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<\/p>\nThat\u2019s nothing to sneeze at, but it\u2019s certainly not $US8 trillion. So where is Trump getting that number from?<\/p>\n
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\u2019t want to pay the tariffs that would apply to their overseas-made products.<\/p>\n
But those investments are over the long term, may not ever materialise, may have happened anyway, and certainly don\u2019t count as \u201ctariff revenue\u201d in any economist\u2019s definition \u2013 or that of any man at the pub, surely.<\/p>\n
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Trump\u2019s April 2 announcement of tariffs. A US appeals court has since found Trump didn\u2019t have the authority to impose his tariffs.Credit: Bloomberg<\/p>\n
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 \u201cEuropean companies are expected to invest an additional $600 billion across strategic sectors in the United States\u201d by 2028.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s nonsense top to bottom,\u201d said Justin Wolfers, an Australian professor of economics at the University of Michigan, of the administration\u2019s tariff revenue claims. \u201cThere are ways to mislead and there are ways to overstate, and then there\u2019s just looking you in the eye and lying.\u201d<\/p>\n
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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 \u201ccompletely, 100 per cent made up\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose figures are so detached from reality that they may as well claim $44 quadrillion in budgetary savings, and a googolplex in tariff revenues,\u201d she said on X.<\/p>\n
Trump is now routinely using the figure without qualification. He claimed on Sunday that \u201cwithout tariffs, and all of the TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS we have already taken in\u201d, the US would be destroyed. In another post, he claimed the tariffs had attracted $US15 trillion in investment.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Witness also Trump\u2019s insistence that the US has spent $US350 billion on military assistance for Ukraine \u2013 rarely challenged despite being nearly double most estimates \u2013 or his claim that crime in Washington is \u201cvirtually nothing\u201d thanks to his decision to send in the National Guard.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s ruling in the US Court of Appeals, and the 7-4 split verdict lays the groundwork for a contest in the politicised high court.<\/p>\n