There’s also the claim that it was sent too early, so regardless of what the error was, these were going to be the demands all along. They were just moving much slower in the discussion prior to the letter being sent. A wise attempt to boil the frog, and then somebody moved the pot over a rocket engine.

It looks stupid on the surface, but I’m concerned it’ll be used as a fake justification to drop nukes on China.

It won’t hit all at once for a lot of different reasons. Retailers’ back stock is not subject to tariff because it has already been imported. Raw material lead times for products assembled in the US will be longer than products imported ready for store shelves. Apple recently made the news for importing planefuls of iPhones the weekend before the tariff was applied. Smaller businesses won’t be able to do stuff like that, but big corporations will have likely done similar things to soften/slow price increases. And, until additional duties go into effect worldwide, lots of companies had already diversified their manufacturing out of China for US-bound products because of the already existing tariffs from Trump’s first term.

But once the companies have to pay the higher price, so will we all.