I first met Dane Chapin, a San Diego-area entrepreneur, in 2012, when he gave me a ride in his Prius and told me I was dead wrong about climate change. We’ve been close friends ever since. Sometimes he’s to my left politically, sometimes to my right. I’ve always admired his curiosity, optimism and independent thinking, especially when we disagree — as we did over his vote for Donald Trump in the last election.
One hundred days into this administration, Dane isn’t happy. “With Trump I thought, maybe, there might be a method to the madness,” he told me on Saturday. “I’m concerned now that there is madness to his method.”
To hear from Dane now is particularly valuable for the insight he offers as to why a critical constituency — the business-minded but non-MAGA side of Trump’s base — is beginning to sour on the president. It’s not about deportations, foreign aid, federal funding of universities or any of the issues that animate Trump’s usual critics. It’s about the tariffs.
“I’m being forced into survival mode regarding my business and our 80 employees, who I care for like a family,” Dane told me. “I have bigger things to worry about than what’s going on with Harvard.”
Dane’s principal business, which his family started more than 30 years ago, is USAopoly, or “the Op” for short. It makes themed versions of board games like Monopoly and Clue, and brings new ones to market, like a family party game called Tapple. His employees, he said, have excellent benefits and salaries ranging from the high five figures on up. He also told me that the company reviews about 2,000 game ideas a year. Between five and six make it to production.
A few years ago Dane tried to start a separate business with the actor Scott Eastwood, called Made Here, which focused on products manufactured in the United States. Great concept, but it didn’t pan out: “Americans love low prices more than they loathe a ‘Made in China’ sticker,” Dane concluded.
As for the Op, roughly three-quarters of its games are made in China, with the rest made in the United States. He recognizes that, logistically, it would make greater sense to produce them closer to his primary market.
But that’s not the way this market works. China, he said, has “a highly developed supply chain that allows America to enjoy a wide range of quality toys and games at very affordable prices.” If he had to make all his products domestically, the retail prices for most of his games would rise to about $35 to $40, from $20 to $25. “There would be no market at this price,” he said, and he would also have to “dramatically shrink” his work force. As for moving production to countries like India or Vietnam, it would take years. With no transition time, Trump’s tariffs have “the potential of obliterating the toy business.”
That’s the state of emergency that’s unfolding across his industry and beyond. In mid-March, Dane gave the green light for 15 containers of goods to be shipped from China. That was when the tariff rate was 20 percent. Before the goods could arrive in Vancouver for shipment to Indianapolis, the tariff rate had risen to 145 percent, potentially costing the company an additional $920,000.
“These goods might now make a round trip to China to allow us to avoid the 145 percent tariff until the more permanent, and lower, tariff is decided on,” Dane explained. The tsunami of economic consequences is moving fast. He has put all China-based production on hold. “There is a very narrow window to restart production that will enable filling shelves in time for holiday shopping” — by which he means Christmas. “Layoffs at many companies are already happening,” he added. “We are doing more of running a daily fire drill than running our business.”
What does Dane think of the Trump administration’s overall trade policy? He doesn’t object to taking a harder line on China. But he’s offended that the president is making tariff exceptions for big tech companies but not for the smaller American businesses that the administration is supposed to champion.
“Apple has more than $60 billion in net cash in the bank and a market cap that is 231 times larger than the market cap of the two biggest U.S. toy companies combined,” he noted. “The toy industry is a blip economically, yet we have been put in deep peril by the chaotic and random execution of trade policy.”
Does all this mean that he now wishes he’d voted for Kamala Harris? Not at all. Trump, he says, was “better than the Democratic alternative: namely a president, Biden, who was plainly deceiving the country about his mental health, and a complicit-in-the-deception candidate, Harris, who comes from the anti-business progressive wing of California politics that is ruining the state.”
“I don’t regret my vote, given the choices,” he added. “I do regret current trade policy.”
Certain readers of this column may be tempted to condemn Dane for caring more about the bottom line than the good of the country, as they see it. That strikes me as morally and politically obtuse.
Morally, because Dane’s focus on the bottom line translates directly to the livelihoods of 80 employees and the well-being of their families — a greater good, in my book, than simply screaming about Trump’s awfulness. Politically, because Trump’s calamitous management of the economy shouldn’t be an occasion to scold disaffected Trump voters. It’s a chance for a moderate, enterprising, business-friendly Democrat to win them over. “A drop of honey,” as Abraham Lincoln once said, “catches more flies than a gallon of gall.”
One additional point in the spirit of friendship: The tariffs Dane and so many others now suffer from were loudly trumpeted by the president during the campaign. The capricious and heavy-handed way in which they’ve been imposed is of a piece with Trump’s capricious and heavy-handed character. And the contempt for legality, procedure, consultation and fairness that lies at the root of the current economic chaos is no surprise from a president who seems to think he can govern via an endless succession of executive orders and social media posts.
Voters who thought they could afford to be indifferent to the president’s indecencies, personal and political, should draw the lesson: If you let a pirate loose, don’t be surprised when he takes your ship.
