You Can’t Eat Record ‘Tariff Revenues’

By Noah Rothman

Friday, September 05, 2025

 

As a great man once said, you go to war with the army you’ve got. Cue the president’s army in his great global trade war:

As many have observed, it’s a rare Republican president who brags about the amount of money the White House has syphoned out of American pockets and cast heedlessly into the Treasury’s gaping yap. The administration’s communications staffers are banking on the notion that its audience will subordinate what they know about who pays tariffs — an intimate education many American importers and producers are receiving right now — to Trump’s unfounded insistence that foreigners are footing the bill.

 

Most Americans are probably willing to look past the president’s bizarre commitment to his preferred fictions as long as their pockets are flush. And for the time being, at least, most (50 percent, according to CBS News’s latest poll) are still feeling “good” to varying degrees about their personal finances — including even the narrowest plurality of self-described Democrats. But American adults do not feel especially positive about the country’s economic health.

 

That same poll found that nearly two-thirds of Americans, including a much more pronounced plurality of Republicans, tell pollsters that the prices they pay for goods and services are going up. To the tune of 56 percent, respondents told CBS pollsters that the economy is “getting worse.” Consumer confidence has declined commensurately after a brief rebound following the collapse that accompanied Trump’s “liberation day,” as the public discovers that the tariff schedule Trump initially envisioned is gradually going into force. Nerves are fraying, wallets are tightening, and a variety of economic indices are reflecting it.

 

Take today’s dismal employment report. Industry experts anticipated that the U.S. would create 75,000 jobs in August. It added a measly 22,000 new jobs to the American employment landscape, boosting the unemployment rate to 4.3 percent.

 

Now, those numbers are derived from surveys — costly and comprehensive ones, although they’re surveys nevertheless, and they suffer from all the same response-rate problems that plague political polling. The Bureau of Labor Statistics adjusts those numbers in retrospect every month, a level of transparency and accountability that has contributed to the degree to which the BLS is increasingly distrusted (let that be a lesson to you, transparency advocates). Accordingly, the BLS’s revisions boosted the numbers from July’s job report — one that sent the president’s supporters into dyspeptic fits and preceded Trump’s decision to summarily fire former BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer. “I think they’ll get better,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik predicted in the wake of McEntarfer’s ouster. Once you “take out the people who are just trying to create noise against the president,” the data will surely improve.

 

Lutnik was right; July’s disappointing numbers grew from the initial 73,000 new jobs to today’s 79,000. But at the same time, the BLS adjusted June’s numbers downward, finding that the U.S. lost 13,000 jobs that month — the first month of employment contraction in the United States since the height of the pandemic. June’s ugly figures mirror May’s ugly figures, when just 19,000 new jobs were created. If the president and his advisers want to take the BLS’s good June, they’ll have to acknowledge the legitimacy of its bad August, July, and May.

 

All told, the BLS’s reports over the past four months indicate that the American job market hit a wall in April — an impact that coincided with the inauguration of the great trade war. It’s a sharp decline from the six months that preceded May, each of which showed the U.S. creating more than 100,000 jobs per month.

 

Soon enough, the sluggish job market combined with the growing sense that high and rising prices are a feature of the Trump economy will present this administration with growing political challenges. If the White House’s only answer to those challenges is to bedazzle you with the amount of money that, but for the tariff regime, would still be in your bank account, they’ll discover that the public’s tolerance for the administration’s many other flights of fancy has limits.