April Fools’: The Joke’s on Us
By the Ghost of HST
APRIL 1, 2025
Welcome to Liberation Day, the national holiday no one asked for—born from the raw loins of economic nihilism, wrapped in a flag, and lobbed at the global marketplace like a glitter bomb full of thumbtacks.
It’s April Fools’, but the biggest prank of the day isn’t Tic Tac’s Dr Pepper–flavored mints, or Nutella’s fake chocolate-themed bed and breakfast. No, the real joke is being played on you, America—by a man who once sold steaks out of a Sharper Image catalog and now believes he can tariff us into utopia.
Trump’s “global trade war” has officially mutated into a full-blown economic hallucination. On paper, he’s slapping tariffs on every country with a VAT system—meaning basically all of them—and calling it “reciprocity.” In practice, it’s a $1.1 trillion tax bomb detonating directly over 33 million small businesses, many of which are being quietly marched into the unemployment line like cattle headed for a meat raffle.
👉 The Telegraph: MAGA Backfires as Tariffs Slam Small Business
Consider Mo Johnson, founder of Better Display Cases, whose imports from China jumped from 13% to 33%. He tried moving production stateside. He failed. Now he’s in Vietnam, hurling money at a supply chain that used to work, wondering if customers will still buy his boxes at a 15% markup just to cover the damage done by one man’s ego and a Sharpie.
“Some small businesses will shut down,” says John Arensmeyer of the Small Business Majority.
No shit.
Here’s another one for the ash heap: StreetStrider, a company I helped get started. We’ve been importing three-wheeled elliptical bikes from China for seventeen years—until Trump’s first round of tariffs hit us like a Louisville Slugger to the kidneys. Now? We’re staring down millions owed to Customs and Border Protection, and with the total tariff rate climbing to 47%, there’s no sane path forward. Bankruptcy isn’t just a possibility—it’s the business plan.
You can’t triple your costs, drive off your suppliers, and expect $30-an-hour workers in Ohio to start cranking out precision-machined aluminum parts overnight. Trump promised a low-skill manufacturing boom. What we got was Walmart execs begging Beijing for mercy, and Target’s CEO warning that prices will spike within days for millions of Americans just trying to afford socks and Pop-Tarts.
This isn’t policy. It’s a prank no one told the markets was a joke. And like all the worst April Fools’ gags, it’s only funny if you’re the one holding the detonator.
Meanwhile, China, Japan, and South Korea are forming a cold-eyed economic axis of their own—because nothing unites former enemies like shared exposure to a reality TV tyrant with a tariff fetish and a Twitter ghostwriter.
And just to season the punchbowl:
- Goldman Sachs revised its earnings forecasts downward
- Consumer confidence hit a 12-year low
- Corporate mergers are down 30%—a number so grim it should be written in chalk on the toe tag of American capitalism
In any other year, this is the part where the curtain drops and someone yells, “Gotcha.” But not in 2025. This isn’t satire. This is the show. The camera is live, the teleprompter is blank, and nobody realizes we’re in the third act of a farce staged for the gods.
So sure—laugh at BabyQuip’s drone baby supply service or Set Active’s fake sweaty gym gear. Marvel at the Nutella B&B. But while marketers are selling giggles, the government is selling collapse. The American economy is now a novelty gag—and the only punchline is poverty.
And the cruelest part? By the time you finish reading this dispatch, it may already be obsolete—because Trump might change his mind by lunchtime… or double the tariffs by dinner.
Welcome to Liberation Day. God help the liberated.
Filed from a bunker beneath the ruins of the American Dream, where the echoes of laughter sound suspiciously like sobs.
