Trump’s Tariffs Are Back and They Brought Receipts

In this episode of Disrupt Your Money, we’re dragging tariffs out of the headlines and into real life—specifically, what Donald Trump’s latest tariff chaos means for your business, your bank account, and yes, your Nana’s 401(k). 

Meg breaks down what tariffs actually are (no econ degree required), how Trump’s “Tariff Oprah” moment and his whiplash 90-day “10% for everyone” reversal set the stage for market manipulation, and why these moves are less about strategy and more about profit and power for the ultra-wealthy.

This episode will help you see exactly how these policies raise prices, squeeze small business margins, fuel inflation, and destabilize global relationships—and what you can actually do to fight back.

⏱️ In This Episode:

00:00 – Introduction: The tariff whiplash

03:30 – Why tariffs are a small-business + 401(k) problem

04:30 – Tariffs 101: What they are & who actually pays

06:42 – The current tariff map: China, allies, and retaliation

09:31 – Everyday fallout: Prices, margins, and inflation pressure

12:41 – Market chaos & your retirement accounts

14:30 – Global relationships, supply chains, and security

16:02 – Layoffs, local economies, and who gets hurt first

18:22 – Five ways to fight back (without starting your own trade war)

20:24 – Closing: Tariffs as a threat to generational wealth
 

🔗 Mentioned in This Episode:

👉 Wealth is Resistance Action Kit → https://equitablemoneyproject.com/kit

👉 Call Your Representatives (Meg’s weekly action scripts) 

👉 Tariffs Hurt the Heartland – national anti-tariff campaign 

👉 Coalition for a Prosperous America (trade + tariff advocacy org) 

💬 Connect with Us:
🌐 Website → https://equitablemoneyproject.com
📸 Instagram → https://instagram.com/equitablemoneyproject
🎧 Podcast → https://equitablemoneyproject.com/podcast

🚀 Your Next Step:
Ready to use your money as a tool for resistance and protection in a rigged system? Download the free Wealth is Resistance Action Kit → https://equitablemoneyproject.com/kit

