The Free Press
I had no idea how much space my stuff would take up in a moving van, and apparently the moving company didn’t either. On Saturday, the mover, a nearly seven-foot-tall West Indian guy, told me that I could pay for the extra space, but then gave me a number that sent a chill down my spine.
“Florida to New York is a long trip,” he explained. “And very expensive.”
Another $1,200 later, and the mover shook his head and motioned toward my two Ikea bookshelves and the coffee table I bought when Tuesday Morning was going out of business. “If I were you, I’d just throw these away and get new ones. They’re cheap.”
They were, but they probably won’t be for long.
On Wednesday, President Trump stood in the Rose Garden and announced new tariffs on the rest of the planet, a baseline of 10 percent, then higher tariffs on dozens of other countries, including significant trading partners like China, Vietnam, and the EU—as well as uninhabited, penguin-occupied islands.
The rising cost of replacing my cheap shit was the last straw, the one that shot my nerves. We loaded up what we could in the car and just started driving. The van would meet us three days later in New York.
I insisted we stop for the night in a run-down Motel 6 in Georgia. There was a hooker smoking cigarettes in the parking lot and what looked like bloodstains on the walls. We were here because five years ago, I tweeted a hot take and someone offered me money to write about it, and I needed the $300 they offered me to make my car payment, which I couldn’t do on $14 an hour, which is what I was making at the time. Things escalated from there. I kept writing, and writing, and then about two years ago I got my first full-time gig. It was the first time in my life I’d felt middle-class. Now I was on my way to New York and a big raise that seemed smaller with every mile I drove. I don’t care about money; I’m just terrified of not having it again.
I know that buying new furniture won’t break me financially—but it feels true, because for most of my life it has been. I grew up poor, and I consider myself lucky for getting out of the working class when I could. It’s about to be a bloodbath.
Soon after Trump announced the tariffs, the stock market tumbled and importers panicked. The White House line was: Don’t worry about it. These measures, it reassured the country, were designed with ordinary Americans in mind.
This, according to many of the president’s supporters—including many commentators I personally admire, and usually agree with, like my Free Press colleague Batya Ungar-Sargon—is a win for the working class. It isn’t.
“The reaction to the tariffs yesterday is the clearest evidence to date that the left has completely jettisoned the working class from their coalition,” wrote Nic Carter, a venture capitalist and crypto advocate, in defending the tariffs as pro-worker. He added, “They firmly see themselves as the coastal elite PMC [professional managerial class] party and nothing else.”
Like Nic, I’m no fan of the professional managerial class, but unlike Nic, I didn’t grow up in it—my father was not a senior director at the World Bank. He is a truck driver. Every day for 30 years he has gotten out of bed, with a bad back, at 3:00 a.m. to go haul logs out of the Piney Woods of East Texas. The paper mill where his father welded is gone. So is the foundry. The trees are the only thing left.
The working class, for me, is not a theoretical concept. It is what I was born in, and belonged to, until I wrote myself out of it a few years ago. I saw my parents struggle, and then I struggled too. I wanted to be an attorney but I couldn’t afford to go to law school. I’ve spent most of my life worrying about my ability to pay the bills. I know what it’s like to get a flat tire that you can’t afford to replace. I have couch surfed. I have lived in trailer parks. I have paid for groceries with loose change—and I know this: If you are already living paycheck to paycheck, being suddenly forced to pay a minimum of 10 percent more on every good produced outside the United States simply means that you will go without—or worse, go into debt.
“There’s not going to be any pain for American-owned companies and American workers, because their jobs are going to come back home,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told NewsNation’s Morning in America on Thursday morning.
She was immediately proven wrong.
That same day, the carmaker Stellantis announced it was laying off 900 American workers. The company said the layoffs were temporary, with production paused at plants in the U.S. as well as in Mexico and Canada due to the trade disruption. We will undoubtedly see more layoffs in the coming days.
Even workers who keep their jobs will feel pain: The impact of the tariffs is estimated to cost the average family $3,800 per year. For a full-time worker making $15 an hour—more than double the minimum wage in 21 states—the projected price increases alone are equal to more than six weeks’ worth of pay. And as a freshly minted member of the middle class, I did not particularly enjoy seeing my modest 401(k) plan tank this week.
The message from the president and his supporters is that eventually, the tariffs will restore American manufacturing and create good-paying blue-collar jobs. I grew up in a community wrecked by deindustrialization, and if I thought our radical new trade regime would reverse that trend, I would be all in.
But there’s no evidence any of that will happen. These are not targeted tariffs meant to protect American jobs or incentivize specific critical industries to manufacture in the United States, both noble goals I wholeheartedly support.
Instead, this is a regressive tax on virtually all goods produced outside the U.S., and one that will hit working people the hardest. And for what? If it’s to restore trade balances, then why put tariffs on goods from countries with which the U.S. has a trade surplus? If the goal is to onshore manufacturing, why raise tariffs on everything, including things we cannot produce here in significant quantities, like coffee or olive oil? And why on Earth is there a 42 percent tariff on items coming from the Falkland Islands? None of it makes sense.
Working-class Americans deserve an ambitious industrial policy. What they got instead was capricious slop policy with no clear aims, no investment, and no central planning that will put working-class Americans’ jobs at risk while burdening them with unpayable credit card debt and higher housing costs.
Perhaps worst of all, Trump’s new trade policy will make the word tariff toxic, such that no future administration will be able to use this tool in the strategic manner it should be used without provoking an immediate political backlash. The ultimate, long-term result could be even an even more entrenched “free trade” absolutism—all because the Trump administration was too lazy or incompetent to come up with a well-thought-out tariff schedule that actually advances a clear set of aims.
By a stroke of luck, I’ve reached a level of financial success that will allow me to buy a new coffee table and new bookshelves without going into debt, whatever my neuroses might insist. Others won’t be able to afford more serious, necessary things, and for nothing. There’s no plan here. The jobs aren’t coming back. The short-term pain won’t be brief. There won’t be any gain.
And that is unforgivable.
In River Page’s hometown, the mail lady is the preacher’s wife. She drives her own Jeep down country roads to deliver last-notice bills, birthday cards, and Amazon packages. Read his piece, “The Postal Service Doesn’t Exist to Make Money.”
