The tariffs lie that just won’t die

Trump’s reckless trade war is based on a total misunderstanding of economics. Is he aware of it? Is he lying or clueless? No one seems to know.

A day before the expiry of the self-imposed July 9 US deadline for concluding global tariff deals, came a delicious scene of bootlickery: Benjamin Netanyahu in the Blue Room presenting Donald Trump with a recommendation letter for the Nobel Peace Prize. Netanyahu is wanted at the Hague for alleged war crimes, so the recommendation probably won’t help much, but Trump loves bent-knee fawning — so in heightened spirits he began to boast about his tariffs.

“We’ve taken in hundreds of billions of dollars because of the tariffs,” Trump said (at 21:30 of the side-splitting video). “We’re the hottest country in the world right now.” Although delivered with the confidence of a very stable genius, the figures provided and the idea at the core of this are both complete and total bullshit.

Tariffs are not tribute by foreign countries but taxes that are paid by Americans. They are a tax hike whose only justification can be the protection of certain domestic industries. Trump’s “revenue” is your higher grocery bill, your pricier car, your more expensive clothing and electronics. As should be obvious, tariffs are levied at the border on importers (mostly US companies) who then pass those costs on to consumers. The $92 billion collected by US Customs in 2023 didn’t come out of Beijing’s bank account but from American families and businesses, quietly siphoned from household budgets into the federal treasury.

Trump wants to jack that figure way up and assumes you are an idiot (or is one himself). He has made this fiction so central to his image as a master negotiator that millions are being manipulated into celebrating their own exploitation. So the administration wheels out poor Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt to actually make the preposterous claim that tariffs are “a tax cut for the American people.” This should be the first search result for “insult to our intelligence.”

In the days since the silly Blue Room meeting, Trump extended the deadline to Aug. 1, and over the weekend he ramped up his threats, jolting America’s economic relationships with two of its closest partners in his desperation to pressure them into something that looks like concessions.