Americans are about to feel the ‘pain’ Trump promised for us in February.

“The magnitude and speed at which these prices are coming to us is somewhat unprecedented in history.”

That’s how Walmart CFO John David Rainey characterized the effect of Donald Trump’s global trade war on his company’s bottom line — effects that the retailer could not continue to absorb. “It’s a dynamic and fluid environment,” Rainey told the Wall Street Journal. That’s a diplomatic way of stressing how destabilizing Trump’s on-again, off-again tariff regime has been for any business that relies on foreign supply chains. And “the full impact of the trade war on consumers has yet to come,” the Journal warned. Thus, the nation’s largest retailer has had no choice but to raise its prices, with more price hikes for consumers expected to come online soon.

Walmart had resisted increasing its prices. As the Journal reported last month, Walmart and other major retailers like Home Depot, Target, and Amazon were “pressuring their suppliers to absorb cost increases and dropping free perks from corporate offices.” Indeed, Walmart became the object of the Chinese Communist Party’s contempt when it attempted to force its Chinese suppliers to eat the new costs associated with U.S. imports. “Walmart’s demand for Chinese suppliers to bear the full tariff burden is unreasonable and disrupts fair competition and international trade order,” one state television broadcaster declared.

But Walmart and its competitors alike warned the president and their shareholders that these contingencies would not repeal the law of supply and demand. Something would have to give.

In the weeks that have elapsed since “Liberation Day,” Americans did not experience tariff-induced sticker shock. Many analysts expected the public to encounter price hikes when U.S. retailers exhausted their current inventories. But Walmart’s price adjustments are likely to be hard to miss.

It operates over 4,600 stores (along with 600 Sam’s Clubs) and has the second largest share of the retail e-commerce market, behind Amazon. Last year, while Americans were cutting back on discretionary purchases, they were increasing the amount of time and money they spent at Walmart. “Groceries account for more than half of Walmart’s sales, and Walmart has benefited from its pricing advantage,” CNN reported at the time. “Walmart’s prices are around 25% lower than traditional supermarkets, according to analyst comparisons.” In March, a YouGov survey ranking consumers’ preferences found that nearly 64 percent of U.S. adults named Walmart as their preferred grocer (with Target coming in a distant second place). Estimates indicate that as much as 44 percent of the U.S. population patronizes Walmart annually.

Walmart isn’t the only retailer raising consumer prices to match increased operating costs. Some of them even have the gall to properly inform their customers about the conditions that have compelled them to increase prices — acts of radical transparency White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt deemed “a hostile and political act” last month. The truth hurts, and no amount of hectoring from the lectern in the James Brady Briefing Room will repel market forces.

Americans are about to feel the “pain” Trump promised for us in February. Defenders of the tariff regime insist that temporarily reducing Americans’ purchasing power is necessary to realize a more fulfilling social compact, one preferred by the social engineers in Washington. Doubtlessly, millions of Americans support that project; at least, in the abstract. But the costs of this endeavor are about to come due while its rewards will be realized, if they are ever realized in the way the tariff regime’s architects imagine, in the distant future.

By far and away, Donald Trump’s voters’ first priority was to see the consumer costs that ballooned under Joe Biden go down. That’s what Trump promised to do, but he has done the opposite. Those who think themselves clever will try to argue voters out of their resentment toward that broken promise, but you can’t argue a bad policy into a good one. And pundits never get the last word. That privilege is exclusive to the voters.