The only time that wine importer Victor O. Schwartz was in the same room with Donald Trump was during a lunch in the 1990s at Jean-Georges, the high-end French restaurant on the ground floor of the Trump International Hotel. Schwartz overheard a nearby table of ABC staffers — the network’s old headquarters was around the corner — ragging on the local mogul who had just left behind a mess of bankrupt casinos in Atlantic City. “A bunch of people were trash-talking him and making fun of his hair,” Schwartz says. “And then he walked by, and, of course, they’re all glad-handing him.” The moment stuck with Schwartz. “I mean, he was a laughingstock in New York, he really was,” he says. And yet when Trump entered, all mocking turned to flattery. “It’s the hypocrisy of that world.”

As a 67-year-old on the Upper West Side, Schwartz is fairly representative of the boomer class living in the city. He likes the Grateful Dead and Lucinda Williams and hates what Donald Trump has done to this country. “We were a dependable military partner, a dependable economic power. We were a country of laws, all those kinds of things,” he says. “All of that? Just with these tariffs — out the window.”

When I met Schwartz at his apartment near Riverside Park in early April, he had the New York Times headlines from the Trump indictment and conviction in Manhattan cut out and taped to the back of his front door; he called it his “Travis Bickle” collage. On the glass coffee table in the living room was an issue of Spy magazine from 1990, our current president illustrated as if he were a baby on the cover, under the headline: “WA-A-A-A-H! Little Donald—Unhappy at Last.”

As a small-business owner, Schwartz has plenty of reasons to dislike the president’s policies. For almost 40 years, Schwartz has owned and operated VOS Selections, an importer and distributor of fine wines from 16 countries. Tariffs on wine have frustrated his industry since 2018, making the already heavily taxed business of sourcing from small farms and importing bottles from abroad more expensive.

When Trump’s second-term tariffs were first announced last April, it looked like an even worse disaster for American wine importers than the first term. A blanket 20 percent on goods from Europe affected not just the wine but the cork (from Portugal and Spain) and the good barrels (France). Sake from Japan and soju from South Korea were hit with a 24 and 25 percent tax, respectively. They might as well forget about South Africa, with its 30 percent tariff. Trump called the tariff rollout “Liberation Day.” Schwartz had an alternative term: “strangulation day.”

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