Say ciao to Italian pasta, thanks to Trump

First he came for your eggs, and now he’s taking your pasta. 

President Donald Trump is slapping a 107% tariff on Italian pasta brands, causing them to soon be unable to stay in the U.S. market. This is partly thanks to Trump’s creepy antipathy toward Europe. 

Well, not all of Europe. 

Trump is very cool with Hungary’s authoritarian leader Viktor Orban and even Italy’s own fascist Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. But apparently Meloni didn’t do enough to get on Trump’s good side, because his Department of Commerce has been probing several Italian pasta companies.

For decades, Italian pasta makers have been investigated by the Commerce Department over allegations of dumping pasta into the U.S. market at low rates to undermine domestic competition. But—because this is the Trump era—it’s now so much more haphazard and stupid. 

Based on a complaint that Italian pasta was being deliberately underpriced, the Commerce Department reviewed 13 Italian companies—but it only requested documentation from two of them. Then it got mad and said that the companies were “uncooperative” because there were some untranslated Italian words and undefined acronyms in the material. 

The Trump administration then decided it could just assume that those two companies were representative of all 13 and slapped a 92% antidumping tariff on them. Then Trump added another 15% tariff because why not? 

So you may not be able to get any imported Italian pasta, but at least you can enjoy higher prices on pretty much every grocery item.

Perhaps Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent can come forward again and tell us that he feels our pain, just as he did when he spoke from the heart as a lowly soybean farmer—who happens to be worth $600 million. Or maybe he’ll tell us how great the economy is, er … will be in 2026 and 2027.

Bessent is also tasked with trying to spin the latest Trump trial balloon $2,000 stimulus check idea into something that is not at all a stimulus check. 

“It could be just the tax decreases that we are seeing on the president’s agenda. No tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security, deductibility of auto loans” he said. “Those are substantial deductions that are being financed in the tax bill.”

So because of his dumb tariffs, Trump took your money—which he now will give back to you. Well, some of it. Except maybe not. Trump could just decide that some other tax cuts from his “One Big, Beautiful Bill” somehow count as stimulus. 

Well, at least the holiday season is coming up, and surely that will mean more affordable goods, right? Yeah, no. And you can thank the tariffs for that too. Do your children love classic toys like Barbie and Hot Wheels? Hope you’ve saved up! 

Well at least the job market is … you know what? Never mind.