She Voted For Trump. His Tariffs Just Destroyed Her Music Store

Kacie Wright co-owns Houghton Horns, a specialty brass instrument shop in north Texas. One year after Liberation Day, her French horn prices are up 20%, her customers fled to Amazon, and the IEEPA refunds the Supreme Court ordered months ago still have not arrived.

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One year ago, Donald Trump signed what he called Liberation Day — a sweeping tariff package he promised would revitalize American manufacturing and punish countries that cheated the U.S. on trade. For Kacie Wright, the owner of Houghton Horns in north Texas, Liberation Day meant something very different: a 20% price increase on French horns, product lines she had to strip down, and a wave of customers who quietly decided to buy from Amazon instead. She did not gain a competitive advantage. She lost sales she will never get back.

American businesses paid $246 billion in Trump tariffs between March 2025 and January 2026. Texas businesses alone absorbed $26 billion of that hit. In Ohio, Andy Payne's Down Decor paid $2 million in tariffs and cut his workforce from 154 workers to 78. In February 2026, the Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA tariffs as unlawful and ordered refunds. Months later, those refunds still have not arrived. As Kacie Wright put it: "Even if the IEEPA refunds process does get worked out, we are still not going to be made whole for the loss of sales that went to Amazon or just never happened in the first place."

This is the core of the Liberation Day lie. Trump promised small business owners a level playing field. What they got was a government-engineered wealth transfer — from Main Street to the import giants who could absorb the costs and undercut them on price. The Supreme Court said the tariffs were illegal. The administration is slow-walking the refunds. And the damage to the music industry — to the kids who will not pick up an instrument because their parents cannot afford one — will last, in Kacie Wright's own words, ten years, twenty years. Liberation Day is a heist with a one-year anniversary.

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