Donald Trump’s Next Move Might Be Driving Uniqlo Out Of The Country

The list of Donald Trump’s atrocities against democracy is growing so rapidly that it’s becoming a tired exercise to spill even digital ink recounting each individual item. In his latest move, though, the President, apparently no longer satiated with his standard poor-people-ignoring, planet-destroying, Kremlin-friendly agenda, has moved on to a new strategy for making America demonstrably worse: Maybe, possibly running our beloved Uniqlo straight up out of the country. This is not a drill. As reported by CNN and noted by our eagle-eyed friends at GQ Style, Uniqlo boss Tadashi Yanai has strongly hinted that he would shutter Uniqlo’s U.S. stores altogether if the Trump White House were to impose an onerous tariff on foreign imports as part of its efforts to conjure up nonexistent manufacturing jobs in the United States. There is more at stake here than the chance to buy a fresh crop of Airism undershirts to get you through another summer. The President’s inane, bumper-sticker-as-policy “Buy American” shtick demonstrates a frighteningly impoverished understanding of how knee-jerk economic protectionist measures work in practice. (Remember in SimCity, when you greedily hiked commercial taxes up to 90 percent and then were shocked that they just up and left your burgeoning metropolis altogether? That’s Donald Trump right now, except in real life.) As Yanai explains, both the cost of a tariff and the higher production costs associated with stateside manufacturing would be passed on to the consumer, so either way, efforts to put the squeeze on overseas retailers would be bad for your wallet. Read more at GQ.