NEW: As Trump Campaigns With Lawler, His District Pays The Price for Tariffs [Courier New York]

“Small business owners across the Hudson Valley describe vanishing inventory, decreasing margins, and a congressman who keeps voting to keep the president’s tariff chaos going.”

One small business owner said she’s now “working 20% harder to make 10 or 15% less money.” Another described cutting payroll and working more hours herself just to stay afloat as prices for basic supplies skyrocket.

The local business owners also described Lawler as absent. “I’ve never met him, or he’s never come to my shop to talk to me and ask me how these things affect me,” one coffee shop owner said.

REMINDER: While Hudson Valley families and small businesses struggle, Lawler has doubled down on his votes to protect tariffs, claiming that they will help “reduce overall costs,” and can be an “effective” negotiation tool.

DCCC Spokesperson Riya Vashi:
“Hudson Valley small businesses have made it clear: Donald Trump’s tariffs are hurting working families, crushing local shops, and driving up prices — and Mike Lawler keeps voting to make it worse. Lawler is once again choosing loyalty to Trump over his constituents, and he’s going to pay the price in November.”

Read the damning coverage for yourself:

Courier New York: As Trump campaigns with Lawler, his district pays the price for tariffs

• When the box arrived at Bloomy Cheese & Provisions in Dobbs Ferry, the UPS driver wouldn’t hand it over. Jessica Galen had ordered roughly $600 worth of Japanese drink stirrers and tabletop goods months earlier […] UPS was demanding nearly $500 in tariff fees, brokerage charges, and other costs Galen had no way to anticipate when she’d placed the order.
• She refused the shipment. Weeks of phone calls to UPS and the Japanese vendor followed. Eventually the small artisan producer in Japan told her they couldn’t help further, citing too many other American clients in the same position. The shipment never reached her. The Japanese company, Galen suspects, may never sell to a US buyer again.
• Galen’s story is one of many like it playing out across the Hudson Valley, where small business owners say President Trump’s tariff policies—backed repeatedly by US Rep. Mike Lawler (R-Pearl River)—have created more than a year of vanishing margins, lost inventory, and impossible planning.
• Lawler has repeatedly voted to preserve Trump’s tariff regime, including a February 2026 vote against terminating the national emergency that imposed tariffs on Canadian goods. At a CNN town hall in April 2025, he defended the administration’s trade agenda, saying “a tax bill, deregulation, increasing domestic production of energy, all of that is going to reduce the overall cost of living in the United States.”
• More recently, he told CNN that higher prices from the Iran war were “absolutely worth it”—even after running a 2024 campaign ad complaining gas prices had “gone through the roof.”
• For business owners in and around his district, that reassurance has proven cold comfort.
• At Mimi’s Coffee House in Mount Kisco, owner Selamawit “Mimi” Wieland-Tesfaye watched the price of a 25-pound box of tomatoes climb from just below $30 to over $80 in a matter of months. Chocolate powder is up 20%. Coffee prices jumped 10% in October—part of a national 20%+ spike driven by Trump’s Brazil tariffs—with another 5% increase her roaster is holding in reserve.
• Every delivery, from milk to linens, now comes with a separate “fuel charge” line item she didn’t see a year ago.
• “In the last three to five months, all the stuff I buy has gotten up by at least 10 to 12%,” Wieland-Tesfaye said.
• She raised her menu prices by 15 to 25 cents at the start of the year. She refuses to do it again, even as her costs continue climbing. To make up the difference, she’s cut payroll and is working more hours herself.
• About 20 miles south in Sleepy Hollow, Transom Books owner Chris Steib offered the clearest articulation of why even businesses that don’t directly import are getting crushed.
• “I’m working 20% harder to make 10 or 15% less money,” he said.
• Financial woes aside, the small business owners share one more grievance: the congressman elected to represent them has been absent.
• “I’ve never met him, or he’s never come to my shop to talk to me and ask me how these things affect me,” Wieland-Tesfaye said. “They typically don’t really come and talk to us, especially if they think we’re not on their political ticket line.”
• Galen, who serves as an elected trustee in Dobbs Ferry, connected the damage to her own shop to the broader crisis Lawler’s votes are reinforcing.
• Rockland County Legislator Dana Stilley made the same point at a press conference Thursday on the eve of Trump’s visit, citing local economic struggles and the president’s recent comment that he wasn’t thinking about Americans’ rising costs “even a little bit.”