The Dictatorship
Tea tariffs that once sparked a revolution are now creating angst
NEW YORK (AP) — A tax on tea once sparked rebellion. This time, it’s just causing headaches.
Importers of the prized leaves have watched costs climb, orders stall and margins shrink under the weight of President Donald Trump’s tariffs. Now, even after Trump has given them a reprievetea traders say it won’t immediately undo the damage.
“It took a while to work its way through the system, these tariffs, and it will take a while for it to work its way out of the system,” says Bruce Richardson, a celebrated tea master, tea historian and purveyor of teas at his shop, Elmwood Inn Fine Teas, in Danville, Kentucky. “That tariffed tea is still working its way out of our warehouses.”
While a handful of bigger firms are behind the biggest supermarket brands, the premium tea market is largely the work of smaller businesses, from family farms to specialty importers to a web of little tea shops, tea rooms and tea cafes across the U.S. Amid an onslaught of tariffsthey have become showcases for the levies’ effects.
On their shelves, selection has narrowed, with some teas now missing because they’re no longer viable products to stock with steep levies on top. In their warehouses, managers are consumed with uncertainty and operational headaches, including calculating what a blend really costs, with ingredients from multiple countries on a roller coaster of tariffs. And in backrooms where the wafting scent of fresh tea permeates, owners have been forced to put off job postings, raises, advertising and other investments so they can have cash available to pay duties when their containers arrive at U.S. ports.
“If I were to add up all the money I’ve spent on tariffs that weren’t there a year ago, it could equal a new employee,” says Hartley Johnson, who owns the Mark T. Wendell Tea Company in Acton, Massachusetts.
Johnson’s prices used to stay static for a year or longer. He ate the tariff costs before being forced to respond. His most popular tea, a smoky Taiwanese one called Hu-Kwa, has steadily risen from $26 to $46 a pound.
He knows some customers are reconsidering.
“Where is that tipping point?” Johnson asks. “I’m kind of finding that tipping point is happening now.”
Though Trump backed off some tariffs on agricultural products last week, many in the tea trade are wary of celebrating too soon and caution tea drinkers shouldn’t either. Much of next year’s supply has already been imported and tariffed and the full impact of those duties may not have fully spilled downhill.
Meantime, other tariff-driven price hikes persist. All sorts of other products tea businesses import, from teapots to infusers, remain subject to levies, and costs for some American-made items, like tins for packaging, have spiked because they rely on foreign materials.
“The canisters, the bamboo boxes, the matcha whisks, everything that we import, everything that we sell has been affected by tariffs,” says Gilbert Tsang, owner of MEM Tea Imports in Wakefield, Massachusetts.
Though globally, tea reigns supreme, imbibed more than anything but water, it has long been overshadowed by coffee in the U.S. Still, tea is entwined in American history from the very beginning, even before colonists angry with tariffs dumped tons of it in Boston Harbor.
Boston may run on Dunkin’ today, but it was born on tea.
The 1773 revolt that became known as the Boston Tea Party rose out of the British Parliament’s implementation of tea tariffs on colonists, who rejected taxation without representation in government. After an independent United States was born, one of the new government’s first major acts, the Tariff Act of 1789, ironically set in law import taxes on a range of products including tea. In time, though, trade policy came to include carve-outs for many products Americans rely on but don’t produce.
For more than 150 years, most tea has passed through U.S. ports with little to no duties.
That began to change in Trump’s first term with his hardline approach to China. But nothing compared to what came with his return to the White House.
In July, the most recent month for which the U.S. International Trade Commission has tallied tariff numbers, tea was taxed at an average rate of over 12%, a huge increase from a year earlier when it was just under one-tenth of a percent. In that single month, American businesses and consumers paid more than $6 million in tea import taxes, amassing in just 31 days more tariffs than any previous full year on record.
“All over again, taxation without representation,” says Richardson, an adviser to the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum. “Our wants and needs and our voices are not being represented because Congress is avoiding the issue by simply allowing the president to act like George III.”
All told, tea importers paid about $19.6 million in tariffs in the first seven months of 2025, nearly seven times as much as the same period last year.
It’s all been confounding to those steeped in the world of tea, on which the U.S. depends on foreign countries for nearly all of the billions of pounds Americans brew each year. Though a number of small tea farms exist in the U.S., they can’t fill Americans’ cups for more than a few hours of the year.
“We don’t have an industry and we can’t produce one overnight,” says Angela McDonald, president of the United States League of Tea Growers.
