Donald Trump's trade wars have caused pain to everyone from heartland farmers to American motorcycle manufacturers, but his latest plan to impose a 25% tariff on $300 billion worth of Chinese imports is now causing a new group of people to sweat: Bible sellers.
“We believe the administration was unaware of the potential negative impact these proposed tariffs would have on Bibles and that it never intended to impose ‘a Bible tax’ on consumers and religious organizations,” Mark Schoenwald, chief executive officer of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, told a panel of officials at the U.S. International Trade Commission.
Outstanding, simply outstanding. Donald Trump jacking up the price of Holy Bibles is (clasps hands together, a single tear forming) as on-brand a metaphor as one could hope for.
The situation is, well, both peculiar and not. Trump's tariffs would include printed materials, and industry executives say that the United States has for the most part lost the ability to print its own Holy Bibles due to the (again, this is so on-brand as to be physically painful) technology and skills required. Children's books will also be affected, but nobody is pretending to give much of a damn on that.
The solution that "evangelical" publishers are hoping for is simple: They want Bibles to be exempted from Trump's new tariffs, because Jesus. (Or more to the point, because money.) It will be harder to sell Bibles if the price sees a steep increase; many already-less-profitable editions would be discontinued entirely. It would be morally wrong to deprive people of their Bibles, even if not many of them are often cracked open.
There seem some obvious solutions to this problem. Of the people Trump truly cares about, meaning his still-loyal supporters and absolutely not one damn person besides them, a great many of them are Bible owners but precious few, televangelist-White-House-photo-op participants included, have much use for the inner contents of the thing. If Bible costs are about to go up 25%, why not simply print a Trump Edition of those Bibles that contains 25% less content?
Slim the book down a bit, both in paper and ink, and call it done. We do not particularly need the parts about who begat who, so those can be trimmed; top Trump supporters like Franklin Graham would not be too bothered if you lopped off the entire New Testament. Keep the Old Testament lists of what things are and are not abominations, because those are always crowd-pleasers; skip the newer, more controversial bits about forgiveness and socialism and having lumber wedged in your eye.
But if we're really being honest, even that is unnecessary. Cheaper still would be to take unsold copies of Trump's Art of the Deal, slap "Holy Bible" dust covers on them, and sell them to Trump's religious-minded supporters at twice the usual price. I promise you, nobody still in Trump's camp will ever notice the difference. That ought to free up more of the “original edition” Bibles for everyone else to share, and America will limp along, as usual, until the next election solves the problem.