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NEW YORK — A tax on tea once sparked rebellion. This time, it’s just causing headaches.

Importers of the prized leaves have watched costs climb, orders stall and margins shrink under the weight of President Trump’s tariffs. Now, even after Trump has given them a reprieve, tea traders say it won’t immediately undo the damage.

“It took a while to work its way through the system, these tariffs, and it will take a while for it to work its way out of the system,” says Bruce Richardson, a celebrated tea master, tea historian and purveyor of teas at his shop, Elmwood Inn Fine Teas, in Danville, Ky. “That tariffed tea is still working its way out of our warehouses.”

While some bigger firms are behind the biggest supermarket brands, the premium tea market is largely the work of smaller businesses — family farms, specialty importers and a web of little tea shops, tea rooms and tea cafes across the U.S. Amid an onslaught of tariffs, they have become showcases for the levies’ effects.

On their shelves, selection has narrowed, with some teas missing because they’re no longer viable products to stock with the steep levies. In their warehouses, managers are consumed with uncertainty and operational headaches, including calculating what a blend really costs, with ingredients from multiple countries on a roller coaster of tariffs. And in backrooms where the wafting scent of fresh tea permeates, owners have been forced to put off job postings, raises, advertising and other investments so they can have cash available to pay duties when their containers arrive at U.S. ports.

“If I were to add up all the money I’ve spent on tariffs that weren’t there a year ago, it could equal a new employee,” says Hartley Johnson, who owns the Mark T. Wendell Tea Co. in Acton, Mass.

Johnson’s prices used to stay static for a year or longer. He ate the tariff costs before being forced to respond. His most popular tea, a smoky Taiwanese one called Hu-Kwa, has steadily risen from $26 to $46 a pound.

He knows some customers are reconsidering.

“Where is that tipping point?” Johnson asks. “I’m kind of finding that tipping point is happening now.”

That tipping point already came for one tea company in the City of Commerce.

International Tea Importers, already under financial strain from climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic, said that tariffs were the final blow, creating an untenable cash flow crunch and forcing its closure after 35 years in business.

“We just became over-leveraged financing — not just the inventory, but also the tariffs,” says the company’s chief executive, Brendan Shah.

Despite the other financial challenges, if not for the tariffs, Shah says, it may have survived.

“Unpredictable tariff policies,” he wrote to customers in announcing the company’s closure, “have created the final, insurmountable barrier.”

Though Trump backed off some tariffs on agricultural products last week, many in the tea trade are wary of celebrating too soon and caution tea drinkers shouldn’t either. Much of next year’s supply has already been imported and tariffed, and the full impact of those duties may not have fully spilled downhill.

Meantime, other tariff-driven price hikes persist. All sorts of other products tea businesses import, such as teapots and infusers, remain subject to levies, and costs for some American-made items, like tins for packaging, have spiked because they rely on foreign materials.

“The canisters, the bamboo boxes, the matcha whisks, everything that we import, everything that we sell has been affected by tariffs,” says Gilbert Tsang, owner of MEM Tea Imports in Wakefield, Mass.

Though globally tea reigns supreme, imbibed more than anything but water, it has long been overshadowed by coffee in the U.S. Still, tea is entwined in American history from the very beginning, even before colonists angry with tariffs dumped tons of it in Boston Harbor.

Boston may run on Dunkin’ today, but it was born on tea.

The 1773 revolt that became known as the Boston Tea Party rose out of the British Parliament’s implementation of tea tariffs on colonists, who rejected taxation without representation in government. After an independent United States was born, one of the new government’s first major acts, the Tariff Act of 1789, ironically set in law import taxes on a range of products including tea. In time, though, trade policy came to include carve-outs for many products Americans rely on but don’t produce.

For more than 150 years, most tea has passed through U.S. ports with little to no duties.

That began to change in Trump’s first term with his hard-line approach to China. But nothing compared to what came with his return to the White House.

In July, the most recent month for which the U.S. International Trade Commission has tallied tariff numbers, tea was taxed at an average rate of over 12%, a huge increase from a year earlier when it was just under one-tenth of a percent. In that single month, American businesses and consumers paid more than $6 million in tea import taxes, amassing in just 31 days more tariffs than any previous full year on record.

“All over again, taxation without representation,” says Richardson, an advisor to the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum. “Our wants and needs and our voices are not being represented because Congress is avoiding the issue by simply allowing the president to act like George III.”

All told, tea importers paid about $19.6 million in tariffs in the first seven months of 2025, nearly seven times as much as the same period last year.

