The tantrum has a price tag.

After the Supreme Court spent the morning dismantling another pillar of the executive branch’s wish list, Donald Trump didn’t just vent on social media. He reached for the biggest, bluntest instrument in his toolkit. The ruling was "deeply disappointing," he said. His solution? A flat 10 per cent global tariff on every single thing that crosses the border.

It’s a classic move. When the law won’t bend, you break the economy instead.

For those of us who track the hardware that keeps the world spinning, this isn’t just another headline. It’s a gut-punch. We’ve spent the last decade watching tech companies try to "de-risk" their supply chains—a fancy way of saying they’re moving factories from China to Vietnam or India so they don’t get caught in the crossfire of a trade war. But a global tariff doesn't care where your factory is. It doesn't care if you’re Apple building iPhones in India or Samsung sourcing OLED panels from Korea. If it’s imported, it’s taxed.

Let’s look at the math, because the math is ugly. If you’re eyeing a high-end laptop that currently retails for $2,000, you aren't paying $2,000 anymore. Between the tariff and the inevitable margin padding companies use to "absorb" volatility, that sticker price is headed north of $2,300. That’s the specific friction here. It’s not a theoretical policy debate. It’s a $300 tax on your ability to do your job.

The logic behind this is a relic. The idea is that if you make foreign goods expensive enough, companies will magically start building motherboards in Ohio. It sounds great in a stump speech. It’s a disaster in a cleanroom. You don’t just "build" a semiconductor ecosystem because the President is mad at a court ruling. It takes decades. It takes hundreds of billions in capital. It takes a workforce that doesn't exist yet.

In the meantime, the bill lands on us.

Silicon Valley is already vibrating with the kind of performative panic we haven't seen since the last time the port of Long Beach backed up. Investors are staring at their spreadsheets, trying to figure out how Nvidia survives a world where every component in its H100 chips gets dinged by a 10 per cent surcharge at every stop in the journey. Modern tech isn't built in one place. It’s a series of handoffs. A chip designed in California might be etched in Taiwan, packaged in Malaysia, and assembled into a server in Mexico. Under this plan, the taxman gets a cut at every border. It’s a compounding nightmare.

The Supreme Court ruling that triggered this—a blow to the administration’s ability to bypass Congress on trade and regulation—was supposed to be a win for the "checks and balances" crowd. Instead, it’s become the catalyst for a protectionist fever dream. Trump is essentially saying that if he can’t control the rules of the game inside the house, he’ll just charge everyone a cover fee to stay in the neighborhood.

There’s a certain irony in it. The very people who claim to want to "deregulate" the economy are now proposing the most massive, sweeping government intervention in the history of global trade. They’re creating a world where the government picks winners and losers based on how much of their bill of materials is sourced from a domestic zip code.

Tech CEOs will fly to D.C. They’ll take the meetings. They’ll tweet about how they’re "working closely with the administration" to secure exemptions. We’ve seen this movie before. Some will get a pass because they donated to the right Super PAC. Others will get crushed because they didn’t. That’s the "efficiency" of a tariff-driven economy. It’s not about competition; it’s about who has the best lobbyist.

So, here we are. The hardware cycle is already slowing down. Innovation is hitting a wall of diminishing returns. And now, we’re adding a 10 per cent "disappointment tax" to the mix. It’s a bold strategy. It assumes the rest of the world will just sit there and take it without retaliating, which they won't.

I wonder how many people realize that "Bringing jobs back to America" is just a polite way of saying "Everything you own is about to get worse and cost more." At least the press releases will be printed on American-made paper. If we can still afford the ink.