A leading economist accused President Donald Trump of spouting “nonsense” in his boasts about the amount raised by his import tariffs.
During an appearance on MS NOW’s The Weekend, professor Justin Wolfers of the University of Michigan dismantled Trump’s claim in a Thanksgiving speech that his import levies would generate enough money to “almost completely” eliminate federal income tax.
Americans aren’t buying Trump’s brags. According to a CBS News/YouGov poll last week, 60 percent of people say the rosy picture Trump paints about inflation does not reflect reality.
Wolfers didn’t bother hiding his disbelief, either. “My kids don’t even lie that often,” he told the Trump-critical network on Saturday. “I just feel disappointment and a certain sadness at this point.”
The Australian economist, who previously taught at Penn’s Wharton School—Trump’s alma mater—zeroed in on the president’s boast at Mar-a-Lago that the United States is “taking in trillions of dollars in tariff revenue,” arguing the claim hinges on a basic misunderstanding of numbers.
Speaking to hosts Eugene Daniels, Jackie Alemany, and Jonathan Capehart, Wolfers said, “This is just nonsense. Let me start with one important fact-check: The president appears not to understand the difference between millions, billions, and trillions. That’s actually one of the most important points in all of economics; they’re massively different. We are not taking in trillions of dollars in tariff revenue.”
He continued, “If we were, we could afford his $2,000 tariff checks. We aren’t. So therefore, we can’t.”
Wolfers also pushed back on the 79-year-old’s repeated boasts about the stock market, noting the United States is lagging well behind its global peers.
“The other thing that he talks about a lot is the stock market,” he said. “Now, here’s a funny thing: If you look at the stock market returns from, say, 25 of the biggest countries around the world, the United States ranks around about 22nd right now. So yes, American stocks are up. But guess what? They’re up even more everywhere else.”
He said that U.S. consumers, far from celebrating the economy, appear deeply uneasy. “So, consumer confidence right now—it’s quite striking just how bad it is. So, consumer confidence right now is very close to being an all-time low. And this has been measured back to the 1970s. So consumers say that they’re feeling worse than they were during the Great Recession, than they were during the pandemic, than they were during the early ’80s recession. It’s really quite striking numbers.”
Wolfers pointed to growing frustration with the administration’s economic policies. “If you dig into that a little bit, you ask them things like: What do you think about the quality of U.S. economic policy?” he said. “The number of people who think that the quality of economic policy is poor is at an all-time high. It’s roughly three-fifths of the American people.”
“What you have, I think,” he added, “is that the president has fundamentally lost the battle of ideas. What you normally do with an economic program is you come up with some ideas, and you try and convince people of the virtues of them. And he has fundamentally failed. There’s a deep question as to how long people are going to keep spending.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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