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Antonio Austin spotted the car from 100 yards away — red dirt caked onto tinted windows, the front bumper gone, smoke billowing out from under the hood. “Damn, I hate this car,” he said. He had sold the 2012 Dodge Avenger almost a year earlier for a down payment of $1,000, but lately it kept reappearing at his used car dealership with problems that were becoming more complicated and expensive to fix.
He grabbed a service intake sheet from his desk, packed his lip with chewing tobacco and walked outside into the stiff prairie wind of southern Oklahoma. The last few weeks had been among the most difficult of his 25-year career, with his inventory falling near an all-time low and his sales dropping even lower. He watched the Avenger clunk across the barren parking lot and stop in front of the service garage. The driver climbed out and banged her fist against the door.
“Can you believe this?” said Tailor Phillips, 28. “It died out on me again.”
“It might be nothing,” Antonio said, as he lifted the hood.
“How am I supposed to get to work?” she said. “Who’s going to pick up my son in an hour at day care?”
“Maybe it’s not as bad as it seems,” he said. “Let’s try not to panic just yet.”
He had been giving himself the same advice every day for the last month, as the earliest impacts of President Trump’s auto tariffs cascaded down from new dealerships to used car lots to foreign-made parts. Now the consequences were landing hardest at the very bottom of the American car economy, at places like Antonio’s Buy Here Pay Here in Lawton, Okla., on a commercial strip wedged between an Army airfield and a graveyard. Antonio, 46, sold mostly to customers with bad credit and little savings — people who couldn’t afford to care that Antonio’s cars were often more than a decade old and pieced together with secondhand parts. “My sales pitch is to get you from point A to point B,” he said.
Most of his customers paid their loans in biweekly installments, delivering him envelopes of cash to avoid the $5 credit card fee. Almost half were behind on their payments, and Antonio was barely keeping up with his own operating costs. Trump had told people to “be patient” and to expect “some pain” before his tariffs would boost American manufacturing and improve wages for the working class, but Antonio and his customers were already at a breaking point. It was a business with no margin for people with no options — and now the cars were becoming as much as 25 percent more expensive to buy, to refurbish and to repair.
