FILE – Cargo containers line a ship at the Port of Oakland on Wednesday, Aug. 6, 2025, in Oakland, Calif. (AP Photo/Noah Berger, File) After a stinging but widely expected loss at the U.S. Supreme Court, President Trump pressed his enablers to search, once again, for some law he could use to justify imposing new tariff rates on dozens of countries, both friends and foes alike. Yet no Trump policy has been a bigger economic and political failure than his tariffs, alienating other countries, harming U.S. businesses and, most importantly, enraging American voters.
Just consider all the ways Trump’s tariff obsession has failed.
First, tariffs aren’t being paid by other countries, as the president has asserted repeatedly. Trump signed an executive order on Inauguration Day ordering certain agencies to explore the feasibility of creating an External Revenue Service to collect tariff-related money from other countries. As the president stated in his inaugural address, “Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.”
Of course, American companies and individuals pay his tariffs, not other countries. Indeed, the Reason Foundation claims his tariffs have amounted to the largest tax increase on Americans since 1993.
For example, Ford Motor Company announced in February that it paid about $2 billion in Trump’s tariffs for 2025 and expected to pay another $2 billion in 2026.
General Motors also had to pay about $2 billion in 2025. And yet Trump said during his recent trip to Michigan, “It’s amazing what tariffs are doing for GM.” He should have said “doing to GM.”
Another example: More than a thousand companies — including FedEx, Costco and Revlon — filed suit at the U.S. Court of International Trade to recoup their portion of the $133 billion they paid in Trump tariffs. As USA Today reported in June, “Corporate America stands to receive billions in tariff refunds from the U.S. government.”
Trump even discouraged U.S. companies from seeking a refund, saying, “If they don’t do that, I’ll remember them.” But that statement makes it clear that Trump knows U.S. companies and consumers pay his tariffs. Why he chooses to continually deceive the American people is hard to understand. Why some Americans continue to believe him is even harder to understand.
Second, Trump’s tariffs haven’t reduced the U.S. trade deficit. The president has long been obsessed with the U.S. trade deficit, even leading one economist and former investment manager with Oppenheimer Funds to dub it “trade deficit derangement syndrome.”
The trade deficit refers to how much more in goods U.S. consumers buy from other countries than other countries buy from us. On the other hand, other countries buy more in services (such as software, entertainment, etc.) than we buy from other countries.
It’s important to understand that the large majority of economists are unconcerned about the trade deficit, just as they don’t worry about a trade deficit or trade surplus between different states or cities. For that matter, you probably have a trade deficit with your local grocery store or gasoline station. You buy goods from them, but they never buy goods from you.
The trade deficit for President Biden’s last year in office, 2024, was $1.2 trillion; for Trump’s first year back in office, it was $1.23 trillion. Even with tariffs, Trump has the highest trade deficit of any president in history.
The third major justification for tariffs was to boost U.S. manufacturing. Yet another failure. Manufacturing jobs tanked in early 2020, as most states shut down their economies in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. But they started growing again in the spring, peaking in early 2023. Since then, manufacturing jobs have been on a gradual decline. There were about 12.67 million manufacturing jobs in January 2025. By June of this year there were only 12.6 million.
Trump claimed his tariffs would lead to a surge in U.S. manufacturing jobs. The country’s going in the opposite direction.
Finally, Trump claimed his tariffs would bring in billions, even trillions, of dollars from other countries, eliminating the government’s budget deficit. He’s even speculated that tariff revenue might replace the income tax.
It’s hard to know if that’s foolish boasting or just plain foolishness. Tariffs, which are higher than any time since the early 1930s, brought in between $130 billion and $160 billion last year. The 2025 federal deficit was $1.78 trillion. And it will probably be about $2 trillion for 2026. In short, federal tariff revenue was about one-tenth of the federal deficit and only a fraction of the government’s $7 trillion in spending.
This is not going to end well. CNN reports that 63 percent oppose Trump’s new tariffs. Consumers widely believe his tariffs have increased prices making many basic necessities unaffordable. If a Democrat were doing this Republicans would be screaming at the top of their lungs, but they are mostly silent. That’ a mistake.
Trump won’t be on the ballot in November, but Republicans will be. And they will be the ones paying for Trump’s tariff failures.
Merrill Matthews is the Texas state chair of Our Republican Legacy.
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