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Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal. If you import goods from outside the country, you’ve had a difficult year. Since last April, the Trump administration has been applying all kinds of tariffs to different items from different countries. You might imagine this is cars, steel, coffee, semiconductor chips. But when we did a show on these tariffs last year, we learned so much about all the different things Bay Area businesses bring stateside.
It wasn’t just commodities, but products they designed themselves that were produced in, say, China. All these different companies — the coffee importers, the FedEx locals — could maybe get a refund now that the Supreme Court has ruled last year’s version of the tariffs were illegal.
So this morning, we begin our show with one of those small businesses. Alfred Mai is the owner of ASM Games, co-inventor of the card games Do You Really Know Your Family? and These Cards Will Get You Drunk. Welcome.
Alfred Mai: Hey, thanks for having me.
Alexis Madrigal: So tell me about these games. What is the actual business? What are you producing?
Alfred Mai: Yeah. So we make and sell our own card games. It actually all started with an idea my wife and I had on the bus ride home from our full-time jobs in downtown San Francisco. We came up with a drinking game idea.
The whole idea was that our games would be super easy to play. People would just pull them out. There’s no need to spend 20 or 30 minutes reading a flight instruction manual trying to figure out how to play the game. It would just be: draw a card, and whatever it says, you do.
And that was the whole premise of not only that game, but all our future games.
Alexis Madrigal: That’s great. So you’re based here in the Bay. I assume you stuck around here. But how did you actually produce these cards? Did you get them printed here or somewhere else?
Alfred Mai: Yeah. So we had our cards produced in China. At the time, we looked at various places to produce the cards. We even actually did a print run here in the U.S. because we needed our goods ASAP.
We went viral one year and completely sold out. Alongside our manufacturer in China, we decided, you know what — there are printing manufacturers here in the U.S., locally. So let’s try that. But the costs were just so astronomical that it was economically unfeasible to continue printing in the U.S. So we pretty much had all our manufacturing — one hundred percent — done in China.
Alexis Madrigal: And was that before Trump came into office the second time? Was that at all affected by tariffs?
Alfred Mai: That was a while ago. That was actually about six or seven years ago. So that had nothing to do with tariffs. That was simply us needing to get inventory in as soon as possible.
Alexis Madrigal: Sure, sure. But you weren’t paying tariffs at that point. Then Trump comes back into office and levels pretty substantial tariffs. How were you impacted?
Alfred Mai: That’s right. So I’ve been in business for eight years now, and I’ve never had to pay a cent in tariffs up until 2025.
In early 2025, we got hit with a 20 percent tariff on our goods. And that hurt. It wasn’t catastrophic, but it hurt. Then when Liberation Day happened, it jumped from 20 to 54 percent. And in the weeks following, it skyrocketed to over 150 percent.
We’re in the toys and games industry, which means the majority of our sales happen during the holidays. It just so happened that we had to make our massive holiday order around May and June — which is right when the tit-for-tat with Beijing happened.
That massive holiday order already sucked up our entire cash flow. Nobody at the beginning of the year planned to have enough cash to pay for a 150 percent tax on our imports. I didn’t have enough capital. I had to look at potentially liquidating my personal assets. I had to rush to get a line of credit from the bank.
It got to a point where the worst-case scenario was that I literally just could not pay that upfront tax. Tariffs are an upfront tax. You don’t pay the tax after you’ve made a sale. You have to pay it before you even get the products in.
So the worst-case scenario was that we would essentially just have to completely skip our holiday sales, which account for 70 to 80 percent of our entire year’s revenue.
Alexis Madrigal: Wow. Just not make the order?
Alfred Mai: Just not make the order because we literally couldn’t afford it. No business — particularly small businesses — plans to have that kind of cash flow at the beginning of the year. Nobody can expect that the president will wake up one morning and go from 20 to 54 to 150 percent tariffs in the span of a week.
So we just kind of sat in shock without really a plan. You can’t plan for something like that.
Thankfully, things calmed down a few weeks later. Tariffs dropped down to 30 percent, and we were then able to make our holiday orders and close out the year okay.
Alexis Madrigal: Wow. So even though they dropped to 30 percent, that’s still a huge chunk of money you paid in tariffs. How much was it, if you can talk about the scale of it? And are you going to try to get it back?
Alfred Mai: Yeah, absolutely. We ended up paying over $150,000 in tariffs in 2025. Again, we hadn’t paid a cent in tariffs for the seven years prior to that. So we suddenly had to fork out $150,000 in taxes that we didn’t have to pay before as a small business.
That hurt. Our main goal was to ensure we tried our best not to pass that on to consumers. So we essentially had to cut expenses across the board. We cut our marketing budgets. We cut product launches. We cut as much as we could to absorb the tariffs.
And again, that still hurt. It wasn’t easy.
