President Donald Trump is back to boasting about the phantom billions of dollars he has supposedly discovered in a Treasury “tariff shelf.”
Trump veered into showing off the apparently fictional fiscal bonus while admitting his tariffs are causing harm to farmers.
“The other day, it was very interesting, they found $31 billion,” he said, referring to his unnamed treasury aides. “I said, ”You mean positively, right?“”
Mixing up billions and millions, the 79-year-old added: “They said, ”$31 million more than we knew.’” And they said, “We don’t know where it came from.”
“I said, ”Check the tariff shelf.“”
All of which could have been believable, had he not told an almost identical story just last month—though that time the number was $29 billion.
On Aug. 14, Trump told reporters, “They couldn’t figure out where it came from,” he said. “I said, ”Check the tariff shelf.”’ And they said, “How did you know that?“”
Trump: “Last week they found $29 billion and they couldn’t figure out where it came from. I said, check the tariff shelf. And they said, ‘How did you know that?'” pic.twitter.com/XdjBx7EuUl
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 14, 2025
If true, the story about unknown billions being “found” doesn’t say much for Trump’s Treasury team.
However, journalist Mehdi Hasan, founder of Zeteo, writing on X, said the story stretched the bounds of credibility. “This entire thing is made up. Astonishing.”
The president, who was speaking to reporters Thursday as he hosted Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the Oval Office, and his administration have a long history of inflating their tariff windfalls.
In June, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick posted a Wall Street Journal piece claiming Trump-era tariffs “generated $37.8 billion in revenue for the U.S. in April and May,” and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller obligingly boosted it.
Unfortunately for the bungling billionaire financier, the article noted that this “still falls short of the amount Trump has said the U.S. is raking in,” leading to social media users dunking on the duo for amplifying a link that undercut their boss’s controversial financial policy.
Trump said on Apr. 8, “We’re making a fortune with tariffs. $2bn a day,” which he then upped at an Apr. 10 Cabinet meeting to “probably $3.5 billion a day,” per FactCheck.org.
Over the 61 days of April and May, that implied $122 billion or $213.5 billion. Against the $37.8 billion actually collected, the gap was about $84 billion or $176 billion—numbers that make Lutnick and Miller’s victory lap look more like an own goal.
And in late July, Fox Business amplified Trump-world boasts of $150 billion in tariff revenue—plus a claimed $28 billion in July—only for a Community Note to slap it down by pointing out tariffs are taxes paid by U.S. importers and, ultimately, American consumers, not “foreign countries.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.”
The post Trump, 79, Stuck in a Loop With Another ‘Made Up’ Tariff Boast appeared first on The Daily Beast.
