I work at a small business. I’m paying for Trump’s tariffs.

Lessons for a fake businessman president, from an actual businessman.

By Erik from Home of the Brave

Donald Trump talks about tariffs like they’re a magical cure-all for all of America’s economic problems. During the campaign, he promised that foreign countries would bear the cost of his tariffs, not American consumers. Once in office, he started a trade war that’s been chaotic, unpredictable, and costly.

I work at a small construction supply company in Florida that’s directly affected by all of this, so let me give you the facts: This is terrible for America’s small businesses. My company sells the steel, safety equipment, and industrial inputs needed to build homes across Florida, much of it imported or made from imported raw materials. Trump’s tariffs are crippling our ability to do business, and making it more expensive for Americans to build or renovate their homes.

We’ve already heard from vendors who need to jack up their prices. This was completely predictable once you understand how tariffs work: When imported goods arrive in the US, the government charges the American buyer—not the foreign seller—the tariff tax. That cost gets passed down the supply chain, resulting in higher prices for businesses like mine, and ultimately for consumers. It’s remarkable that someone like Trump, who has been talking up tariffs for decades, still doesn’t seem to grasp this.

One supplier recently sent us a price increase list for essential materials that we deal in every day. The increases ranged anywhere from 15 to 40 percent, a staggering jump that’s going to hit us essentially overnight. We don’t have a reserve fund sitting around to cover these costs, so we are facing hard decisions about what we can absorb, what we pass along to customers, and whether we need to scale back operations.

We’re managing, for now, but in the coming months we anticipate more and more hikes like these. This is not sustainable. Is this what Trump meant when he promised he would be great for the business community, including small businesses like ours?

I’ve talked to other people in my industry who are feeling the same squeeze. My company is part of a larger buying group of construction manufacturers and vendors across the US, Canada, and Mexico. Everybody—from large corporations to mom-and-pops like us—is saying the same thing: This can’t go on. Trump’s trade war is actually a war on American companies, and it’s us—and the consumers we serve—who are paying the price of his economic illiteracy.

Trump’s cuts have also hit my family personally. My mother is in her mid-seventies, retired, and recently moved to rural Nebraska. She relies on Social Security, a system she has paid into her entire working life with the expectation it would be there when she needed it. But since Trump took office, that has proved to be untrue.

We’ve had difficulties reaching anyone at the local Social Security office, and she’s had to make the several-hour round-trip several times just to get basic questions answered. These aren’t complex issues, even—she just needs help from someone who can process her paperwork related to the move. It’s not an accident that no one is available to help; it’s a direct consequence of Trump’s chaotic mismanagement of the federal government.

In his first months back in office, Trump fired 7,000 Social Security Administration employees and closed six of the agency’s 10 regional offices. I’m sure Trump just saw these people as useless pencil-pushers; numbers on a page to be cut at his whim. But they were real workers, with real jobs, responsible for helping people who rely on them for life’s basic necessities—people like my mother.

She doesn’t deserve to be victimized by Trump’s monomaniacal campaign for so-called “government efficiency.” Nor does my business deserve to suffer because Trump doesn’t understand how trade and tariffs work. We’re not responsible for these failures—we’re just stuck paying the price for them. But we do have a responsibility to speak up. Trump gets away with his destructive policies because too many people stay silent while their businesses suffer and their families struggle. I refuse to be one of them.

Erik works at a small construction supply company in Florida. He is part of Home of the Brave, a new initiative highlighting the harms of Donald Trump’s second term.