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Well, hey there, I'm Meg Wheeler, CPA, entrepreneur, and political activist. And you're listening to Disrupt Your Money, the podcast that's pursuing liberation through financial education. Let's face it, our economy and financial institutions weren't built to support the majority of us. So if we're going to achieve financial equity and justice for all, we've got to build our own. So let's do it, my friends. Let's get ready to disrupt your money. All right, so about 20 minutes after I recorded this episode, you're about to hear. Trump made a big decision about tariffs, and he decided to suspend all of the tariffs he had implemented for a period of 90 days and essentially dropped the tariff rate to a universal 10% rate for every country, except for China, still on his warpath about China, but for the next 90 days, 10% for everybody. Oh boy, what does this mean? Well, first and foremost, this is not even remotely surprising because what a lot of people have been suspecting that Trump is doing with these tariffs is setting up the market for him and his incredibly wealthy friends to be able to have a huge payday. And frankly, for him to get a lot of credit for saving the day. Because by implementing these tariffs and causing the market to decrease significantly, he then knows that if he pulls back on those tariffs, the market is going to shoot back up. And by getting it down super low and then buying a lot into it and then having it shoot back up, he and his friends are going to make a ton of money and they're going to get credit, like I said, for saving the market. So this is most likely why he's done this. Now, what does that mean for all of us? Does it mean we don't have to worry about tariffs anymore? Absolutely not. Because number one, we don't know if he's going to change his mind again. And given his history, it's fairly likely that he will. We don't know if there will be higher tariffs in place after the 90 days. We don't know if he will keep the 90 days in place. He may change his mind next week. We also just in general need to take this as a serious, serious warning because it shows how volatile and disruptive Trump is willing to be in order to benefit himself and his friends. So we need to be really careful as we're watching his actions and understand that it's not just about what he does in the current moment, but about what the long-lasting impact of what he's done is going to do to our country and our security and really who we are as a nation. Because at the end of the day, great that he's walking back these tariffs for now. But other countries now know that they cannot trust him. They cannot trust him to maintain the critical relationships that they've developed with each other, that at any moment, at any whim, he may decide to do something that is incredibly destructive. So am I relieved that he walked back the tariffs? Not really, because I don't believe that this is the end. I don't believe that this was done because he understands how harmful tariffs are. I believe that this is just another play in his game, which is all about him and his billionaire friends winning and taking everything from us so that they can have it all. Well, hey friends, and welcome back to Disrupt Your Money, the podcast where we don't just talk about making money, we talk about smashing the systems that were designed to keep us from it. I'm your host, Meg K. Wheeler, CPA, financial educator, and founder of the Equitable Money Project. And today we are diving into a topic that is hotter than a Black Friday sale on iPhones that are about to get a 20% markup thanks to one man's ego. Yup, we're talking about tariffs. Specifically, Trump's latest round of tariffs and how they're screwing over small business owners, working families, and your Nanas 401k. And let me just say, when we came into this season of Disrupt Your Money, I really did not think we were gonna have to have this many episodes on what's a space in charge and all of the shit that he's pulling. But here we are, and it's been quite a week. Now, now let's start with the basics because I don't know about you, but high school econ did not prepare me for this mess. Okay, so first and foremost, what is a tariff? Well, a tariff is a tax on imports. Remember, imports are things that are brought into the country. So products we buy from other countries, right? That's it. That's all a tariff is. Sounds simple. Not quite. Because when you slap a tax on goods coming into the country, the big question really is well, who actually pays for that? And there's some argument about this, but for the most part, economists are pretty much on the same page, which is that the foreign companies are not going to be the ones paying for it in the end. It's not gonna be the dictators that have those trade deficits. Who pays for it? We do. Consumers, small businesses, everyday folks just trying to buy eggs. Not the golden eggs that Trump has, but just regular eggs. Okay, so what is actually happening right now and why is everybody talking about tariffs? Well, Trump has been making a lot of noise about reinstating, expanding, and basically going full Oprah with tariffs. You get a tariff, you get a tariff, everybody gets a tariff. We're talking tariffs on steel, aluminum, electronics, EVs, solar panels. And did you see the tariffs on the penguins? Yeah, he he really meant everybody gets a tariff. Basically, anything that sounds like the future or a functioning infrastructure is getting a tariff. Because nothing says economic policy like dragging us back to 1930. Speaking of 1930, let's talk about that. That's when we passed the Smoot Holly Tariff Act that raised tariffs on over 20,000 goods. You want to know what happened? Oh, just a little thing called the Great Depression got a whole hell of a lot worse. Now, other countries, not surprisingly, were kind of pissed about the fact that we put all these tariffs on them. And so they slapped us back with tariffs of their own, meaning they put tariffs or taxes on the products that we made and sent and sold to other countries. What do you think happened when all of a sudden we were having this tariff pissing contest? Well, international trade slowed to a crawl. It was like global ghosting. Super cute, right? Yeah, not quite. All right, so why am I talking about the 1930s? What's happening right now? What's actually going on? All right, so let's break this down and talk about what is actually happening right now. Now, depending on when you're listening to this, some of this may have changed. But as of the date of this recording, here are just some of the tariffs that Trump has imposed. Let's start with one of the biggest, China, 104% rate. Now, China and the US are currently in a standoff because of tariffs. And Trump didn't start at 