Meet the Small-Business Owner Suing Trump over Tariffs

The Washington Post

16:51 JST, May 19, 2025

PENSACOLA, Florida – After a long day promoting her new cookbook, entrepreneur Emily Ley sank into her couch and began writing about the threat that President Donald Trump’s tariffs posed to her nine-person company.

Ley sells high-end paper planners, advice books and other office staples online and at major stores such as Target. The only cost-effective way to run her company, Simplified, is to manufacture the products in China, she says. So when the White House signaled in March that it would escalate its trade war with Beijing, Ley wanted her Instagram followers to know who would foot the bill.

“I cannot be quiet about this anymore,” she wrote. “Tariffs are killing businesses.”

Ley watched as discussions about home organization and dinner prep in her Instagram comments shifted to debates over trade policy, with some commenters praising her transparency and others calling on her followers to switch to planners made in the United States.

“One minute I was talking about how to make an easy pot roast, and the next minute we’re talking about an international trade war,” Ley said

The post attracted the attention of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a nonprofit that asked Ley to join a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the tariffs. Now the 42-year-old mother of three and one-time Trump voter is in the vanguard of a rapidly expanding legal campaign arguing that the president overstepped his authority and usurped the role of Congress in applying levies to almost all imports entering the United States.

Ley said she had multiple conversations with the NCLA about what it would mean to sue the president. The NCLA describes itself as a nonpartisan organization that addresses violations of Americans’ civil liberties, but it has previously received financial support from conservative donor Charles Koch’s foundation – highlighting how backlash to Trump’s tariffs does not neatly follow traditional political lines.

“I knew that I could be putting a target on my back,” Ley said. Bots have attacked every post she shares on Instagram with pornographic links since the day she sued the president, she said. Some customers have told her that they will stop buying her products because of the lawsuit, but she has also attracted new buyers who want to support her political cause.

The Trump administration’s chaotic trade war has imposed punishing tariffs on China and other countries in an effort to rebalance a globalized economy that Trump says has disadvantaged American manufacturers. While the on-again, off-again tariffs have roiled markets and global supply chains, many large companies and top business executives have remained silent, in part for fear of drawing Trump’s ire, and no Fortune 500 company has pursued legal action.

That has left small businesses like Simplified to take the lead in challenging the tariffs. Operating on narrow margins dependent on cheaper foreign labor, many small businesses view the tariff payments they would owe the government as an existential threat, forcing them to weigh raising prices, laying off staff – or even closing.

Since Simplified filed its lawsuit in federal court in Florida in early April, four additional Florida small businesses joined the litigation. Another nonprofit, Liberty Justice Center, has filed a suit in the U.S. Court of International Trade on behalf of a group of small businesses – including a fishing gear provider, a women’s cycling business, and a wine and spirits company. The states of Oregon and California have also sued.

The complaints argue that no other president has used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to implement tariffs, and that Trump cannot bypass Congress’s authority to draft tariff laws simply by invoking an emergency. Andrew Morris, the NCLA’s Senior Litigation Counsel, said traditionally, businesses would be able to share input with federal agencies and lawmakers before tariffs of this magnitude are imposed.

“It’s not a one-man process,” Morris said. “That’s what happens when you bypass the democratic and administrative process.”

Tim Meyer, the co-director of the Center for International and Comparative Law at Duke University Law School, said the lawsuits have “a good chance of succeeding,” especially if any eventually reach the Supreme Court.

Trump is “trying to basically wholesale rewrite a whole bunch of federal legislation that Congress has passed over the years on the basis of a statute that doesn’t even use the word tariff,” said Meyer, who clerked for Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch when he served on the 10th Circuit Court.

Small businesses – defined as having fewer than 500 employees – employ more than 61.7 million Americans, about 46.4 percent of private-sector employees, according to 2023 data from the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy. They make up 43.5 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, the standard measure of a country’s economic output.

When Trump was asked whether he would consider tariff relief for small businesses during an interview with NBC News in May, he brushed off concerns.

