“Economic vitals are proving resilient” and markets are “oddly serene.”

That sentence is spliced together from Tuesday’s mainstream financial media coverage of the trade war, which is coming up on another ostensible deadline next week. On August 1, countries which fail to strike a bilateral deal with Donald Trump will be subject to the unilaterally-determined levies communicated in a series of silly “letters” the administration circulated to foreign heads of state earlier this month.

Markets — equity markets, anyway — have decided to simply ignore Trump’s tariff bombast. And thanks in part to tens of billions in mechanical buying, US stocks were mostly unperturbed by Trump’s increasingly brazen attacks on the Fed in their quest for new record highs.

The Wall Street Journal suggested, not implausibly, that the world was better prepared for Trump’s tariff war this time around. “Businesses are benefiting from reflexes learned and changes made during the pandemic which compressed margins at the time, but [are] now paying off,” Tom Fairless wrote.

Domestically, year-two earnings revision breadth is now the most positive since 2022, according to Goldman, where David Kostin noted that “recent economic data releases have indicated a smaller impact from tariffs on consumer spending, inflation and the labor market than many investors feared earlier this year.”

That’s all fine, but amid the “serenity,” we shouldn’t lose track of the fact that somebody, somewhere has to pay these cursed trade levies. GM offered investors a reminder of that on Tuesday, when the company said that although it’s “making solid progress to mitigate” a third of the projected full-year tariff impact, the hit from the trade duties in Q2 was $1.1 billion on net.

So far, GM conceded, mitigation efforts have largely come to naught. And the tariff impact’s expect to be higher in Q3 (i.e., during the current quarter) “due to [the] timing of indirect tariff costs.” More or less all of the Q2 EBIT decline at GM was attributable to Trump’s tariffs, according to the company’s slide deck.

The results came a day after Stellantis said tariffs cost it €300 million during the first six months of the year, as production delays tied to the Trump administration’s trade war resulted in a 25% drop in deliveries to American customers.

Struggling automakers aren’t the only ones impacted by the levies, although they’re probably among the worst-suffering given limited capacity to pass along input cost inflation. An entertaining graphical piece published by the Journal on Sunday illustrated sweeping price hikes across lower-cost products sold on Amazon, where everything from “deodorant to protein shakes and pet care items” saw increases up to 30% since Trump first announced new tariffs in February. Walmart, by contrast, has lowered prices for comparable items since Inauguration Day.

Amazon suggested the Journal‘s analysis was misleading, but this is probably a good time to remind readers that Amazon at one point considered displaying “how much of an item’s cost is derived from tariffs,” to quote Punchbowl’s reporting from April. One phone call from Trump to Jeff Bezos was all it took to deep-six that idea.

Meanwhile, Trump’s belligerent approach to US-Canada relations (and it’s still hard to believe we’re in a place already where even that bilateral relationship is soured) has cost US spirits companies their Canadian footprint. According to Spirits Canada, a trade group, sales of US liquor in Canada are down by two-thirds amid a boycott. In Ontario, US spirits have all but evaporated, with sales falling 80%.

I could, of course, go on. And on. And on. But I think you get the point: The global economy may prove “resilient” and stocks might continue to exhibit equanimity in the face of adversity, but this crusade of Trump’s is exacting a toll. And eventually, consumers will pay it. Or some of it.

The question, as ever, is “For what?” Why is this necessary? Even if you can answer that question (and Trump thinks he can), you have to be able to demonstrate that the cost of the tariffs (which, by the way, is far higher if you incorporate lost trust between America and its trading partners) is worth it by presenting evidence that somebody, somewhere benefits. I don’t see any such evidence just yet, and I doubt much is forthcoming.