Inquirer: Trump moves to tax parcels; some retailers give up on US

As the United States ends a tariff exemption for small parcels on Friday, some retailers have stopped selling to US customers while others are seeking temporary workarounds in the hope the tariff rate may be reduced.

The removal of “de minimis”—duty-free treatment of e-commerce packages worth less than $800—for products originating from China and Hong Kong exposes those goods to tariffs of 145 percent on most Chinese goods following US President Donald Trump’s decision last month. The move upended global trade and triggered retaliation from Beijing.

https://www.msn.com/en-ph/news/other/trump-moves-to-tax-parcels-some-retailers-give-up-on-us/ar-AA1E4Aw6

Daily Express: Temu halts Chinese shipments overnight as Trump kills tariff loophole in crackdown

Temu, the Chinese e-commerce giant, has ceased shipping products from China to the United States, according to a company spokesperson last Friday as a key tariff loophole was cancelled by the Trump administration.

Now, all U.S. orders will be dispatched from domestic warehouses within America, and products that were once shipped directly from China and dominated the site are now listed as out of stock.

This shift follows the Trump administration’s move to to end the de minimis exemption that permitted Chinese-made goods valued at no more than $800 to enter the U.S. duty-free. The exemption, which President Trump denounced as a “big scam” harmful to American small businesses, expired on this morning.

Most business will never notice, except those order stock & office supplies from China. As usual, King Donald is screwing the consumers, the “Little People”, every day American citizens.

Incidentally, this de minimis exception helped my family get their N-95 masks during the COVID epidemic. I found a supplier in Shanghai whose N-95 mask had the proper U.S. certification and who would ship them direct from Shanghai to my front porch for a reasonable price.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/temu-halts-chinese-shipments-overnight-as-trump-kills-tariff-loophole-in-crackdown/ar-AA1E4Ksu

New York Post: Elon Musk rips ‘moron’ Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro: ‘Dumber than a sack of bricks’

It’s a dog-eat-dog world, and it’s always entertaining to see the mutts chewing on one another. “Dumber than a sack of bricks” applies equally to F’Elon Musk as well as to Peter Navarro.

Musk, 53, responded Tuesday to the trade adviser’s suggestion on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Monday that the Tesla boss was “not a car manufacturer” but “a car assembler,” pointing to the electric vehicle company’s importing of batteries and other key components to manufacture its cars. 

“Navarro is truly a moron. What he says here is demonstrably false,” Musk wrote on X, adding in a subsequent post in which he tagged the “Re—d Finder”: “Tesla has the most American-made cars. Navarro is dumber than a sack of bricks.”

https://nypost.com/2025/04/08/us-news/elon-musk-rips-moron-trump-trade-adviser-peter-navarro