On the centennial day of President Donald Trump’s second administration, a D.C. tabloid dropped a turd in the oligarchs’ punchbowl by reporting Amazon would start listing the cost of Trump's tariffs alongside higher prices. The kerfuffle that followed isn’t a fraction as discombobulating as most other Trump-related news such as the horrifically disturbing saga of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, or the dissociative moment the president deemed foreign films “a national security threat.”
Unfortunately, this makes an overlooked dimension of the Amazon Haul story that much easier to miss: the poorest Americans, increasingly reliant on these supercheap discount retailers, which themselves are reliant on China’s supercheap costs. As Trump’s tariffs stand to raise prices, these consumers are left with few other options in the private market for affordable, readily available goods — something that should be seen as a monstrous failure of our current capitalist system.
