Thread by @Nash076

A 300% rate increase on international packages means lots of merch simply goes away.

Small content creators won't be able to afford to sell t-shirts or pins or mugs or any of that stuff anymore. freightwaves.com/news/us-to-lea…

It's either import the custom-made stuff, or try to find a US-based supplier with reasonable prices. That's not always easy.

It also means half of eBay just vanishes. Poof. Gone.

Because Trump thought the US (read: him personally) was being disrespected, essentially.

Same as most of his disastrous foreign policy. It's ego-driven and self-destructive.

https://twitter.com/APope45/status/1172693120221425664

The international postal agreement was a situation where there were no winners or losers. It was the best worst option to keep mail moving between nations at a reasonable cost.

Trump can't process a situation that isn't zero-sum. If someone else isn't losing, how can he win?

I could say a lot more on the subject of how our societal insistence on the existence of winners and losers and our inability to conceive of any other kind of interactions is slowly poisoning us, but Trump is an overdose.

This is going to hit both etsy and eBay really hard. Most of their non-US sellers simply won't be able to afford to ship to the US, or their buyers won't be willing to spend (as a spitball example) $400 to import a $50 item.

The damage will last for years and years.

I want to stress there's absolutely nothing you or I can do about this. It's done. Trump is going to let it fail, and no one can dissuade or stop him.

We're all just gonna have to suffer through it.