Donald Trump's trade war is on the brink of going from bad to worse. Up until now, American consumers have seen the stock market tank (and go through wild swings) and are beginning to see higher prices for some of the things they buy. But all that's about to go into overdrive, as the shock to the global trading system works its way down all of the supply chains. The next big phase of this may wind up being empty shelves in the stores -- which is going to be a monumental psychological shock to consumers.

Americans aren't generally very good at sacrifice. We do try to pull together when necessary, but usually for an external reason: A big natural disaster. The 9/11 attacks. A war. A global pandemic. But even then there are limits to what Americans will put up with (as evidenced by the politicization of COVID-19 protection measures, to name just one example). When George W. Bush announced a global war on terrorism after the 9/11 attacks, he pointedly did not call for any sacrifice from his fellow Americans -- he told them to go shopping, instead.

But this time around the catastrophe is internal. It was caused by one man. And he seems awfully blasé and dismissive about it. After all, he won't personally be feeling the effects, so why should anyone else get upset?

Here is what is coming down the pike for the American economy:

While high tariffs on Chinese products have been in place since early April, the availability of Chinese products and the price that consumers pay for them has not changed that much. But some companies are now starting to raise their prices. And experts say that the effects will become more and more obvious in the coming weeks, as a tidal wave of change stemming from canceled orders in Chinese factories works its way around the world to the United States.

The number of massive container ships carrying metal boxes of toys, furniture and other products departing China for the United States has plummeted by about a third this month.

The reason consumers haven't felt many of the effects yet is because it takes 20 to 40 days for a container ship to travel across the Pacific Ocean. It then takes another one to 10 days for Chinese goods to make their way by train or truck to various cities around the country, economists at Apollo Global Management wrote in a recent report. That means that the higher tariffs on China that went into effect at the beginning of April are just starting to result in a drop in the number of ships arriving at American ports, a trend that should intensify.

By late May or early June, consumers could start to see some empty shelves, and layoffs could occur for retailers and logistics industries. The major effects on the U.S. economy of shutting down trade with China will start to become apparent in the summer of 2025, when the United States might slip into a recession, said Torsten Slok, an economist at Apollo.

"U.S. consumers will within a few weeks see empty shelves in clothing stores, toy stores, hardware stores and retail drugstores, and higher prices of the goods that still are on the shelves," he said.

Molson Hart, the chief executive of Viahart, a toy company, wrote on X: "It's almost like we're speeding towards a brick wall but the driver of the car doesn't see it yet. By the time he does, it'll be too late to hit the brakes."

Estimates vary as to when all of this is going to take place. It depends on when factory orders in China were cancelled, how long it takes to get across the Pacific Ocean, how far down the falloff in orders goes, and how much American corporations stocked up in anticipation of the trade war. But sooner or later even the most well-stocked warehouses will be emptied. Sooner or later, empty shelves in the stores will appear if nothing changes in the meantime.

Toys are getting a lot of media attention, because it is such an obvious example to use. The vast, vast majority of toys sold in America are made in China. But it goes far beyond toys. The impacts are going to be felt in many sectors of the economy, some worse than others (depending on how dependent each sector is on Chinese goods). Clothing and shoes will be hit hard. Back-to-school supplies will too. Fireworks are almost entirely Chinese-produced. And a whole lot of what hardware stores sell is made in China as well. Empty shelves could be in the near future for any or all of them -- and hundreds of other products as well.

As I said, the effects will be both economic (either paying higher prices or not being able to buy what you need) as well as psychological. Empty shelves are, to be blunt, shocking to Americans. The last two times this happened were both a function of disease -- the shortage of eggs caused by the bird flu virus and the widespread shortages (anyone else remember standing in line to buy toilet paper?) of the COVID era. But this time there'll be no external reason why it is happening for people to blame.

Empty shelves always make for scary stories on the news. A camera pans over a store's aisle showing big huge gaps in the products on the shelves, and the commentary pretty much writes itself: "Americans are shocked to see empty shelves at their local stores!"

