Taylor’s Takes: Go ahead, Amazon, make my day

It seems to me a very big opportunity was missed this week by both the minds at Amazon and the White House.

Reporting from Punchbowl News early Tuesday morning revealed that the mega-distributor, Amazon, was planning to display the prices of the offered products with an addendum: how much of the cost is impacted by President Trump’s tariffs.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked about the consideration by Amazon later that morning. Leavitt called the plan a “hostile and political act,” and noted that President Trump was none too pleased with the news.

A reportedly irate Trump later called Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to personally express his displeasure over the plan. The President later told reporters that Bezos was a “good guy” and it was a “good call.” “He solved the problem very quickly,” said Trump.

Yes, ultimately, a faceless spokesperson for Amazon released a statement stating that the company had never officially approved the plans for the tariff footnotes and that the idea was being scrapped.

Not so fast, says I.

Would it be so terrible for the largest distributor of foreign-made products in the United States to alert customers as to why the cost of their desired goods is being impacted?

It’s no secret that tariffs on goods are most often passed onto the consumer instead of being absorbed by the tariffed nation and it’s manufacturers.

President Trump, himself, has admitted that his plan for widespread tariffs will have to be met with patience and understanding by Americans. “We may have in the short term, a little pain, and people understand that. But long term, the United States has been ripped off by virtually every country in the world,” said Trump in February.

One of my biggest gripes with Democrats is they can never admit when their party’s leaders are responsible for the shape of the economy.

High gas prices? Inflation? Rising energy costs? Joe Biden and his stoppage of oil pipelines and increased wasteful green energy spending was never to blame for such things, according to his supporters. And that’s if you could even get a Democrat to admit that there was an increased cost of living under the Biden regime.

So why should the Trump administration act like a bunch of liberals and deny ownership of the for-now elevated costs of commonly purchased products? As I’ve stated, Trump has already acknowledged there will be growing pains as part of this process to renegotiate America’s trade deals. Why should he be angered when a company wants to point out the obvious?

If President Trump is confident in this endeavor, he needs to exude confidence throughout the entire process.

Perhaps the White House’s reaction to Tuesday’s news should have been more welcoming than full of rebuke.

Let’s pretend Amazon was to go through with their proposal to display the impacts of tariffs. How would this display have been met by the average consumer?

Any in-the-know Trump supporter wouldn’t need the explanation from Amazon to know why they were seeing a jump in prices.

But I’d imagine that a liberal Amazon customer would quickly become furious they were being subjected to higher prices induced by Orange Man’s policies. Said liberal would likely take to BlueSky to shout into the void their dissatisfaction with the increased costs.

This hypothetical Democrat would then set out to find an alternative product at a lower cost, unwittingly supporting President Trump’s ultimate goal: to ween the United States off of it’s reliance on foreign-made goods.

It would be a win-win for everyone. Americans would consume the comparatively cheaper, American-made products, forcing Amazon to expand their offering and promotion of those products, and further encouraging overseas manufacturers to move their operations to America.

And President Trump could claim victory throughout the entire process.

To quell a company’s efforts to add a “Trump’s tariffs” disclaimer on the receipt is short-sighted. The White House should have called Amazon’s bluff, thereby recruiting them to help fight this trade war on their behalf.

To the credit of Karoline Leavitt, she did engage in “whataboutism” by pointing out that Amazon never added such disclosures during the highest inflation in forty years under the Biden administration.

Such a disclaimer would be a slippery slope. How would a company exactly determine which policies are to blame for affected prices? Would they add such a disclaimer for lowered prices? Who would be responsible for making sure the disclaimers are fair and balanced, and applied equally despite which party was responsible for setting policies? What is the benefit to Amazon for even adding such a disclaimer?

There are many more unanswered questions about this proposal. But for the purposes of this exact and precise moment in time, I believe this policy would have eventually swung toward favoring Trump.

Amazon assumed this plan would have served to wound Trump. Unfortunately, the Trump White House didn’t allow the broken clock to be wrong even once this day.