“They’re not going to need it. They’re going to make so much money,” he said.

Ley said she wanted to “throw rocks” when she saw that interview.

“When you listen to the president talk about it, it’s like we don’t exist,” Ley said. “It’s impacting real families, real American jobs, real American livelihoods, real American customers – but he won’t acknowledge it.”

Ley’s road to suing the president of the United States began in 2011, shortly after her first son was born. Overwhelmed by the responsibilities of managing a house, a business and a newborn, Ley did what many American mothers would do: She drove to Target.

But every product she picked up stressed her out more, as she paged through prompts to manage household budgets.

Ley realized she could use the design skills she honed making her wedding invitations and stationery to create a planner that contained a simple schedule and a to-do list. Soon, she began selling the plastic-bound planners with laminated covers on Etsy, an online marketplace.

After she paid off her business expenses, she had zero profit for the first year. So she began meeting with manufacturers in the United States, in search of a cost-effective plan for production.

Her vision for the planners included gold spiral binding and stickers that could be used to mark key events. Again and again, Ley said, she was told that there was no way to make the product in a profitable way in the United States.

She began staying up late and sending emails to factories in China.

In 2012, she finally connected with a Chinese manufacturer who took a chance on her. “It just took off from there,” she said.

As Ley juggled a growing business and family, the 2016 presidential race was not at the top of her mind. Originally from the South, Ley said she was raised to vote for “party not person” and grew up in a family that revered Republican politicians like George W. Bush. In November of that year, Ley walked into a voting booth at her local library with her then 5-year-old son in tow. They said a prayer and Ley cast her ballot for Trump.

Ley said she regretted the decision almost immediately. As a mother who had just undergone IVF to have twins a year earlier, she soon realized that she did not agree with the policies of the man she voted for. Shortly after the election, Ley changed her voter registration to Democrat.

After Trump announced he would run for president again, Ley said she worried about his campaign promises to increase tariffs and tried to convince other voters he was serious about overhauling the global economy. Then, when he was reelected, she braced for impact.

The levies Trump implemented during his first term had created new costs for the company, snarling plans to hire more staff and launch an app. Ley knew the tariffs would be higher in Trump’s second term, but even her most pessimistic projections did not account for the chaos to come.

Each of Simplified’s signature planners costs about $12 to make in China and includes specialized pieces that Simplified was unable to source in the United States. At the height of trade tensions with China this spring, Simplified was looking at paying tariff rates of 145 percent – which would add an almost $18 tax on each planner.

The levies threatened to eat into Ley’s profits and increase the costs of running her business. Simplified already sells the planners for $54 each, and Ley said she does not think she can stay competitive if she raises the price any further.

Simplified employees have been exploring whether other countries have the manufacturing capabilities to produce its planners and other products, fielding calls from potential partners in India, Turkey and Southeast Asia. But the company is struggling to make long-term plans as the White House repeatedly changes its tariff policies. Since the inauguration on Jan. 20, Trump administration officials have announced new or revised tariff policies more than 50 times, according to a Washington Post analysis.

Tariffs now stand at 30 percent on imports from China after the Trump administration announced a deal Monday to lower tariffs for 90 days. But the continued uncertainty is making it impossible to make plans, Ley said.

Ley has paused plans to launch an Amazon storefront and to expand her product line. She is making cuts to bring down the cost of each planner, like replacing the keepsake boxes the planners ship in with bubble wrap. She’s even looking at downsizing her staff or reducing salaries.

Ley said she’s frustrated that she’s confronting these choices not because of a lack of consumer demand or bad business decisions, but because of intentional policies by the White House.

“It feels a little bit like our business didn’t fail. Our government failed us, Ley said.

She recently wrote on Instagram that she feels like a “pawn” in a game.

“I feel like we’re red and black checker pieces in a cheap checkers game when it could be chess,” she told The Post. “I don’t feel like we’re part of some sort of really forward-thinking strategy.”