Many of the small businesses said they’ve been forced to freeze hiring, pull back growth plans, take on new financing or cut salaries to keep operations afloat.
“It’s to the point now where it could kill us, it could take us down, and I could lose everything. … Being a small business owner isn’t worth it when your country turns on you,” said Jared Hendricks, the CEO of Village Lighting, a small business selling Christmas products.
One story:
Viresh Varma can’t sleep.
The CEO of AV Universal Corp., a small footwear company that sells through retailers like Macy’s, Nordstrom and DSW, said he needed to take out a $250,000 loan to pay his tariff bill on a container of shoes he imported from India for the holiday shopping season.
Varma didn’t have the cash on hand to pay the duties, which he said used to be around $7,500 for a similar-sized container before President Donald Trump’s new tariffs. But without the financing, he wouldn’t have anything to sell during the holidays
He took the loan which has very onerous terms requiring him to raise prices. It will probably bankrupt him. What choice did he have?
Often called the backbone of the U.S. economy, small businesses routinely represent more than 40% of the nation’s GDP and employ nearly half of the American workforce, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Trump says his tariffs allow the U.S. to reduce its trade deficits with other nations and encourage domestic manufacturing, but some of the small business owners who spoke to CNBC said that’s happening partially at their expense.
The struggles they’re facing could be a warning sign for the rest of the economy and bigger businesses in 2026, said Kent Smetters, a professor of business economics and public policy at theUniversity of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
“The small businesses … they’re kind of like the canary in the coal mine here,” said Smetters, the faculty director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model. “They’re going to get hit first, and then I think you’re going to see more of an impact with some delay on larger businesses.”
Larger retailers have been able to manage higher tariff costs in part because they had the foresight and ability to order extra inventory before the new duties went into effect, said Smetters. At a certain point, that stock will run out and push costs higher, and those companies only have so many low-tariff countries where they can produce goods.
It’s working out great.
Trump is saying that prices have come down on everything and that we now have $2.00 a gallon gas. His cult will always believe him over their lyin’ eyes. But how about the rest of us? When is reality going to hit the 70% who aren’t Trump lovers?
He was very happy after his call with BFF Vlad. As Always:
Trump: I did actually say to Putin, would you mind if I gave a couple thousand tomahawks to Ukraine? He did not like the idea. pic.twitter.com/B7AnT6N4AM
Trump: We need tomahawks for the United States of America, too. We need them. We can't deplete for our country. So they are very vital, very accurate and very good. But we need them, too. So, I don't know what we can do about that. pic.twitter.com/hVEz1mqUgV
That didn’t take long… On Wednesday he was saying that he didn’t have a problem with Hamas killing people in Gaza because he thought those who were being killed were bad guys.
It’s nice that he thanks Hamas, though. It’s important to have good manners when you’re threatening to kill someone.
When Donald Trump first announced his candidacy for president back in 2015, he didn’t have what anyone could call a real campaign. Loosely advised by his old pal Roger Stone and others, there was no real structure or normal hierarchy since Trump saw himself as a managerial genius who didn’t think he needed a formal campaign apparatus. A year earlier, at an event in New Hampshire, he met a fellow backstage who had been hovering around the fringes of politics for a while. Corey Lewandowski was a lobbyist and an ex-cop, and Trump eventually hired him as campaign manager. He was just the first of several to have the job, but he’s one of the few from those early days who made it back inside the Trump orbit. But it was a long, circuitous road to get there.
According to the New York Times, Trump liked Lewandowski for his “feisty instincts and off-color humor” but he ended up reluctantly firing him after he’d manhandled a reporter. Lewandowski knocked around on the periphery for a while, but in 2019 he went on a fishing junket hosted by conservative billionaire donor Foster Friess, where he met Kristi Noem, the recently elected GOP governor of South Dakota. The pair reportedly hit it off right away, and Lewandowski was soon serving as her unpaid adviser.