104%. It's just escalated because he basically said, if you don't like this and you fight us, then I'm gonna keep raising it. Super cool. Okay. Um, we've also got about 60 other US trading partners that have been hit by tariffs, ranging anywhere from 11% to 104%. Now, not to go too far into economic policy, but Trump has implemented these tariffs or chosen the amount of the tariffs based on the trade deficits with those countries. When we think about a trade deficit, we're talking about the difference between how much we send them versus how much they send us. And Trump says, I don't want a trade deficit. I want you to send us as much as we send you, and vice versa. The problem with that is not every country is the same. Not every country has the same goods that they make. And so to think that you are never going to have trade deficits is pretty much a guarantee that you're gonna fail economics 101. But anyway, I digress. Okay, so we've got China. Now, China's, by the way, has hit back on us. They've raised import duties on US goods to 84%. So just to be clear, we're taxing them 104%, they're taxing us 84%. That's a whole lot more money just because Trump decided to get into an ego pissing contest. Now, we've also got tariffs of 24% on Japan, 25% on South Korea, you've got the European Union getting hit with a blanket 20% tariff. It's across the board. Now, Trump is claiming that more than 70 countries have actually reached out to begin negotiations because of these tariffs. And we've seen delegations come from the EU, come from Tokyo, come from Seoul, lots of different places heading to the US to actually talk about these tariffs with Trump. So Trump is, of course, trying to claim that these tariffs have been super successful because it's getting all of these people to the table, uh, you know, and he's now forcing their hand and uh to negotiate. Uh, will that actually work? I don't know. We'll see. But again, I'm gonna go back to the 1930s. Didn't really happen then, probably not gonna happen now. And pretty much every economist that isn't on Trump's payroll would agree with me on this. All right, but let's talk now about how this actually affects you. Because at the end of the day, this is not an economic policy show. This is a show about how you, as a small business owner, can build generational wealth and fight against economic inequity. All right, so let's break this down. You are the brilliant, resilient, scrappy business owner, you're wearing 27 different hats on any given day, and you're already struggling to figure out how to stretch$1 into 10. What the hell does all this tariff stuff actually mean for you in your everyday life? Well, first and foremost, kind of the obvious one, prices are gonna go up. If you import goods or materials for your business, you bring things from other countries, yeah, you're gonna pay more. Those just got more expensive. And by the way, even if you don't run a products company, even if you run a services or you know, digital products company where you're not actually manufacturing anything or selling physical goods, you're likely to see prices go up anyway, because I'm guessing you use a laptop or a notebook or lots of other supplies in your business that most likely are not made in the US. All of those things are going to get more expensive because the companies that are importing them are now being hit with these tariffs and they're not going to pay them. They're going to trickle it down to you. And you're going to have to decide: do you suck it up and pay it or do you trickle it down to your customer, which means they're probably going to buy less and less. The other side of this is that your margins are going to shrink. So if you do sell physical products, you now have a smaller margin unless you decide to raise your prices. And raising your prices doesn't guarantee that your sales are going to stay where they're at. Again, you may see people buying less and less. We've already seen this across the market that people are cutting back on, especially expensive purchases like cars because they're worried about the cost of these things. So I think we're we're planning, we're buckling up for a recession. And actually, pretty much all of the big Wall Street institutions are saying that's the path we're headed on. In fact, just to dive a little bit into the economic stuff again, because I love this stuff. I was an econ major. I geek out on this. Uh, just a couple of days ago from the date we're recording this podcast. So we're talking about kind of mid-April, uh, Goldman Sachs actually raised their odds of a US recession from 35% pre-tariffs to 45%. So almost, almost a 50% chance that we're going to be in a recession. Uh, and um, by the way, uh JP Morgan is actually putting the odds of a US and global recession, so not just US, global recession, at 60%. They have expressed fears that not only will US inflation ignite, and inflation, remember, is a measure of what we pay for things, things are going to get more expensive, uh, but that there's going to be so many retaliatory measures from around the globe, such as the China one I mentioned, that this is just going to spark a worldwide crisis. We've seen um Goldman has lowered their uh outlook for US economic growth. Um, we it just across the board, we're seeing folks say shit doesn't look good. Okay. So none of this feels awesome. But it's not just about prices going up and the economy coming down. And that's bad enough as it is, but it doesn't just stop there. We're also seeing this affect the stock markets, right? Because what's happening is investors absolutely hate uncertainty. And they're saying we don't know what's going to happen. We don't know if the tariffs are gonna stay or he's gonna walk them back. We don't know what other countries are going to do. We don't know what this is going to do to the economy. Stock markets and investors hate uncertainty and tariff wars create chaos. So if you've got a 401k or an IRA or a sub-IRA, I'm guessing if you've checked it, you know it's volatile as fuck. And if you haven't checked it, you're probably hiding under your covers, going, I don't want to look. Okay. And the worst part about this is the people who really can't afford the volatility isn't the Trumps of the world. It's not the Elon Musks of the world. It's people like you and I who did not grow up with trust funds. And much, if not all, of our wealth is inside of our retirement accounts. Now, the one thing I will say here is to not panic. Because even though this is a nightmare of a mess that has been created for our economy, when we look at the stock market over, let's just say 100 years, over 10 years, even 20 years, 50 years, these things happen. The stock market will come back. Our retirement accounts will come back. The worst thing you can do right now is to