Their illegality aside, the Trump tariff tax has not generated anything close to the amount the president claims.

After the Federal Circuit affirmed the Court of International Trade’s invalidation of the Trump tariffs on Friday evening (in a decision that Dan and I separately analyzed on Saturday), President Trump took to Truth Social to pine about how the “Radical Left group” of judges “didn’t care” that, in the absence of the tariffs, “our Country would be completely destroyed, and our military power would be instantly obliterated.” This, the president’s story goes, is because of “the TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS we have already taken in.”

All of this is arrant nonsense. That includes the description of the seven (of eleven) judges in the majority, who include both Republican- and Democratic-appointees, and (as their opinion illustrates) are the antithesis of a “radical left group.” (The radical here is Trump, the first president in the nearly half-century history of the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to use it to unilaterally impose tariffs — a taxing power that the Constitution vests in Congress, not the president.)

I want to focus in particular on the amount of the haul the president claims.

Let’s set aside that tariffs, including those the president has decreed under the IEEPA (illegally, according to the two courts), are taxes that are paid by American importers, not by foreign governments — and that the importers will pass the costs along to American consumers, who are already beginning to pay higher prices. The amount thus far generated by the Trump tariffs is not anything close to “TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS.”

That is not to trivialize the matter. As the Circuit majority observed, the U.S. imports about $4 trillion in goods annually, accounting for 14 percent of the economy. Still, as Forbes reports, the government has collected $142 billion in tariff revenue so far this year, about $96 billion of which stems from the (mostly IEEPA-based) tariffs Trump ordered in April.

The Justice Department represented to the Circuit that, if left in place, the tariffs would “generate between $2.3 trillion and $3.3 trillion over the budget window” — which is a decade long. That is roughly consistent with Trump Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s estimate of about $300 billion annually.

The U.S. defense budget is around $850 billion per annum (efforts to push it over $1 trillion appear to be running into the headwinds of mountainous debt and Washington’s inability to cut other spending). The Defense Department has proved resistant to reliable auditing, but it unquestionably controls trillions of dollars’ worth of assets. The president’s claim that it would be obliterated, and the country entirely destroyed, by the disappearance of the Trump tariff tax on Americans is complete fiction.

That is not to say that the tax isn’t steep.