Rumors of an affair began almost immediately. This was slightly inconvenient, since both parties were married to other people and were working closely together in the governor’s office. When the gossip became public a year or so later, Noem dismissed it as “total garbage.” The governor was enmeshed in several other scandals, including allegations that she strong-armed a state official into giving her daughter an unearned certification as a real estate appraiser. Lewandowski, meanwhile, stood accused of sexually harassing a Republican donor at a Las Vegas charity event in 2021. This was just too much for the governor, who announced that he would no longer be working with her.
But there was no keeping the political soulmates apart for long. Widely considered a top prospect to be Trump’s running mate, Noem ruined her chances by proudly revealing in her 2024 memoir that she had taken her dog to a gravel pit and shot her for misbehaving. Republicans are more than fine with cruelty to humans, but apparently even they are leery of trying to elect a puppy killer.
After being axed from Noem’s office, Lewandowski wormed his way back into Trump’s inner circle. He was hired to work on the 2024 presidential campaign, where he immediately began to interfere with the machine put together by co-campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita. And as it turned out, he and Noem were still in touch, planning how to rescue her future.
According to a blockbuster exposé by Ben Terris at New York Magazine, Noem and Lewandowski cooked up a scheme to have Noem named as Trump’s secretary of homeland security. Lewandowski rounded up supporters such as Tom Homan, the immigration czar who is reported to have taken bribes before the election — although there’s no evidence that Lewandowski paid him for his endorsement. Trump apparently offered Noem her choice of the interior or agriculture departments, but she held out, telling him she wanted to run the department that was his top priority. He agreed.
But there was a caveat. Trump tasked Stephen Miller, whom he named as White House homeland security adviser and deputy chief of staff, with overseeing the administration’s immigration policy. The mass round-up and deportation of millions of immigrants, undocumented or not, is his life’s dream. Miller is the one guiding the homeland security ship, while Noem is in charge of public relations and day-to-day departmental operations. She brought Lewandowski with her to run the massive department as if it’s their own fiefdom.
While Noem is the agency’s public face, Terris reported that Lewandowski is her enforcer, reprising his role as an unpaid adviser. While he was disappointed he wasn’t named chief of staff, it’s worked out fine for him. He can maintain his outside businesses and run roughshod over the department while Noem, in Terris’ words, “brings reality-show energy” as she travels the world, dresses up in various costumes and makes propaganda videos.
The story revealed Noem’s stunningly poor management of DHS, a vastly important agency that has poured virtually all its resources into deporting immigrants while ignoring counterterrorism efforts, FEMA and cybersecurity. The dynamic duo has clogged up the bureaucracy, requiring that all contracts over $100,000 be personally approved by Lewandowski — a step that has created massive delays in paying the bills. (The department’s electricity was reportedly nearly cut off.). People are being fired willy-nilly, even MAGA die-hards, if they get on the wrong side of Lewandowski. He routinely demands that top employees take polygraphs if he suspects they are leaking to the press. The disarray is so bad that Trump was persuaded to tell them to get their acts together.
With her famous shiny pout and long dark tresses, Noem is the public face of Donald Trump’s emergent police state. And she is everywhere. At nearly every immigration hotspot, the secretary stages photo shoots demonstrating her hands-on leadership of the administration’s crackdown, all while sporting attire that she (mistakenly) believes fits the moment. In one surreal instance, Noem posed in front of prisoners in the notorious El Salvadoran gulag wearing a $50,000 Rolex.
DHS has spent more than $50 million filming television commercials of Noem thanking Donald Trump for securing the border, and the agency recently distributed a public service announcement of the secretary informing passengers in Transportation Security Administration lines that Democrats have shut down the government and are to blame for any delays. (Many airports are refusing to air it.) The low-rent Leni Riefenstahl social media propaganda campaign, in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and street theater are meticulously documented, has the effect of inuring the public to the idea that troops are invading American cities and no one who opposes the regime is safe.
But Noem has a lot of money to play with. The One Big Beautiful Bill handed over a massive $170 billion war chest to the department, which is engaged in building detention camps all over the country — by private companies, who are making a killing, naturally — and is offering up to $50,000 signing bonuses to any dude willing to put on a mask and start cracking heads.
Terris writes:
Under Noem, it is DHS, not the Justice Department, that has emerged as Trump’s most devastating and visible weapon against the right’s perceived enemies. “She’s going to play a key role in advancing Donald Trump’s effort to consolidate the powers of the presidency,” a former DHS official told me. “I think by the end of this administration, if she stays the whole time, she’s likely to become the warden of the police state.”
But in the meantime, Noem and Lewandowski are working night and day together, preparing for the next step in her political career. She’s clearly swinging for the fences, and is almost certainly planning a run for president in 2028.
When Noem was confronted about the reprehensible story of her shooting her dog, she responded that she told the story to illustrate her willingness to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly.” In that regard, Noem is certainly proving her capability, and she is evidently counting on the fact that her image as the cold, remorseless executor of the plan to rid America of foreigners will launch her into the White House. They don’t call her ICE Barbie for nothing.
If it takes criminalminds, the GOP is flush with them. Republicans are determined to use every legal, quasi-legal, and outright illegal means of securing permanent one-party control of government exclusively for their kind of people. The conservative-dominated United States Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts is on board with becoming a Potemkin third branch in support of that very goal.
Mark Joseph Stern explains what it means if the Roberts Court eviscerates what’s left of the Voting Rights Act:
If the Republican-appointed justices end federal protections for minority representation, as they sounded eager to do during Wednesday’s arguments in Callais v. Louisiana, Southern states can quickly gerrymander Black and brown communities into oblivion. The resulting maps will hand white voters almost total control over these states’ congressional maps, producing a net gain of 15 to 19 GOP seats in the House of Representatives. As the New York Times’ Nate Cohn explains, the VRA’s demise could put the House out of reach for Democrats outside of a rare “blue wave” election.
Blue states’ natural response would be to engage the electoral arms race and gerrymander Republicans out of their states’ congressional delegations.
Such a strategy would require painful trade-offs: Congress could become even less diverse, since racial minorities in blue states would have fewer opportunities to elect the representatives of their choice. And the number of truly competitive House elections would shrink even more, further eroding democratic accountability. The neteffect, though, would be a substantial boost for the Democratic Party that could offset many of the gains that Republicans are poised to reap. The result may not be a Republican-dominated House so much as a Congress with far fewer members of color—an outcome that the justices bent on destroying the Voting Rights Act blithely dismissed on Wednesday.
So long as the House is whiter and more male overall, many from the MAGA world might not care. What they want is a congress that looks like the America of yesteryear. And that’s what a decision on Callais may produce, Stern explains. If the court decides that VRA-compliant districts are racially impermissible gerrymanders, Democratic legislatures might have to redraw “racial minorities into whiter districts to more efficiently convert Democratic votes into House seats.” Or else see their power eroded further.
Republicans have never been reluctant to throw their own voters under the bus so long as more Democrats go with them. They play percentages. But here’s how that might manifest after a Callais decision in large blue states:
Consider New York. The state’s 26 House seats are currently split between 19 Democrats and seven Republicans. That includes many majority-minority districts in and around New York City. (Depending on how they’re defined, New York has about 10 such districts.) Currently, to comply with the VRA, the legislature has grouped many minority neighborhoods—so-called communities of interest—in districts together. But since nonwhite voters are disproportionately Democratic, that produces “wasted votes”: ballots cast in excess of what the Democrat needs to win. If the legislature “unpacked” these districts by dispersing minorities into areas now dominated by white Republicans, it could enact a map that gives Democrats 24 House seats and Republicans just two. That’s a five-seat pickup for Democrats.
Lather, rinse, repeat in other large, blue states.
Stern concludes:
It will not be blue states’ fault, though, when the Supreme Court guts the Voting Rights Act. The question will be how best to respond to the judicial destruction of a landmark civil rights statute that did more to advance multiracial democracy than any other law in history. They can strive to uphold its spirit by fighting a losing battle for minority representation. Or they can exploit its wreckage to build a new map of power.