That's what's coming, in the very near future. It's already happening in small businesses, since they can't afford to fill up a warehouse with six months' worth of goods to sell. They had no means to stock up before the tariffs hit, and their choice now is a stark one indeed: stop ordering products from China to put on their shelves (and go out of business because they don't have anything to sell); order the products anyway and raise the prices to over twice what they used to charge (and go out of business because nobody is going to buy it for that insane price); or order the products anyway and sell them for the old prices (and go out of business heavily in debt, for losing so much money at the end). You'll note that none of those choices include weathering the storm somehow and things working out in the end. This is the situation now being faced by independent toy stores and discount clothing stores and shoe stores and drugstores and local hardware stores and appliance stores and too many others to even mention. And this is before it filters out to the corporate big-box stores. When it hits them, it's going to be unavoidable for any American shopper. Empty shelves will become the biggest economic story of the year on the news.

Donald Trump doesn't seem especially worried about any of this. Here's how he answered the issue yesterday:

You know, somebody said, "Oh, the shelves are going to be open." Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know? And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.

Again, so far the focus is on toys and what this could all mean for the Christmas shopping season. But that's an amazing amount of callousness from Trump, you've got to admit. "Hey kiddies, you've got to sacrifice and be happy with less on Christmas morning, and maybe it'll cost your parents a couple of bucks more -- but be of good cheer knowing you're doing it all to make China blink in my trade war!" That is not exactly going to fly with the public (that's my humble guess, at any rate).

This could still largely be avoided. Team Trump is counting on being able to announce some trade deals soon, and that will probably make Wall Street happy for a while. But absent a trade deal with China, it won't matter all that much to the biggest supply chains. Even with a brand-new trade deal in place with Japan or India, the Chinese goods are still going to have a 145 percent tariff on them.

There's the prospect of a lawsuit wiping out Trump's tariffs too. The groups suing are arguing that there was no actual emergency and thus Trump applied the tariffs illegally in the first place. If a judge (or a number of them) agrees, they could halt the tariffs for the time being.

Trump could also be talked into excluding certain businesses or even whole business sectors from these insanely-high tariffs. Toys may be the first on this list, since that's where the media attention is now focusing. It's also being proposed that small businesses be exempt, but that would be trickier to actually implement. Either way, Trump has been open to carving out certain things from his grandiose tariff announcements when enough CEOs complain to him, so this is a real possibility.

Or Trump could back down in a big way. Ideally for the White House (in order to save face), this would involve both countries announcing a rollback on their tariff rates simultaneously, as a "measure of good faith" that negotiations were going to happen soon. Actually having negotiations underway would also be somewhat of a balm to the economy. But this would have to be a gigantic step backwards for Trump, since it's estimated that any tariff of 50 percent or more would still have the practical effect of an embargo between the two countries. Even at 50 percent, it'd be tough for any retailers to actually make money -- and that would involve Trump pulling back by almost 100 percent on his current tariff rate (a smaller rollback seems more likely, to put it another way).

Any of these options would have to happen extremely quickly for them to be enough to solve the problem of empty shelves in the near future. When a supply chain breaks down, you can't just turn it back on again with the flip of a switch. There's still that unavoidable one-to-two-month lag time built in. But the big stores could probably survive if they knew they could restock at a reasonable price, and some of the small businesses could also survive the gap (perhaps by just closing their store for a few months until their shelves were full again, which would be rough but still better than bankruptcy).

It's still a long way until Christmas. The prospect of empty toy store shelves isn't going to be seen as critical yet. Even so, Trump's callous disregard of the prospect of empty shelves -- for a lot of other sectors than just toys -- is pretty tone-deaf, you've got to admit. If he continues to brush off the bare shelves American consumers start to see with their bare eyes, he's going to seem woefully out of touch. Because dismissively sneering about people having to pay "a couple of bucks more" isn't exactly "I feel your pain."

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant