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Rick Wold­en­berg thought he had come up with a sure-fire plan to pro­tect his Chica­go-area ed­u­ca­tion­al toy com­pa­ny from Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s mas­sive new tax­es on Chi­nese im­ports.

“When he an­nounced a 20% tar­iff, I made a plan to sur­vive 40%, and I thought I was be­ing very clever,” said Wold­en­berg, CEO of Learn­ing Re­sources, a third-gen­er­a­tion fam­i­ly busi­ness that has been man­u­fac­tur­ing in Chi­na for four decades. “I had worked out that for a very mod­est price in­crease, we could with­stand 40% tar­iffs, which was an un­think­able in­crease in costs.”

His worst-case sce­nario wasn’t worst-case enough. Not even close.