Stern doesn’t address the potential, longer-term backlash from voters to this voting rights retrenchment. Those newly gerrymandered under the bus — Republicans, Democrats and, importantly, independents — are not going to enjoy having no voice in Congress. How will they respond? By giving up on voting altogther, driving down the country’s already miserable participation rate? Or once they realize they are paying taxes to support a government that no longer represents them as it once at least purported to, will they demand structural change?
The only way to fix some of the damage done by the Roberts court, Republican election manipulation, and an electoral arms race is with constitutional amendments. Yes, those are notoriously had to pass. But emisserate enough Americans, and both major parties might find that their own partisans as well as the growing plurality of independents may insist.
But God knows how long that might take to happen. It was 13 years between passage of Prohibition and its repeal by popular demand.
Who can forget then-White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s fiery pronouncement on the size of Trump’s first inauguration crowd? I’d like to. Spicer declared it “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe.” Because for Donald Trump it’s always about size.
That’s why the White House is so anxious about the No Kings protests set for this weekend. About five million took to the streets to protest Trump in June. More than 2,400 protests are planned for Saturday, about 450 more than June.
The White House is sweating. The word has gone forth to brand Saturday events “Hate America” rallies:
For more than a week, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) and other GOP leaders have cast the “No Kings” rallies as un-American, using increasingly hyperbolic language. Johnson and other members of House GOP leadership, including Majority Leader Steve Scalise (Louisiana), Majority Whip Tom Emmer (Minnesota), and Republican Conference Chair Lisa C. McClain (Michigan), have all described the protests as events for people who “hate America,” with Johnson and Emmer going as far as to suggest they are meant to appease a “terrorist wing” of the Democratic Party.
“We call it the ‘hate America’ rally that will happen Saturday. Let’s see who shows up for that,” Johnson said Wednesday at a news conference with other House GOP leaders. “I bet you you’ll see Hamas supporters, I bet you’ll see antifa types, I bet you’ll see the Marxists on full display, the people who don’t want to stand and defend the foundational truths of this republic.”
Like the separation of powers, Mike? Like respect for the law and the courts? Like defending the protections in the Bill of Rights?
Trump has reduced Johnson to a figure so comical it would be tragic if not for it being Mike Johnson.
“If you offer any criticism of this government, then you ‘hate America’? That’s ridiculous, un-American and unpatriotic,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) said in a video. “The fact is our country was founded on the idea that everyone has … a constitutionally-protected right to speak up and protest your government, especially when you think they have become lawless and corrupt.”
The Republicans attacks on the No Kings protests are sickening.
To them, only pro-Trump speech is protected. If you oppose Trump – you "hate America" or you're a "terrorist".
What they're trying to do is simple: suppress turnout this weekend. Don't let them win. pic.twitter.com/yTiPxe0vem
I’ve never been a fan of protest rallies. They tend to be catharic, feel-good events as substantial as cotton candy. People tend to go home and sit back down on their couches. What I’m seeing on the ground here, however, is a groundswell. Growing weekly sign protests across the county. A couple have grown from a handful of die-hards to 40-50.
We are faced with an authoritarian clique in Washington that sets a lot of store by spectacle. By size. Trump’s deployment of the National Guard and his creation of his own secret police is all about initimidation.
Your job tomorrow is to intimidate right back. Bigly.
And on being branded antifa:
Jimmy Kimmel on AG Pam Bondi blaming Antifa for the chaos in our cities: “There's no chaos in Portland. None. There is no chaos in Chicago. There was no chaos in Los Angeles. They're pretending there's chaos as a pretense for a military takeover." pic.twitter.com/PNDHzrV5hP
Apparently, Whiskey Pete and JD Vance are planning a big 250th birthday “vanity parade” at Camp Pendleton during the No Kings protests — using live ordinance:
Donald Trump is planning to throw himself another “vanity parade”—and this time, it might include Navy warships hurtling missiles toward the state of California.
California Governor Gavin Newsom is considering whether to shut down sections of Interstate 5 on Friday and Saturday, as reports circulate that the White House intends to shoot live ordnance over the highway at Camp Pendleton in San Diego County, MeidasTouch Network reported Wednesday.
Newsom’s office told the Los Angeles Times that it had “received little information about the event or safety plans.”
