, handed his competitors a PR weapon in this industry dispute. They've been drawing attention to Cambria's political connections at a time when Democratic lawmakers as well as business and economic experts across the political spectrum are accusing Trump of playing favorites to an unprecedented degree.

"It's pretty obvious that your connections to Trump and … the people surrounding him have become pretty central to whether or not you receive favorable government treatment," says Reilly Steel, a law professor at Columbia.

Davis is less of a household name than the tech-bro oligarchs, like Tesla's Elon Musk or Oracle's Larry Ellison, who have publicly embraced (and been embraced by) Trump. But he's also a power broker — especially in Minnesota, where his family has owned businesses since the 1940s — and he's made national headlines for his fervent support for Trump.

Davis has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to efforts to re-elect Trump and other Republicans since 2020, according to Federal Election Commission data. And in 2021, the Cambria CEO gave Trump's social-media company a $5 million loan, the New York Times first reported two years ago. (During his interview with NPR, Davis volunteered that he had "invested in" Trump's "tech startup.")

All of this support at least appears to have earned Cambria some public endorsements from the Trump administration, including multiple visits from members of Trump's Cabinet. In January, Fox News interviewed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent at Cambria's Minnesota factory — and filmed Bessent touring it with Davis. (A Treasury spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.)

The White House has consistently dismissed accusations of "crony capitalism" and says that U.S. companies are benefitting from Trump's policies whether or not they have a good relationship with the administration.

"The only special interest guiding the President and the Administration's decision-making is the best interest of the American people," White House spokesman Kush Desai told NPR in an emailed statement.

Quartz is one fleck in the broader tariffs debate

There are already many high costs to quartz's popularity — especially for the workers who cut the manufactured slabs, so that they'll fit into customers' kitchens and bathrooms. In California alone, at least 31 workers have died from a serious lung disease caused by cutting the artificial stone. Cambria and other manufacturers are asking Congress for immunity from the resulting lawsuits.

This worsening health crisis for quartz-industry workers has made many more headlines than the business dispute over tariffs. But the industry's trade squabbles serve as a microcosm of the broader debate about all the tariffs Trump has imposed in the past year.

Some U.S. manufacturers and small businesses say the president's policies are restoring their ability to compete. But many businesses — and consumers — have seen their costs skyrocket, as the price of almost everything goes up.

Amid this broader affordability crisis, fancy kitchen countertops might appear to be more of a home-design flourish than a necessity for most Americans. But Cato's Lincicome and other economists say that increased prices for each component that goes into a house weighs on the overall costs for builders — and then for the people ultimately looking to buy them.

Quartz is "not as important as something like lumber, where there's not really a substitute," Lincicome says. "But you still would expect it to have some effect on prices."