The corporate media launched a coordinated spin campaign this week, declaring President Donald Trump’s tariffs a failure because a luxury dog bed startup backed by leftist billionaire Mark Cuban couldn’t find a way to manufacture its high-end pet products in America for under $250.
Reuters, U.S. News & World Report, and Fast Company each ran virtually identical stories sourced to Reuters on July 2 featuring the same weak anecdote: a California-based startup named “Plufl” that “tried to make its dog beds in the U.S.” but “couldn’t make it work.”
Left-wing media regurgitates the same stories to their readers, typically without context, critical facts, and without the obvious inconsistencies addressed.
Tariff critic Steve Moore recently admitted that he was probably wrong to oppose Trump on these economic policies.
The media is trying to use this one isolated example of a company selling niche products to elites as a representative sample of all small business struggles in the Trump economy.
The supposed tragedy in this story pushed by the media?
American labor and material costs made their luxury dog beds, which were designed for the upper crust of the canine world, too expensive for their well-heeled customers, who balked at a $250 price tag.
The featured company is no mom-and-pop shop. It was backed by Mark Cuban’s venture capital firm and boosted by Shark Tank media exposure.
The founders, in typical corporate fashion, blamed Trump’s China tariffs for making their venture into American manufacturing untenable.
“Trump’s tariffs make it too expensive to manufacture in America,” they claim, while brushing over the fact that their core product is a high-margin pet accessory for wealthy consumers.
Lost in the sympathetic coverage is any serious analysis of why American manufacturing is more expensive: overregulation, high electricity costs, union labor premiums, permitting delays, inflated land and other costs, and the broader result of decades of outsourcing driven by the same elite class now complaining about the consequences of policy shifts they oppose.
Experts say that the left-wing obsession with ‘green’ energy, which is substantially more inefficient and expensive than traditional energy production, has severely hurt American manufacturing.
While an average manufacturing company’s energy costs can be 5-10% of their overall budget, most modern manufacturing plants are energy-intensive, where their company budgets have an average 30% spent on energy.
In one telling detail, Fast Company admits that when the company switched production back to China and Vietnam, it dropped prices to $110, but still wasn’t satisfied with profits.
So they dropped the product entirely. This isn’t about American labor vs. foreign labor. It’s about a Silicon Valley backed brand trying to scale a luxury product for mass retail using globalist economics and whining when it didn’t work.
The media keeps blaming Trump’s tariffs for the aftershocks of the disastrous Biden economy and four years of policies, even though just yesterday Trump announced a major trade deal with Vietnam that would reduce tariffs from Vietnam to America to 20%.
In May, grocery prices had the biggest drop in five years.
Egg prices recently hit a five-month low.
Yahoo News admitted that gas prices recently hit the lowest prices since 2021, the last year Trump was in office.
The media refuses to admit Trump’s tariffs are working as intended, Trump’s economic policies are bringing consumer prices down, and reliable metrics are showing the American economy improving.
The media used this boutique business failure to slam Trump’s broader economic policies, with Reuters and U.S. News both highlighting Biden administration efforts to “restore global trade norms” and distance themselves from the Trump-era protectionist shift.
The media is cherry-picking one example to try and make broader claims against Trump’s economic policies.
The articles also noted supply chain problems in sourcing aluminum from China, as well as child car seats and ‘high end notebooks’ from China.
These are not products that are representative of the broader U.S. economy.
In reality, Trump’s tariffs were never about plush dog beds for pampered Manhattanite poodles.
They were a strategic attempt to realign American trade with national interests, revive domestic industry, and reduce dependence on hostile foreign regimes like the Chinese Communist Party.
As well, the long-term impact of the tariffs in rebuilding U.S. manufacturing will take time to realize, as the new prices cause domestic production and business development.
The failure of a Cuban-funded pet bed startup doesn’t indict tariffs, it indicts the fantasy economy that Silicon Valley and its media enablers have built, where venture capital subsidizes vanity products, and globalism is the only acceptable supply chain strategy.
The media also treats Cuban as a business genius when his one major lifetime deal was a bit lucky to say the least.
Cuban, who was not the founder or principal of Broadcast.com, had an anemic user base of 570,000 sign-ups.
The company, founded in 1989 by Cameron Jaeb, had Cuban come on in 1995, and it sold itself to Yahoo in 1999 for $5.7 billion in stock, or nearly $10,000 per user.
Cuban usually falsely claims he was the company founder, when this is not true.
The company idea to broadcast radio stations on the internet was closed by Yahoo altogether, which shut the service down entirely, in 2002.
Yahoo, at the time a major public company, took an enormous write-down.
Cuban managed to make a billion dollars by clearly having a very good relationship with someone at Yahoo to offload a company for nearly $6 billion that would be completely defunct three years later.
The media wants Americans to believe the free market is under threat because a company backed by Cuban the business genius couldn’t produce a high-end pet pillow in America at Chinese prices.
Meanwhile, real American manufacturers continue to adapt, build, and compete without media fanfare or Mark Cuban’s money.
The Trump economy continues to post major gains that are important to Americans: cheap gas, cheaper grocery bills, and tariffs that will preserve American jobs.
Trump’s tariffs were originally projected to bring in $100 billion per year, but already in the first six months of the year they have brought in over $80 billion, far outpacing estimates.
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