This massive Trump stumble could be what finishes him — and it's not Epstein

Economists by and large have agreed that tariffs are harmful, ultimately producing no positive results for either the tariff-enacting country or the recipients. Arguably the hardest-hit victims of Donald Trump’s 2025 tariff war are the American people.

Trump’s tariffs have resulted in the most brutally regressive tax possible on Americans. U.S. businesses pay the import tax on foreign goods they purchase and have passed 55 percent of that cost onto consumers in 2025, according to Goldman Sachs.

According to the Tax Foundation, the tariff tax has amounted to an average tax on U.S. households of $1,300 in 2025 and a projected increase to $1,600 in 2026. The working poor are taxed at the same rate as millionaires, as the cost of goods are the same for every American.

The difference, of course, is that to lower-income Americans, a $1,300 tax increase in the form of higher prices can create a monthly budget dilemma while to the upper-middle class and the wealthy, it is flicked off like a piece of lint.

The result of Trump’s tariffs is that a McDonald’s worker making $15,000 a year is taxed at the same rate as a large-company CEO making $23 million a year.

Trump brags about the billions of dollars that his tariffs are bringing into the federal coffers. What he fails to say is that these billions of dollars are coming out of the pockets of the American people and American businesses, not the foreign countries the tariffs are levied on. They are the equivalent of Trump imposing a huge tax increase on the American people without congressional authorization. Taxation without representation.

Small business owners have filed lawsuits to be reimbursed for their losses due to Trump’s tariffs, claiming the imposition of tariffs is beyond executive authority and unconstitutional. The Trump administration is bleating that if the Supreme Court rules for the plaintiffs, the federal government will lose billions of dollars in import tax dollars, failing to mention that the money was fleeced from American businesses and the American people.

Similarly damaged by Trump’s tariffs, the American people could use the same legal arguments of small businesses to file a huge class-action lawsuit to demand their money be returned beyond the price of goods prior to Trump’s tariff enactments. The lawsuit would undoubtedly fail with a Trump-packed Supreme Court, but the political impact could be momentous.

That Trump’s tariffs are hurting the American people comes as no surprise. Tariffs in Trump’s first term cost American consumers $7.2 billion by the end of 2018 due to the increased cost of goods, according a university economist's report. The American people bore the brunt of the tariff import taxes, as they did in 2025.

In addition, Trump’s first-term claims of the economic wonders of tariffs proved illusory. The tariffs supposedly were going to return thousands of manufacturing jobs to the U.S. Tariffs imposed on Chinese goods had a net negative effect on manufacturing jobs as well overall U.S. employment according to the Federal Reserve Board.

Trump claimed his tariffs were going to reduce significantly the U.S. trade deficit. The deficit rose from $481 billion in 2016 to $679 billion in 2020.

The increase reflected the decades-long reality that the deficit is due primarily to the U.S.’s consumption demands being much greater than its production capabilities. The deficit is not the result of Trump’s claim that countries worldwide are ripping off the U.S., Trump’s raison d’etre for imposing tariffs.

Trump also claimed that U.S. industries would profit greatly as tariffs made imported goods more expensive. The reality is that the tariffs hurt many U.S. industries with agriculture among the hardest hit, losing $26 billion in exports in 2018-19.

The Federal Reserve Board concluded that the tariffs had a net negative impact on most US industries. Retaliatory tariffs, shrinking foreign markets from countries shopping elsewhere, disrupted global supply chains leading to increased costs for US companies, and the fact that many industries relied on foreign components for their products all impacted US industry production and sales.

Of course, we cannot expect the exact same results with the Trump 2.0 tariffs as the country experienced during his first term. We can expect worse.

As Trump is slapping much larger and less target-specific tariffs on more countries in 2025, we are seeing a larger increase in consumer prices across a broader range of products. Americans will continue to pay more for coffee, meats and seafood, general groceries, restaurant meals, foreign-made cars, airfares, furniture, appliances manufactured outside the US, clothing and shoes, electronics including iPhones and TV’s, and basic necessities such as toothpaste and toilet paper.

Of course, the 37 million Americans below the poverty line are most cruelly burdened by Trump’s tariffs, spending 82% of their budgets on basic needs. This population, the majority of whom are women, children, and the disabled, holds little interest for Trump or historically for Republican politicians in general.

It is no coincidence that practically all federal programs to help the poor were established during Democratic administrations: Medicaid, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and Health and Human Services Programs (HHS). Trump's federal budget proposal included eliminating or reducing funding for several social service programs that help lower-income Americans.

Trump’s tariffs are contributing to the generational poverty that has plagued the poorest Americans for over half a century, making it more difficult for people to meet their basic needs. It puts a tax burden on those who can least afford it without Trump or his allies shedding a tear.

But why does Trump continue imposing tariffs when anyone who buys groceries knows that they are causing Americans severe economic pain? To Trump, the American people are just collateral damage in his demented, victim-syndromic crusade to pay back the world for treating the U.S. unfairly. Trump is going the full monty in pursuing his greatest pleasure: revenge.

• Tom Tyner is a freelance editorialist, satirist, political analyst, blogger, author and retired English instructor