The Boats Are Slowing Down

A few days ago, I read that container traffic at the Port of Los Angeles is down 35% from last year. Not a typo. Thirty-five.

No dramatic explosions. No headlines screaming “Emergency.” Just fewer ships showing up.

And that’s how you know it’s real. The effects of Trump’s trade war are arriving the same way cargo does—slowly, heavily, with paperwork. And once it’s here, there’s no fast way to send it back.

Last month, he imposed tariffs as high as 145% on goods from China.

It takes about thirty days for ships from Asia to hit the West Coast, and another week or two to reach the East. That means now is when it starts to hit.

Imports drop. Prices rise. Supply chains seize. Jobs vanish.

It will feel at first like a glitch. Your usual toothpaste might be out of stock. The summer shoes you were eyeing are suddenly fifty dollars more. Your local Target has less of everything, but you can’t say why. Then the layoffs will begin. Dockworkers. Truckers. Small business wholesalers who can’t pivot fast enough. Warehouse shifts that never get called back.

You’ll hear excuses. Some companies will blame “supply chain rebalancing.” Others will cite “seasonal volatility.” But the truth is simpler. The global trading system doesn’t run on ideology. It runs on reliability. And when you detonate it in the name of “leverage,” you don’t get a clean negotiation.

You get shortages, panic ordering, inflation, and eventually, contraction.

Amazon just had one of its slowest quarters in North America. Home Depot and Walmart CEOs have already gone to plead their case. But even if the White House reverses course today, the damage is already moving downstream. Global shipping is inertia-based. You can’t whip a freighter into a U-turn.

This isn’t about whether you love or hate Trump. It’s about whether you understand the economy as a system or as a stage. He sees it as performance. The rest of us have to live inside the consequences.

Some call it a slow-motion wave. Others call it a reckoning. I think it’s more like a mirror.

We’re about to see what happens when a nation that runs on consumer ease has to face friction. The abundance we got used to was always fragile. We just didn’t know who had the power to break it.

We know now.