Berating the Businesses

Plus: Tim Dillon takes on the establishment, Chicago's racist hiring strategies, train fetishes, and more...

You simply must berate businesses for acting rationally in response to tariffs: Walmart told investors it will probably have to raise prices soon in response to 10 percent across-the-board tariffs and 30 percent tariffs on Chinese imports.

"Walmart should STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain," wrote President Donald Trump on Truth Social. "Walmart made BILLIONS OF DOLLARS last year, far more than expected. Between Walmart and China they should, as is said, 'EAT THE TARIFFS,' and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I'll be watching, and so will your customers!!!"

Or else what? Trump is acting like he can strong-arm Walmart's executives into behaving in a certain manner (and maybe he can!), but it's not crazy for a CEO to warn shareholders and other relevant stakeholders that prices will have to reflect altered trade conditions.

Earlier in the month, the toy maker Mattel said something similar: It predicted a less-successful earnings outlook, that it would reduce the number of goods that are produced in Chinese factories, and that it was likely to raise prices. And Amazon made headlines in April when rumors started that the company would display the new, adjusted-for-tariffs prices alongside the old prices, which led to Trump calling Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and the company quickly getting its PR folks to recant (after the White House press secretary started alleging Amazon was sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party).

These companies are all perfectly within their rights to make evident to customers what additional costs they're bearing due to the new tariff regime. But Trump—ostensibly a pro-business Republican—is also wrong to say that a company's profits are so large that they can simply "eat" the tariffs; it's a common leftist line to act like you know what kind of financial pain a big corporation can bear. Is he saying Walmart's shareholders should just accept worse performance for the good of the country? Why, exactly, should they do that? What incentive do they have? Is being a Walmart shareholder an altruistic pursuit?

Walmart does a lot to keep prices low, it's part of its whole proposition to customers; it has an incentive to do that because it has built its brand around an Everyday Low Prices (EDLP) promise, where customers don't have to wait for sale events. It negotiates favorable deals with its manufacturers and does a lot of bulk purchasing, leveraging its size; it cuts out middlemen; it has really efficient inventory management and distribution networks; it tries to keep labor costs low (and has historically been very anti-union). But the flip side of all of these tactics is that, all across the country, it provides poor and middle-income Americans with the ability to get cheap groceries, clothing, cookware, lightbulbs, paper towels, laundry detergent—the stuff that keeps households running. All the handsomely paid executives are the ones who have an incentive to problem solve and strategize about how to keep these goods supplied and these prices low so that Americans in Middletown, Ohio, can manage to keep their homes afloat.

But to Trump, that doesn't seem to matter: He just wants to convince people that, actually, it's foreign nations who will bear the costs of the tariffs, not American consumers or businesses. Honestly, threatening businesses like this—and implying that they'll be punished if they set prices at a different level than the government wants—feels a little communist to me. What a fascinating pivot for the GOP.

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Scenes from New York: "A Mexican naval ship in the East River accelerated suddenly in the wrong direction before slamming its masts into the Brooklyn Bridge in a crash that killed two crew members, federal transportation officials said on Monday," reports The New York Times. "The ship, the Cuauhtémoc, was moving at a speed of about 2.3 knots after shoving off from a Lower Manhattan pier Saturday night with a tugboat's help, Brian Young of the National Transportation Safety Board said at a news conference. The 300-foot-long ship, which had 277 people on board, maintained that pace for 'a bit of time' before 'the speed began to increase,' said Mr. Young, the investigator leading the safety board's inquiry into the crash. The Cuauhtémoc's speed had risen to six knots when it hit the bridge less than five minutes after leaving shore, he said." It's not clear why it accelerated like that, and the full investigation could take a very long time—up to two years—to complete.

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QUICK HITS

• Incredible exchange between a CNN reporter and comedian Tim Dillon, in which Dillon properly describes the power of establishment institutions and chafes at the concept that he and Theo Von and Joe Rogan have anywhere near that amount of power:

CNN asks Tim Dillon if comedians with podcasts are "part of a new establishment" and gets immediately destroyed ???? pic.twitter.com/oh3W1nI5Oc

— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) May 19, 2025

• "The US Department of Justice said it will investigate whether Chicago is discriminating against municipal job candidates by race after Mayor Brandon Johnson highlighted the number of Black officials in his administration while addressing a church on the city's south side," reports Bloomberg. "The investigation is 'based on information suggesting that you have made hiring decisions solely on the basis of race,' [Assistant Attorney General of the Civil Rights Division Harmeet] Dhillon, who was nominated by President Donald Trump, said in the letter."
• Will Pope Leo XIV have to deal with the IRS?
• Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase was breached by "criminals bribing employees and contractors in India to obtain client data," per Bloomberg. The Justice Department has opened a probe into the matter. Interestingly, "the perpetrators deployed what's called social engineering attacks—where criminals use people to gain unauthorized access to data, rather than exploiting flaws in computer code."
• Intelligentsia train fetishism continues, alas:

Banger headline. pic.twitter.com/6ybwa5ql17

— JR Urbane Network (@JRUrbaneNetwork) May 18, 2025