It’s all been confounding to those steeped in the world of tea, on which the U.S. depends on foreign countries for nearly all of the billions of pounds Americans brew each year. Though a number of small tea farms exist in the U.S., they can’t fill Americans’ cups for more than a few hours of the year.

Said Angela McDonald, president of the United States League of Tea Growers: “We don’t have an industry and we can’t produce one overnight.”

Sedensky writes for the Associated Press.

Clippers owner Steve Ballmer is being sued by 11 former investors in the sustainability firm Aspiration Partners.

Ballmer was added this week as a defendant in an existing civil lawsuit against Aspiration co-founder Joseph Sanberg and several others associated with the now-defunct company. Ballmer and the other defendants are accused of fraud and aiding and abetting fraud, with the plaintiffs seeking at least $50 million in damages.

“This is an action to recover millions of dollars that Plaintiffs were defrauded into investing, directly or indirectly, in CTN Holdings, Inc. (‘Catona’), previously known as Aspiration Partners, Inc,” reads the lawsuit, which was initially filed July 9 in Los Angeles County Superior Court, Central District.

Attorney Skip Miller said his firm, Miller Barondess LLP, filed an amended complaint Monday that added the billionaire team owner and his investment company, Ballmer Group, as defendants in light of recent allegations that a $28-million deal between Aspiration and Clippers star Kawhi Leonard helped the team circumvent the NBA’s salary cap.

“Ballmer was the perfect deep-pocket partner to fund Catona’s flagging operations and lend legitimacy to Catona’s carbon credit business,” says the amended complaint, which has been viewed by The Times. “Since Ballmer had publicly promoted himself as an advocate for sustainability, Catona was an ideal vehicle for Ballmer to secretly circumvent the NBA salary cap while purporting to support the company as a legitimate environmentalist investor.”

Although Ballmer did invest millions in Aspiration, it is not known whether he was aware of or played a role in facilitating the company’s deal with Leonard. The Times reached out to the Clippers for a comment from Ballmer or a team representative but did not receive an immediate response.

CTN Holdings filed for bankruptcy in March and, according to the lawsuit, is no longer in operation.

In late August, Sanberg agreed to plead guilty in federal court to a scheme to defraud investors and lenders of more than $248 million. On Sept. 3, investigative journalist Pablo Torre reported on his podcast that after reviewing numerous documents and conducting interviews with former employees of the now-defunct firm, he did not find evidence of any marketing or endorsement work done by Leonard for the company.

That was news to the plaintiffs, according to their amended lawsuit.

“Ballmer’s purported status as a legitimate investor in Catona was material to Plaintiffs’ decision to invest in and/or keep their investments with Catona,” the complaint states.

It also says that “Sanberg and Ballmer never disclosed to Plaintiffs that the millions of dollars Ballmer injected into Catona were meant to allow Ballmer to funnel compensation to Leonard in violation of NBA rules and keep Catona’s failing business afloat financially. Sanberg and Ballmer’s scheme to pay Leonard through Catona to evade the NBA’s salary cap was only later revealed in 2025, by journalist Pablo Torre.”

Miller said in a statement to The Times: “A lot of people including our clients got hurt badly in this case. This lawsuit is being brought to make them whole for their losses. I look forward to our day in court for justice.”

The NBA announced an investigation into the matter in early September. Speaking at a forum that month hosted by the Sports Business Journal, Ballmer said that he felt “quite confident … that we abided [by] the rules. So, I welcome the investigation that the NBA is doing.”

The Clippers said in a statement at the time: “Neither Mr. Ballmer nor the Clippers circumvented the salary cap or engaged in any misconduct related to Aspiration. Any contrary assertion is provably false: The team ended its relationship with Aspiration years ago, during the 2022-23 season, when Aspiration defaulted on its obligations.

“Neither the Clippers nor Mr. Ballmer was aware of any improper activity by Aspiration or its co-founder until after the government instituted its investigation.”

Leonard also has denied being involved in any wrongdoing associated with his deal with the now-defunct firm. Asked about the matter Sept. 29 during Clippers media day to open training camp, Leonard said, “I don’t think it’s accurate” that he provided no endorsement services to the company. He added that he hadn’t been paid all the money due to him from the deal.

President Donald Trump’s razing of the White House’s East Wing to build a ballroom has put some news organizations following the story in an awkward position, with corporate owners among the contributors to the project — and their reporters covering it vigorously.

Comcast, which owns NBC News and MSNBC, has faced on-air criticism from some of the liberal cable channel’s personalities for its donation. Amazon, whose founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, is another donor. The newspaper editorialized in favor of Trump’s project, pointing out the Bezos connection a day later after critics noted its omission.