When the Supreme Court struck down the tariffs — the IEEPA tariffs — I was hopeful. I thought, okay, this is good news. Where’s my money? I need the $150,000 back. It’s a lifeline not only for me but for a lot of small businesses so we can continue investing in our business and growing again.
So absolutely, I’m trying my best to get the tariffs back. I’m following the court case and doing everything I’m supposed to do.
Alexis Madrigal: Yeah.
Alfred Mai: At least according to the latest CBP statement in court, they’re working on a process to try to refund businesses. But as we’ve all seen, this administration has been loose with following court orders, to say the least. So I’m hopeful, but like everyone else, I’m just not sure.
Alexis Madrigal: I mean, did they send you an email saying, “Hey, you may have a refund. Log in to the system”? Or—
Alfred Mai: Absolutely not. Nothing is coming. It’s up to me.
And look, I’m not a trade expert. I’m not a constitutional law expert. I’m literally plugging the court orders I get in PDF form into AI and saying, “Hey, what’s going on? What do I need to do to make sure I’m best prepared to potentially receive the refund?”
Alexis Madrigal: And are you planning to go this alone, or are you going to get help from people?
Alfred Mai: I plan on going this alone. I’ve reached out to brokers and haven’t even gotten a response — I’m sure they’re slammed.
So it’s gotten to a point where it’s me, research, and AI. I’m just figuring it out alongside everybody else. It’s not too bad. I have AI essentially hand-holding me, walking me through every step of the process — from logging into the system that CBP has to potentially filing protests on our import entries that have been liquidated.
It gets technical. It gets complicated. But with my AI companion hand-holding me, it’s doable.
Alexis Madrigal: Let’s bring in Zoe Tillman, who’s a senior reporter covering law and politics for Bloomberg News. Welcome, Zoe.
Zoe Tillman: Hi. Thanks for having me.
Alexis Madrigal: Obviously, the situation Alfred is describing is one that not just he, but hundreds of thousands of businesses find themselves in — thinking about these refunds and trying to figure out if they’re going to get one and how.
These lawsuits are going to be filed in a court called the Court of International Trade, which is not an international body — it’s an American court. Tell us a little about how this might work.
Zoe Tillman: Right. This is a federal court. Over the past year, many people have become familiar with the federal court system because there’s been so much litigation against the Trump administration — but not really in the trade court.
It’s not a court that handles your garden-variety constitutional claims or violations of U.S. law. It’s pretty specialized in dealing with issues related to imports or exports. So it normally handles a pretty narrow body of work.
That said, when there are policies that affect trade in a major way, those cases typically flow through that court. So when major constitutional challenges to the president’s tariff executive orders came in, they were mostly filed there.
Those were the original orders declaring the tariffs unlawful. They then went up to a specialized appeals court — the Federal Circuit — which upheld the findings of the lower court. And those are the cases that then went to the Supreme Court.
Alexis Madrigal: Got it. So because it went up that way, when the Supreme Court made its decision and didn’t rule specifically on refunds, it just got sent back down to the original court — the Court of International Trade.
Zoe Tillman: That’s right. I’m not a Supreme Court reporter most of the time, but something we know from covering the lower courts is that the Supreme Court will often address the highest-level question they can and then send everything else back to other judges to figure out.
They’ll say, “This is unlawful,” and everyone will ask, “So what?” And the court will essentially say, “Not our problem,” and kick it back down to the lower courts to hash out. That’s exactly what happened here.
There was discussion during the arguments before the justices in November about refunds. Everyone acknowledged it was an important but complicated question. Ultimately, the court decided not to touch it.
Justice Kavanaugh wrote in his dissenting opinion that this was going to be a mess — but it’s not a mess they offered guidance on.
Alexis Madrigal: And it’s my understanding that when these lawsuits were filed and people asked for an injunction to stop collecting the tariffs, the Department of Justice said that wasn’t necessary because the government would refund people if the tariffs were found illegal. That’s part of the crucial evidence that refunds might happen.
Zoe Tillman: Right. Some of the tension now comes from what happened earlier in these cases. For the companies that sued early on — whose case went up to the Supreme Court — there were explicit assurances by the government that refunds with interest would be available if they won.
So there was no need for the court to intervene in the meantime because there was no irreparable harm to those businesses.
Later, as more companies began filing lawsuits — especially after the November arguments when it looked like the government might lose — there was a surge of businesses going to the trade court. Again, they asked for an injunction.
And again, the Department of Justice said, “You don’t need to worry about this.” And the court said, “Okay, we’ll take your word on it.”
Alexis Madrigal: We’re talking about the impact of tariffs on local businesses and their efforts to get a refund after the Supreme Court invalidated them. We’ve been joined by Alfred Mai, owner of ASM Games. Thank you so much for joining us, Alfred.
Alfred Mai: Thank you for having me.
Alexis Madrigal: We’ll be back with more with Zoe Tillman and others right after the break.