sell everything and get out because you'll be taking a huge hit and you'll be losing out on the growth that will come. So, as hard as it is, take a deep breath, pause, do not hit that sell button. Probably don't even look at your retirement account for a little bit. It's going to be volatile right now. We know that every day is going to be a different story, so don't let it stress you out. Now I want to talk about another issue that doesn't directly affect what you pay, your prices, or even your retirement account, but it really does matter in this whole conversation because it's a big fucking deal. Let's talk about our global relationships. No matter what party has been in charge, no matter who is sitting in the leadership seats in the administration, developing and maintaining strong and trusting global relationships has been a pivotal piece of American democracy and diplomacy and strategy for certainly my entire life and well, well beyond that. But the reality is that tariffs piss off our allies. And the way that these are being implemented is making it so much worse. Because not only are they just being done on a whim at random, willy-nilly, but they're being done without any conversation with the countries that they are impacting. This is going to fray our global relationships. In fact, it already has. Countries like Canada, the EU, and Japan, they are pissed off. And when they're pissed off, that means there's going to be less cooperation on other big issues like climate change, security, supply chains, lots of things that we need to work with each other on. Let me be clear: America may be one of the quote-unquote great big powers in this world, but so much of what allows us to do the work that we do is rooted in other countries globally. And if we piss off everybody and lose all of our friends, it's going to be a pretty lonely and sad existence. And I also want to mention that with these tariffs are going to come a lot of layoffs. Now, Trump has argued that these tariffs are going to force US goods to be purchased. We're going to see more manufacturing facilities built, more warehouses. All of this is going to happen in the US. Maybe a little bit of that happens. Maybe that's the case. I doubt it, but maybe it is. But the reality is that takes time. That doesn't happen tomorrow. In the meantime, lots of people are getting laid off because companies can no longer afford the higher prices. They can't afford the tariffs, they're losing customers. So they have to lay off their workforce. Any job that relies on global trade, shipping, manufacturing, even tech is getting hammered right now. And so if you're in a situation where either you or maybe a partner or family member has one of those jobs, you might have to do even more with even less. Once again. And even if you aren't directly affected by those layoffs, it's going to impact the economy because those people are going to spend less money in the economy, they're going to be buying less stuff, and that's going to hurt you too. So there's so many reasons why this is such a bad thing. And why if you aren't freaking out, you should be freaking out. Although I say that with a little hesitation because no matter how bad it gets, we shouldn't freak out because freaking out does not help us take action. Even in the worst of times, we need to focus on how we can stay calm, take action, and fight back. And so on that note, here is the good news, I suppose. Trump is not the king, at least not yet anyway. These tariffs have faced major pushback from economists, business groups, and even some Republican politicians who understand that you can't just tariff your way out of a trade deficit like it's a bad X. Even the US Chamber of Commerce, which is not exactly a bastion of progressive thought, has said these tariffs hurt businesses. And surprise, surprise, a lot of Republicans in Congress are nervous about how this is going to play with their base, especially their sweet suburban voters who don't want to pay$3,000 for a fridge. So how do we fight back without launching our own trade war? Well, here are five action steps for you. Number one, call your representatives. Seriously, Congress can limit presidential tariff power. Demand they support legislation like the reasserting Congress's Trade Authority Act, which is currently being debated, or similar bills that restrict unilateral tariff action. And as a plug here, don't forget to go to callyourrepresentatives.com, my subsack where I send out a weekly action for you to call your representatives on. This week was all about tariffs. The second thing you can do is to join a coalition. There are groups like Coalition for a Prosperous America and Tariffs Hurt the Heartland. They are organizing business owners to push back. They have petitions, they have media opportunities, they have policy briefings, and they need your help. Third, educate your customers. Tell your community why prices are going up. Make it clear that this isn't greed or bad business, it's policy sabotage. Educated customers become local voters. And never forget this. You may think that everybody knows what's going on and everybody knows how bad this is, but I guarantee you they don't because most people are not paying attention. You have an opportunity and a platform to educate them, take it. Fourth, diversify your suppliers. Now, this is easier said than done, but if you can source more locally or from tariff-free countries, do that now. Start looking into those options now. This is a way to cushion the blow. And lastly, vote with your damn wallet and your ballot. Midterms, local elections, presidential elections, they all matter. Support candidates who understand small business isn't a buzzword, it's a livelihood. And I'm just gonna put one more plug in for local elections here because you may think, well, what does it matter if I go vote for the local select board or town council or school committee person? You wanna know why it matters? Because a lot of those people grow up to become senators, representatives, and even president. That is where they start. Make sure you get people in those seats that get it. All right, look, y'all, if you are building a business in a world that's rigged against you, which we are, then you are already a superhero. But superheroes need to stay informed. These tariffs aren't just bad policy. They are a threat to your dreams of generational wealth, of equity, and of breaking cycles. So don't just shake your head at the news. Shake the freaking table. Call, organize, educate, and keep building the future that these jokers are so fucking scared of. Thanks for listening to this episode of Disrupt Your Money. If you like what you heard, please remember to subscribe on your favorite podcast player and leave us a review. And tariffs, we see you and we are not impressed.