The End of $800

Your $12 Phone Case Just Got a 30% Tax

The great de minimis exemption is dead.

Trump killed it with an executive order, effective August 29, 2025. No more duty-free imports under $800. The White House says it’s about fentanyl. Of course it is.

Four million packages a day crossed the border under this rule. That’s 1.36 billion shipments in 2024, up from 134 million in 2015. Someone was making money on this exponential growth curve, and it wasn’t American retailers paying full freight on their inventory.

Congress never authorized this. Article I gives tariff power to the legislative branch, not the executive. But Trump found the magic words: “national emergency.” Same playbook as 2018. Yesterday he pardoned Ross Ulbricht, Silk Road founder. Today he’s saving America from fentanyl in $15 sundresses.

They claim 98% of narcotics seizures came through de minimis shipments. Impressive statistic. Also meaningless. A gram of fentanyl in a Shein package counts the same as a container of cocaine. They’re counting packages, not pounds.

The postal exemption stays. You know, the anonymous channel perfect for drugs. UPS and FedEx get hammered while China Post sails through. This isn’t about security. Never was.

Temu and Shein accounted for 30% of daily packages. Their model was brilliant. Ship direct, skip warehouses, dodge tariffs. American retailers watched their lunch disappear. The market’s adjusting though. Temu’s pushing “local” inventory. Shein raised prices in April. DHL quit shipping over $800 months ago. They all saw it coming.

This is a consumption tax on the working class, nothing more.

Rich people don’t shop Temu. They don’t need $8 leggings or $12 phone cases. But millions stretching paychecks in this inflation do. The average Trump voter just raised their own taxes and doesn’t know it yet.

The EU’s threshold was EUR 22. Switzerland charges duties over $75. America’s $800 limit was absurd. Some retailers played fair, paid duties, stocked inventory. They got crushed by competitors gaming the system. There’s an argument for fairness here. Just not the one Trump’s making.

Air cargo from Asia dropped 10.7% after May’s China ban. Real economic data, not hypothetical seizures. When tariffs hit 145% before settling at 30%, someone blinked. China might throw Trump a bone now. Tighten some chemical regulations, make a show. He’ll declare victory. Prices stay high.

Amazon wins. Their hybrid model positions them perfectly. Walmart wins. Target wins. Any retailer with capital to absorb inventory costs wins. Small businesses importing specialty goods lose. Etsy sellers lose. The entrepreneur dropshipping from Alibaba loses. Consumers lose most.

History shows this pattern before. Smoot-Hawley started protecting farmers, ended with the Depression. The rhetoric hasn’t changed much. National security. Unfair competition. American jobs.

The de minimis exemption survived 94 years because it made sense. Administrative costs exceeded revenue on small shipments. That changed when e-commerce exploded and China weaponized American trade rules against American retailers. Maybe killing it was overdue. Maybe 4 million packages daily was unsustainable.

But they didn’t need the fentanyl lie. They didn’t need emergency powers for what Congress should’ve debated. Then again, maybe they did. “Raising prices to help Best Buy” doesn’t poll well. Voters needed the drug dealer story.

The packages keep flowing, just with duties now. Prices up. Revenue up. Someone declares victory. Meanwhile actual fentanyl arrives through the same channels it always has. But at least those Shein hauls cost 30% more.