It’s not the first time since Trump regained the presidency that interests of journalists at outlets that are a small part of a corporate titan’s portfolio have clashed with owners. Both the Walt Disney Co. and Paramount have settled lawsuits with Trump rather than defend ABC News and CBS News in court.

“This is Trump’s Washington,” said Chuck Todd, former NBC “Meet the Press” host. “None of this helps the reputations of the news organizations that these companies own, because it compromises everybody.”

Companies haven’t said how much they donated, or why

None of the individuals and corporations identified by the White House as donors has publicly said how much was given, although a $22 million Google donation was revealed in a court filing. Comcast would not say Friday why it gave, although some MSNBC commentators have sought to fill in the blanks.

MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle said the donations should be a concern to Americans, “because there ain’t no company out there writing a check just for good will.”

“Those public-facing companies should know that there’s a cost in terms of their reputations with the American people,” Rachel Maddow said on her show this week, specifically citing Comcast. “There may be a cost to their bottom line when they do things against American values, against the public interest because they want to please Trump or buy him off or profit somehow from his authoritarian overthrow of our democracy.”

NBC’s “Nightly News” led its Oct. 22 broadcast with a story on the East Wing demolition, which reporter Gabe Gutierrez said was paid for by private donors, “among them Comcast, NBC’s parent company.”

“Nightly News” spent a total of five minutes on the story that week, half the time of ABC’s “World News Tonight,” though NBC pre-empted its Tuesday newscast for NBA coverage, said Andrew Tyndall, head of ADT Research. There’s no evidence that Comcast tried to influence NBC’s coverage in any way; Todd said the corporation’s leaders have no history of doing that. A Comcast spokeswoman had no comment.

Todd spoke out against his bosses at NBC News in the past, but said he doubted he would have done so in this case, in part because Comcast hasn’t said why the contribution was made. “You could make the defense that it is contributing to the United States” by renovating the White House, he said.

More troubling, he said, is the perception that Comcast CEO Brian Roberts had to do it to curry favor with the Trump administration. Trump, in a Truth Social post in April, called Comcast and Roberts “a disgrace to the integrity of Broadcasting!!!” The president cited the company’s ownership of MSNBC and NBC News.

Roberts may need their help. Stories this week suggested Comcast might be interested in buying all or part of Warner Bros. Discovery, a deal that would require government approval.

White House cannot be ‘a museum to the past’

The Post’s editorial last weekend was eye-opening, even for a section that has taken a conservative turn following Bezos’ direction that it concentrate on defending personal liberties and the free market. The Oct. 25 editorial was unsigned, which indicates that it is the newspaper’s official position, and was titled “In Defense of the White House ballroom.”

The Post said the ballroom is a necessary addition and although Trump is pursuing it “in the most jarring manner possible,” it would not have gotten done in his term if he went through a traditional approval process.

“The White House cannot simply be a museum to the past,” the Post wrote. “Like America, it must evolve with the times to maintain its greatness. Strong leaders reject calcification. In that way, Trump’s undertaking is a shot across the bow at NIMBYs everywhere.”

In sharing a copy of the editorial on social media, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote that it was the “first dose of common sense I’ve seen from the legacy media on this story.”

The New York Times, by contrast, has not taken an editorial stand either for or against the project. It has run a handful of opinion columns: Ross Douthat called Trump’s move necessary considering potential red tape, while Maureen Dowd said it was an “unsanctioned, ahistoric, abominable destruction of the East Wing.”

In a social media post later Saturday, Columbia University journalism professor Bill Grueskin noted the absence of any mention of Bezos in the Post editorial” and said he wrote to a Post spokeswoman about it. In a “stealth edit” that Grueskin said didn’t include any explanation, a paragraph was added the next day about the private donors, including Amazon. “Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post,” the newspaper said.

The Post had no comment on the issue, spokeswoman Olivia Petersen said on Sunday.

In a story this past week, NPR reported that the ballroom editorial was one of three that the Post had written in the previous two weeks on a matter in which Bezos had a financial or corporate interest without noting his personal stakes.

In a public appearance last December, Bezos acknowledged that he was a “terrible owner” for the Post from the point of view of appearances of conflict. “A pure newspaper owner who only owned a newspaper and did nothing else would probably be, from that point of view, a much better owner,” the Amazon founder said.

Grueskin, in an interview, said Bezos had every right as an owner to influence the Post’s editorial policy. But he said it was important for readers to know his involvement in the East Wing story. They may reject the editorial because of the conflict, he said, or conclude that “the editorial is so well-argued, I put a lot of credibility into what I just read.”

Bauder writes for the Associated Press.