The Status Kou

04/30/2025

Gaslighting

Throughout the campaign, and to this very day, Trump maintains the fiction that his tariffs will be paid by the countries exporting goods to the U.S., and not by the U.S.-based importers who will then pass along the cost of the tariffs to consumers here.

This has gone hand-in-hand with other fictions, including his insistence as late as yesterday that tourism in the U.S. is actually up when in fact it has fallen off sharply. “Tourism is way up. Tourism is doing very well,” Trump insisted to ABC News in an exclusive interview on Tuesday.

At some point, such fictions will run headlong into reality. Prices will shoot up. Layoffs will be widespread. The economy, which just today registered negative growth for the first quarter as tariffs sapped it of strength, will enter a recession if it hasn’t already.

But for now it appears the White House is trying to forestall that reckoning, perhaps long enough to ram through its economic agenda extending tax breaks to the wealthy while slashing Medicaid and food programs for the poor. And it can’t have companies like Amazon go and inform customers of the truth.

This isn’t going to change the fact of impending sticker shock. While customers may not know the exact number that the tariffs have added to their bills when shopping at Amazon, other companies such as Temu and Shein, which are based in China, are beginning to add these charges expressly to the checkout page.

Whether or not Amazon is transparent won’t matter in the end. Tariffs will be blamed, and by extension Donald Trump.

Chaos

The tariffs, particularly those on Chinese goods, went up so suddenly and drastically that importers and manufacturers have had little time to adjust. Many goods were already en route to U.S. ports when the trade war began, sticking businesses with the unexpected costs of covering the high duties.

Trump’s rat-a-tat tariff pronouncements—with tariffs on, then off, then up, then exempted, then back on—have made business planning nearly impossible. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent defended this chaos as “strategic uncertainty” for ongoing trade negotiations. This could take the title for Best Trump Speak long held by Kellyanne Conway for “alternative facts.”

Now big companies can’t even be certain they can explain to their customers that they are not price gouging them but rather simply passing along a tariff that Trump imposed. Should they try, they might also get called out for “hostile and political acts,” or worse, labeled enemies of the state and propaganda arms of the Chinese.

That leaves corporate America both without the ability to accurately plan and without the freedom to communicate with customers transparently. It’s small wonder many are simply pulling back and laying low.