Eight years after Trump’s 2016 Victory, any Company Blindsided by Tariffs on Chinese Imports is Willfully Negligent

I’ve spent most of my career working with private and small businesses. I still do. There is not one successful or well-run business with whom I’m familiar that is suddenly caught off guard by the latest round of tariffs on Chinese imports. But such companies exist, apparently, and the anti-Trump media loves to tell the sad stories of these companies being blindsided by the tariffs imposed on their Chinese imports.

Donald Trump campaigned in 2016 on de-coupling from China, to be aided by the use of tariffs. It was seven years ago, in March of 2018, that Donald Trump first imposed a round of tariffs on Chinese imports. He made it clear that the initial 25% tariff was just a start in his endeavor for the U.S. to fully eliminate its reliance on China as a trade partner on whom we had a dangerous reliance.

After 2018, it would take an almost willful blindness for a company not to have taken actions to mitigate the risk of relying on China as a sole supplier.

The Wall Street Journal ran this sob story a few days ago: “How Tariffs Are Crushing Small Businesses: Owners are laying off staff and tapping personal savings, hoping to hold out until a trade deal with China; an $8,752 fee on a $5,649 order” [WSJ – 5/11/2025]

Around the country, small businesses that import goods made in China are taking actions—big and small—to try to outlast the current 145% tariff regime on items from that country. But many are worried that their companies won’t survive.

“Nobody in power seems to care about small business,” said Scott Anderson, owner of 5 Star North, which works with Chinese manufacturers to make its products ranging from acrylic markers to tiki torches. “At this point the only option I see is selling out the rest of what we have and shutting our doors.”

Sourcing exclusively from China is a concentration risk unto itself, without even factoring in its authoritarian government, slave labor, and beating war drums. Add to that the supply chain bottlenecks, canal backups, port problems, etc that have affected overseas shipping, and there are numerous ways that concentrated reliance on China should have caused indigestion. But on top of all that, it has been seven years since tariffs were first levied on China. An explicit purpose of that tariff was to incentivize companies such as this one to stop sourcing its tiki torches from China. Whether Trump was in the right or wrong doesn’t change the reality of the tariff regimen. The writing has been on the wall that this company needed to de-couple itself from China.

Charles Gasparino of the New York Post recently tweeted: “Breaking: In talking to sources who run small businesses the pause w/ China came just as their companies were on the precipice of disaster since they source so much of their material from China and the containers coming from China were coming back empty. If you want to know why we were as desperate for a deal as the Chinese, it’s because small businesses — a key MAGA constituency— was about to get crushed.”

Again, I know the owners of many small businesses who have spent the past eight years disengaging from China. They are not about to get crushed. Many are booming due to re-shoring.

Hampton Prescott had an excellent response to Mr. Gasparino: “I feel for people in this predicament, but if after Trade War 1.0, Covid, and general evolution of the CCP into a serious threat you didn’t diversify your supply chains away from China, then this is on you for failing to hedge against a substantial business risk.”

Very well put.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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