Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

Donald Trump’s tariffs are making consumer goods more expensive, and he doesn’t want anyone to know it. This week, he phoned Jeff Bezos in a tizzy, furious over a reported Amazon plan to show consumers how much of each product’s price owed to the new tariffs on imported goods. The site allegedly intended to print the figure alongside the list price in an attempt to absolve itself of responsibility for the inevitable price hikes.

After Trump’s call to Bezos, Amazon publicly denied the report, saying that the plan was meant only for its spinoff website Haul—a low-cost competitor to Shein and Temu—and, furthermore, was “never approved and not going to happen.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a Tuesday briefing that if Amazon were to publicly list import charges on its goods, it would be a “hostile and political act.”

Cue the ClickHole headline: On this issue, Leavitt has a point. Explicitly tying the cost of goods to trade policy in a way that everyday people can understand is inherently political. And because it would reflect poorly on Trump, highlighting the burden he is placing on U.S. consumers, it would also be a de facto shot against his regime.

That’s why, starting today, every American business selling a good or service that involves a tariff-affected product should do exactly what Amazon is denying that it planned to do: itemize the tariff upcharge, list it at the bottom of the receipt, and point it out when customers complain about rising prices. Call it a Trump tax.

Specialty grocers peddling wedges of exorbitantly priced Italian cheeses should do it. Nail salons losing access to cheap disposable manicure tools should do it. Megastores chock-full of made-in-China goods, French restaurants with eye-poppingly expensive wine lists, department stores charging more for leather goods, supermarkets stocking bags of 40-percent-pricier frozen shrimp, car seat manufacturers raising prices by $100 overnight—there should be no question why consumers are paying more for each purchase.

It’s a win-win proposition. Businesses will evade the blame for selling overly expensive products and services. Customers will gain transparency and a course of action: If they take their complaints to Republican officials, the Trump administration may back down on a policy that’s going to make life harder for most Americans, especially those with tight finances. And if paying the Trump tax turns voters against the guy who made a campaign promise to lower prices on his first day in office, so be it. If tariffs are no big deal and Americans can easily adjust their spending to accommodate them, as the president claims, he should be glad to have his name on them.

Most of the tariffs Trump announced at the beginning of April are on pause for 90 days, with some notable exceptions: Tariffs on imported goods from China, which can be as high as 145 percent, are already in effect. That means that Chinese products are now or will soon be roughly two and a half times as expensive as they were a few weeks ago—or completely unavailable, as importers balk at the sky-high prices.* When the rest of the tariffs go into effect (barring any last-minute policy reversals, which would be very Trump), other imported products will be subject to a minimum 10 percent tariff, depending on the country of origin.

There is precedent for instituting explicit customer surcharges due to economic forces outside a business’s control. Lyft and Uber once added fuel fees to help drivers offset climbing gas prices. During the coronavirus, New York City allowed restaurants to append a temporary “COVID-19 Recovery Charge” of up to 10 percent to guests’ bills. After District of Columbia residents voted to phase out the so-called tipped minimum wage—a designation that allowed restaurants to pay servers a lower hourly rate so long as tips made up the difference—eateries began adding service fees to customer checks to cover the higher labor costs.

And in recent years, paying extra fees while dining out has become commonplace. In 2023, 15 percent of restaurants began adding surcharges to their check for a variety of stated reasons, often related to inflation. Restaurant owners were paying more for food, labor, and credit card swipes, and they didn’t want to scare off customers by raising menu prices.

These fees were not intended to be read by diners as a Biden tax, but they might as well have been. Most Americans blamed Biden and the Democrats for soaring postpandemic inflation, and here was a big, fat charge, listed on their receipts, to quantify the cost. The fees put some psychic distance between the products and the extra money, making the charges seem akin to a sales tax—totally out of a business owner’s control.

Some retailers are already experimenting with a version of my proposed Trump tax. (The name is essential to the concept, people!) Temu, a site for ultracheap products made largely in China, recently began listing “import charges” as a line item at checkout, figures that sometimes more than doubled the total purchase cost. Shein, a major Temu competitor for women’s clothing and lifestyle goods, took a different tack, promising consumers no surprises at checkout. Instead, the e-tailer folded in tariff costs by raising prices across the board, including an average of 51 percent on top beauty and health products and more than 30 percent on housewares.

Guess which strategy made a splash at the White House? Americans have been able to buy super cheap overseas products from the likes of Shein and Temu only because of a long-standing loophole that exempted purchases of under $800 from tariffs and customs paperwork. Trump was set to close this loophole—hence Temu’s added fees on cheap consumer goods—but may be backing off by gutting enforcement of tariffs on those shipments. People are already crediting Temu with the shift.

If that reporting is true, think of what might come from attaching Trump’s name to extra charges on receipts and invoices across the country. Even if that act doesn’t reach the president himself, it will indelibly cement him to this period of financial hardship in the normal American brain. Think of the COVID stimulus checks, which some continue to attribute to the president’s largesse because they came embellished with his name. Obamacare, today a title of respect for a broadly popular piece of health care legislation, was originally an epithet coined by conservatives to tie the then president to a bill they hoped would tank. Politicians know that Americans can’t always see the connection between an act of government and the responsible party. It’s best to bonk us over the head with it.

A Trump tax won’t account for every impact of the looming tariffs. Some consumer products won’t be more expensive—they won’t be available at all. Already, shipments to the U.S. from China are plunging. And once more tariffs take effect, grocery shoppers may be forced to choose from a much smaller variety in imported categories of food, like coffee. In those cases, instead of a boilerplate reference to the Trump tax, I would settle for little signs on the empty shelves stating, “Pardon our void! The Trump Tariffs prevent us from selling [insert brand or product name].” The Highsnobiety store is doing an online take on this: On the pages of goods it has stopped selling to American customers as a result of the tariffs, the site states, “This item is temporarily unavailable in your region due to US tariffs impact.” Would it kill the store to add Trump somewhere in there?

I don’t expect many big-name national brands to get on board with my plan. The Targets, Home Depots, and Safeways of the world will be too cowed by Trump’s threats of retribution to draw attention to his punishing policies. Businesses might also want to use the tariffs as an excuse to raise prices and keep them there, even if the tariffs are lifted. But some companies may see an upside to consumer transparency. Costco, for instance, makes nearly three-quarters of its profits from membership fees, not product sales, and it keeps members on the rolls by promising the lowest prices out there. It has already taken a stand against Trump’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. It would make sense for Costco to show its members exactly why the company that sources half the world’s cashews can no longer sell a giant jar for a pittance.

Companies large and small could face pushback from MAGA customers for itemizing tariff upcharges instead of building them into list prices. But conservatives might lose their energy for boycotts as prices spike across the board. Business owners who aren’t loving Trump’s economy should seize this golden opportunity for political effect, because it is famously difficult to get average voters to understand public policy, identify its impacts, and remember all of it when it comes time to vote. Unlike, say, the Inflation Reduction Act, an enormously consequential bit of Biden-era legislation that never broke through the public consciousness, tariffs will have the advantage of affecting almost everyone, almost every day, in direct, quantifiable ways. All that’s left to do is place the blame.

Correction, May 2, 2025: Due to a production error, this article originally misstated how much tariffs will increase the cost of imported goods from China.