The tariffs argument at the Supreme Court last week did not really go so great for the Trump administration. That must have been a new and unpleasant feeling for President Donald Trump, given that the court’s conservatives have given him nearly everything he wants.
But Trump has a cunning plan to fix it: make shit up.
Late Monday night, Trump got on Truth Social to say that, if the court rules against him on tariffs, the country would lose $3 trillion in refunds or lost investments. Oh, and also that “the U.S. Supreme Court was given the wrong numbers.”
Pretty tough to know what the right numbers might be, as tariff revenue is whatever Trump says it is at any given time. Indeed, that $3 trillion number was a huge leap from the $2 trillion that he touted just 10 hours earlier. To be fair, it’s easy to lose track when you’re just making things up on the fly.
A cartoon by Clay Bennett.
During Nov. 5 oral arguments, Trump said that his tariffs “are bringing in hundreds of billions of dollars,” which is very much not $3 trillion.
And Solicitor General John Sauer, who got his job by being one of Trump’s former criminal defense lawyers, is equally vague. In its brief to the Supreme Court, the Trump administration said that, one day, these tariffs could be worth $15 trillion and will reduce the national deficit by $4 trillion someday.
Here’s Sauer’s big problem: Since the Constitution gives taxation power to Congress, the administration has to say that the tariffs do not actually raise money. So Sauer told the Supreme Court that these are regulatory tariffs, and any revenue is incidental.
But, as Neal Katyal, who argued on behalf of the plaintiffs, noted during oral arguments, the administration’s brief to the court admits to raising $4 trillion—and he’s right.
“Vitally, the Congressional Budget Office recently projected that the IEEPA tariffs will reduce the national deficit by $4 trillion in upcoming years,” the brief says.
Sauer’s other big problem is that Trump can’t stop bragging about how much money his tariffs have raised. In fact, we’re so flush that he’s going to maybe give everyone $2,000—maybe. That would run about $600 billion, and it appears that the government does not seem to have collected nearly that much money so far.
But since none of this is grounded in reality, who cares?
Trump also didn’t seem to notice those “wrong numbers” that were given to the Supreme Court when he took a victory lap on Fox News the day of the hearing, saying that he heard the case went well.
“If I didn’t have tariffs, the entire world would be in a depression. I did this for the world. If I didn't put 100 percent tariff immediately on China, because of magnets, a special kind of rare earth, we'd be closed up,” Trump said.
His tariffs somehow even end wars. Sure, why not?
In the real world, with real numbers, Americans are being battered by these tariffs. The average tax on imports— as in money that Americans are paying—now sits at 18%, which is up from 2.4% before Trump took office. Lucky us.
As always, Trump’s solution is to lie and say that all of those higher prices just don’t exist. But unlike Trump and Sauer, we can count, and those higher prices are extremely real.