Trump’s suspension of tea tariffs came too late for some businesses, including Los Angeles-based International Tea Importers Inc., for which tariffs created an untenable cash-flow crunch.
“We just became over-leveraged financing not just the inventory, but also the tariffs,” says the company’s CEO, Brendan Shah.
Tariffs weren’t the only thing the 35-year-old business was facing, but without them, Shah says it may have survived.
“Unpredictable tariff policies,” he wrote to customers in announcing the company’s closure, “have created the final, insurmountable barrier.”
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Matt Sedensky can be reached at [email protected] and https://x.com/sedensky
President Donald Trump faces a serious new hurdle to secure taxpayer funding for his exceedingly controversial proposed White House ballroom after the Senate parliamentarian ruled against a $1 billion provision in a bill to fund his pet project.
The parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, said over the weekend that Republicans cannot include the ballroom funding provision in a larger partisan bill because it is a technical violation of Senate rules, according to the ranking Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee who released the parliamentarian’s findings.
“A project as complex and large in scale as Trump’s proposed ballroom necessarily involves the coordination of many government agencies which span the jurisdiction of many Senate committees,” MacDonough concluded, according to Sen. Jeff Merkley.
The administration has estimated that $220 million of the $1 billion would go toward building the new ballroom in the East Wing, which was demolished last October to make way for the new structure Trump has envisioned.
The parliamentarian in her ruling said the provision violated the Byrd rule, which is meant to curb extraneous spending in proposed budget reconciliation bills. A violation of the Byrd rule also means the provision would be subject to a 60-vote filibuster threshold, effectively killing it since Democrats are in opposition.
“The president started talking about this thing with $100 billion, then $200 billion, and he was going to pay for it,” Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., said. “And now it’s a billion — or $100 million, $200 million — and now a billion dollars, and he wants the American people to pay for a gilded ballroom when they cannot afford to drive their kids to a soccer game.”
Some Republicans disagreed with the parliamentarian’s interpretation of Senate rules. Ryan Wrasse, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader John Thune, pushed back against the ruling.
“Redraft. Refine. Resubmit. None of this is abnormal during a Byrd process,” Wrasse wrote on X on Saturday.
It was not immediately clear whether Republicans would be allowed under Senate rules to resubmit the provision — the budget resolution only allows language to originate from the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“As drafted, the provision inappropriately funds activities outside the jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee,” the ruling reads.
Trump previously said that the ballroom would be privately funded and cost around $400 million. The ballooning cost has provoked open criticism from Republicans, from vulnerable moderates to hardline conservatives, in what could become a potential revolt.
Mychael Schnell and Syedah Asghar
Peggy Helman is a desk associate at MS NOW.
Ahead of an all-day prayer event backed by the White House on Washington’s National Mall Sunday, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson doubled down on Christianity as a core part of the American identity — over the objections of religious freedom advocates.
“The naysayers who have created this new term ‘Christian Nationalism’ as a pejorative, a derogatory term, are trying to silence the influence and voices of Christians,” Johnson said in an interview with Fox News before the event commemorating the nation’s 250th anniversary. “And I think that’s wildly inappropriate.”
In addition to the speaker, the evangelical-style festival — dubbed the “National Jubilee of Prayer” — featured Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio and several conservative Christian leaders and right-leaning pop-culture figures. They included Franklin Graham, son of the late evangelist Billy Graham, Jonathan Falwell, son of the late Liberty University founder Jerry Falwell, and Sadie Carroway Robertson of “Duck Dynasty” fame.
The White House, in a statement posted to social media Sunday, said “thousands of Americans are gathering on the National Mall TODAY for a powerful day of prayer, praise, and patriotism as we chart the course for America’s next 250 years and rededicate ourselves to ONE NATION UNDER GOD.”
In between returning from his official trip to China and issuing fresh threats to IranPresident Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I HOPE EVERYBODY AT REDEDICATE 250 IS HAVING A GOOD TIME. IF THERE IS ANYTHING I CAN DO TO HELP, JUST HAVE OUR BEAUTIFUL, BOTH INSIDE AND OUT, RACHAEL C.D., GIVE ME A CALL. I’M BACK FROM CHINA!!!,” an apparent reference to Rachel Campos-Duffy, Fox and Friends co-host and wife to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.
Hegseth, who has led Christian prayer servicesat the Pentagon during his tenure, recounted a story of President George Washington at Valley Forge in a video message.