[…]
The show of force is intended to commemorate the Marine Corps’s 250th anniversary and will run counter to the nationwide No Kings protests, which uses the visuals of millions of protesters to ideologically challenge Trump’s unopposed rule.
The event, called “Sea to Shore—A Review of Amphibious Strength,” will be led by Vice President JD Vance.
Vance said it’s fake news, but only because it was earlier reported that the White House was shutting down the I-5. It’s Gov. Newsom who is contemplating it just in case some bombs accidentally fall on the area. You see, it’s not usual for the military put Americans in the line of fire like this. Of course, times have changed…for all we know, they consider them collateral damage in the war against Antifa.
It’s very cute that they’re doing this on the same day as the No Kings protest but I would have thought their massive belly flop of Trump’s belly flop on the earlier No Kings day would have made them leery of doing it again. Maybe that explains why Trump is sending Vance to attend this one.
Jack Smith spoke last week at the University College London law school, which has now posted online the hour-long conversation, which I moderated. There are lots of interesting substantive aspects to the conversation, but what struck me most was that the talk permits you to get a measure of the man himself, and not the caricature of him that many depict. He comes across as sincere, thoughtful, by-the-book, and apolitical. A career person through and through.
It’s easy to see why the Republicans don’t want this guy testifying in public. He is clearly a very competent, articulate, straight-arrow. He will remind many people of what many prosecutors used to be like before we had beauty queens and shitposters running the DOJ.
A couple of weeks ago he gave a lecture at George Mason University and he said this:
“My career has been about the rule of law and I believe that today it is under attack like in no other period in our lifetimes.”
That may seem obvious but coming from someone like him it’s chilling. He’s seen all the evidence of the first term crimes. We don’t even have to imagine what’s happening now.
Media Matters reports on Glenn Beck advising the FBI on who to go after in their purge of leftists. He’s been “gathering the evidence” for years and back in the day when he was a huge star on the Tea Party circuit, he would lay it out in great, hilarious detail.
He’s back on the case:
“The FBI showed up to my house to discuss my TV show exposing Antifa’s network,” Beck posted to social media on Monday, referencing the umbrella term for a broad and decentralized grouping of militant far-left activists who say they oppose fascism. “If you are a member of Antifa or providing material or financial support for Antifa, I might be a little concerned because the FBI is DEADASS serious about investigating you.”
Beck appended a clip from his radio show in which he said that he had met for two hours on Saturday with agents sent at the behest of extremely online FBI Director Kash Patel.
“This is information that I first gave on Fox years ago,” he added. “Let me just say this: Finally, we have an administration and an FBI director that is willing to go in deep.”
Beck’s claim of FBI interest in his antifa report comes as President Donald Trump and his administration are attempting to reframe the concept of antifa as a framework to target their political enemies. Trump responded to the September killing of MAGA activist Charlie Kirk by seeking to implicate as many of his political opponents as possible, and he has ordered federal law enforcement, including the FBI and its Joint Terrorism Task Forces, to target nebulously defined “organized political violence.” In recent days, Republican officials have sought to blur the distinction between antifa activists and protesters who plan to participate in Saturday’s “No Kings” rallies.
On October 8, at Trump’s White House roundtable on antifa, Patel promised that his bureau would “find every single seed money, donor organization and funding mechanism that we have.”
That same day, Beck published to YouTube his “off the cuff” review of what he mocked as “ANTIFA’s ‘De-centralized’ Network.” He explicitly pitched his work as “a starting point for people at the FBI or Justice Department as they begin investigating leads.”
Beck’s list of purportedly antifa-linked organizations worthy of federal investigation meshed well with reports about the administration’s targets of interest, including Democratic megadonor George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and ActBlue, the platform Democratic candidates and affiliated organizations use to marshall small-donor fundraising.
If they have to go to Glenn Beck for investigation advice they are scraping the bottom of the barrel. Not that it isn’t dangerous. They’ve already shown they’re willing to indict on the thinnest of pretexts.
Here’s what he told them:
Beck has been waiting for this moment for almost 20 years. He almost disappeared before they finally found a use for his “research”:
