That’s nothing to sneeze at, but it’s certainly not $US8 trillion. So where is Trump getting that number from?
Plainly, he is including several significant investment commitments announced by foreign countries (United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Japan) and major companies, including Apple, NVIDIA and OpenAI. Trump says they are investing in the US because they don’t want to pay the tariffs that would apply to their overseas-made products.
But those investments are over the long term, may not ever materialise, may have happened anyway, and certainly don’t count as “tariff revenue” in any economist’s definition – or that of any man at the pub, surely.
Trump’s April 2 announcement of tariffs. A US appeals court has since found Trump didn’t have the authority to impose his tariffs.Credit: Bloomberg
One of these purported investments is $US600 billion from the European Union. But the text of the framework shows this is not new money nor a special deal, but reflects that “European companies are expected to invest an additional $600 billion across strategic sectors in the United States” by 2028.
“It’s nonsense top to bottom,” said Justin Wolfers, an Australian professor of economics at the University of Michigan, of the administration’s tariff revenue claims. “There are ways to mislead and there are ways to overstate, and then there’s just looking you in the eye and lying.”
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Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, said the tariff revenue boast was one of several claims made by the White House over the weekend that were “completely, 100 per cent made up”.
“Those figures are so detached from reality that they may as well claim $44 quadrillion in budgetary savings, and a googolplex in tariff revenues,” she said on X.
Trump is now routinely using the figure without qualification. He claimed on Sunday that “without tariffs, and all of the TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS we have already taken in”, the US would be destroyed. In another post, he claimed the tariffs had attracted $US15 trillion in investment.
It serves as a neat example of how Trump and his administration misuse numbers and manipulate language in ways that are often transparent and brazen. The figure, having been lobbed into the discourse thanks to some creative accounting, is then repeated without context until it becomes an uncontested fact.
Witness also Trump’s insistence that the US has spent $US350 billion on military assistance for Ukraine – rarely challenged despite being nearly double most estimates – or his claim that crime in Washington is “virtually nothing” thanks to his decision to send in the National Guard.
The tariff hyperbole now has a fresh urgency as Trump tries to build a case that it would be economically ruinous for the American economy if they were removed. It is almost certain the federal government will appeal to the Supreme Court to try to overturn last week’s ruling in the US Court of Appeals, and the 7-4 split verdict lays the groundwork for a contest in the politicised high court.
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