“Amid all the bleak nights, the loss and despair, the lack of proper support, George Washington performed a profound act: he prayed,” Hegseth said. “And on this day of ‘Rededicate 250,’ let us follow George Washington’s example. Let us pray as he did. Let us pray without ceasing. Let us pray for our nation on bended knee. And let us ask our lord and savior Jesus Christ as Washington did on that momentous day.”
Speaking passionately at the podium, Southern Baptist Pastor Robert Jeffress told the crowd that “these leaders who loved our country and loved our God would be called Christian Nationalists today, and it is a title they would have gladly embraced. By the way if being a Christian Nationalist means loving Jesus christ and loving America, count me in!”
Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a religious freedom advocacy organization, denounced the event as a “Jubilee of Christian Nationalism.”
“As we approach the 250th anniversary of American independence on July 4 – and President Trump’s Christian Nationalist ‘jubilee’ on May 17 – I urge everyone to celebrate the fundamentally American invention of church-state separation, which promises everyone the freedom to live as themselves and believe as they choose, as long as they don’t harm others,” the organization’s CEO, Rachel Laser, said in a statement. “Church-state separation is what enables us to come together as equals and build a stronger democracy.”
Laser said in an interview with C-SPAN Sunday that the event “should alarm all Americans who are patriotic.” Hailing the separation of church and state as a pillar of American democracy, she slammed the event as a “government-sponsored national church service on the National Mall and it’s extremely problematic. It’s violating our promise.”
“And then I just want to bring us back to something that the founders were focused on that we forget about today, which is that they were avoiding violence, bloody wars, crusades,” Laser added Sunday. “They saw what happens when you don’t have church-state separation. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that in America we’ve become more and more violent the more we undermine church-state separation in this country.”
The government watchdog group Public Citizen also condemned the event, saying in a statement, “This highly politicized mess is not what Congress envisioned a decade ago in passing legislation creating an official commission for the 250th anniversary.”
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW, with a focus on how global events and foreign policy shape U.S. politics. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.
President Donald Trump signaled Sunday that the U.S. is prepared to resume fighting Iran, threatening that the country had “better get moving, FAST, or there won’t be anything left of them.”
Trump spoke by phone Sunday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an Israeli official told MS NOW, as the U.S.-Iran ceasefire was strained further by new strikes in the U.A.E. that sparked a fire at a nuclear power plant.
“For Iran, the Clock is Ticking, and they better get moving, FAST, or there won’t be anything left of them. TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!,” Trump wrote in social media post.
Trump is expected to meet with his senior national security team on Tuesday in the White House Situation Room to “discuss options for military actions against Iran,” according to reporting by Axiosciting two American officials. MS NOW has not independently confirmed the reporting.
Iran did not take responsibility for the fresh strike in the U.A.E., but a senior Emirati official told MS NOW that the attack was an “unacceptable escalation” and a violation of the ceasefire. The official added that “this is an attack against a nuclear power plant during a ceasefire.”
In a statement, the U.A.E Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the strike an “unprovoked terrorist attack.”
“These attacks constitute a dangerous escalation, an unacceptable act of aggression and a direct threat to the country’s security,” the statement said. “The targeting of peaceful nuclear energy facilities is a flagrant violation of international law, the UN charter and the principles of humanitarian law.”
No increase in radiation has been detected at the plant and no injuries were reported, according to Emirati officials. Two of the three drones that attacked the plant were shot down.
One drone hit an electrical generator outside the inner perimeter of the Barakah Nuclear Power Plant, the Abu Dhabi Media Office said, CNBC reported. The International Atomic Energy Agency said it was following the situation closely and called for “maximum military restraint” near any nuclear power plant.
The U.A.E., a primary target of Iran since the war began, has been attacking in retaliation, according to recent reporting by The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Emirati officials have not confirmed that they have carried out military strikes.
The U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran has stretched into its 11th week, as domestic gas prices continue to soar amid the double naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, a critical oil trade route. Tehran, already crippled by sanctions before the war, faces a worsening economic crisis. Peace talks, mediated by Pakistan, have so far failed with the U.S. remaining firm on its demand that Iran abandon its nuclear program and Iran underscoring its right to enrichment.
Contrary to statements made by Trump administration officials that Iran’s missile stockpile has been destroyed, classified U.S. intelligence assessments of Iran’s military capacity have revealed that it has regained access to key missile sites and launchers.
Julia Jester contributed to this report.
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW, with a focus on how global events and foreign policy shape U.S. politics. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.
David Rohde is the senior national security reporter for MS NOW and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. Previously he was the senior executive editor for national security and law for NBC News.
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