The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 12 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
President Trump is now claiming he’ll pay $2,000 to every American out of the money collected in revenues from his tariffs, a plan widely panned by experts as a joke. This comes even as signs mount that the Supreme Court might strike the tariffs down. Now Trump has made all this worse by issuing two new public statements about the tariffs. In one, he claimed his tariffs have pulled in $2 trillion in revenues. In the other, that number suddenly ballooned to three trillion. We think Trump badly damaged his case with this absurdity because it underscores yet again just how reckless and blundering his handling of the tariffs has been all throughout. However, all this turns out in coming weeks, we’re looking at a pretty serious fiasco ahead and here to help us work through this mess is Alex Jacquez of the Groundwork Collaborative, a trade advisor under Joe Biden. Alex, thanks for coming on.
Alex Jacquez: Thanks for having me, Greg.
Sargent: So just to set the table here, Trump claims he wants to send $2,000 to every American out of the tariff revenues. But experts are saying it’s really fanciful. There’s no way you could possibly have that amount of money in the revenues. Can you quickly bring us up to speed on that and also on what the Supreme Court is about to decide?
Jacquez: Sure thing. So, Trump has taken to his favorite policymaking forum, Truth Social, to make yet another guarantee that Americans are going to receive dividend checks from the revenues collected by tariffs. I’m old enough to remember the last time this happened—I think in the spring—when it was five-thousand-dollar checks. Those never materialized.
The Republicans in Congress passed a tax bill with a number of tax changes. They also didn’t send any checks. So I’m very skeptical. Of course, there’s not a lot of data out there or implementation examples given by President Trump, but I’m very skeptical that these will come through as well. I wouldn’t be budgeting an extra two thousand dollars.
And to your point, depending on how you slice it, that may already exceed the revenues that have been collected by Customs and Border Protection so far for the tariffs that have been enacted. And those are on thin ice. We saw during oral arguments last week between the Trump administration and the Supreme Court that the justices were extremely skeptical of the president’s case.
And this is the argument under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act—more commonly known as IEEPA—that the president has wide latitude to do basically whatever he likes, including impose tariffs under a national declaration of emergency for a threat that emerges outside the United States.
Sargent: The emergency that he’s claiming to supposedly justify these authorities is our trade deficit—which is not an emergency.
Now, let me ask you, Alex: if the Supreme Court does overturn the tariffs—as looks very plausible, though it’s hardly certain with this Court—there’s the small issue of what to do about the revenues that have already been collected. They might have to be given back, I guess.
Can you explain this dimension of the problem?
Jacquez: That’s right. About ninety billion dollars has been collected under the IEEPA tariffs specifically. There are, of course, a number of other different tariffs in play right now—it’s getting hard to keep track. But the argument from the small businesses that have brought the case against the Trump administration is that if these tariffs are invalidated, they will be owed back pay—essentially, a refund.
And I’ve worked with the men and women of Customs and Border Protection who are responsible for collecting these tariffs at the border and then rebating them if something happens. And it’s going to be a logistical nightmare. These are billions of dollars collected from thousands and thousands of importers, and they simply don’t have the manpower to be able to do it right now.
Sargent: It really seems like it’s a catastrophe in the making. Well, here comes the main event. In two tweets, Trump raged that the people who are suing to overturn the tariffs have told the Supreme Court that there would be far less in revenues to pay back than there actually would be.
Trump is saying this because he’s trying to imply it would be an even larger disaster than it already looks like if the Court did overturn the tariffs. He’s trying to dissuade them from doing that. So now I’m going to read two lines—one from each of his tweets.
The first one: “The actual number we would have to pay back in tariff revenue and investments would be in excess of two trillion dollars, and that in itself would be a national security catastrophe.” That’s the first one.
Now here’s the second one. In it, he says, “The return of funds would be in excess of three trillion dollars.” So it went from two trillion to three trillion in a matter of hours. Alex, that’s quite a difference, isn’t it?
Jacquez: It’s quite a difference, and it’s interesting that Trump’s arguments—which he has been pushing forward for several months now on Truth Social—do not match the arguments that his lawyers are making in court.
Trump, it seems, is trying to pressure the justices by implying that this will be some massive economic disaster if they rule against the tariffs. But of course, the justices seem to be focused squarely on the legal interpretation of the IEEPA statute.
And so, I think by becoming more and more hysterical and exaggerating, he’s not doing himself any favors.
Sargent: Yeah, and I think it bears underscoring as well that, yes, it would be a logistical nightmare, as you said, but it would be handleable. It’s not actually a national security catastrophe if tariff revenues that were illegally imposed on people have to be paid back. It would be because Trump did something illegal. That would be the cause of this catastrophe.
Jacquez: That’s right. It’s not actually uncommon for importers to pay tariffs at the border and then have a case that is adjudicated in some way, or have an exclusion that is accepted, that requires them to be rebated.
The issue is, this usually happens at a much, much smaller scale than the global tariffs that we’re talking about right now. So yes, it would take time.
And then I think the other dimension to this is that it’s very clear that if these tariffs are struck down, Trump will immediately move to start using other statutes to try to recreate them in the aggregate. And so they’ll have to be dealing with both the collection of these new tariffs as well as the rebates from the illegal tariffs.
Sargent: So what do we know about how much in revenues actually has been collected? You used the number earlier in the discussion, but that sounds like it was only for one type of tariff. Do we have any sense of what the total is? He says it’s two trillion dollars. Wait, no, he says it’s three trillion. Do we have any idea what it actually is?
Jacquez: Certainly. So none of that is close to what we have collected to date, which is certainly much higher than we generally collect under tariffs. We’ve raised about one hundred seventy-four billion dollars, including the existing tariffs that we had on, and I think about one hundred fifteen to one hundred twenty billion of that is new. So certainly, we’ve collected revenue.
And if you look at the estimates for the long term—over ten years—I think that’s where you get into these estimates of 2.2 to 2.6, 2.8 trillion, depending on who you’re asking. But of course, that depends on a number of things, including the assumption that people don’t get sick of paying extra money for their imports and start reducing their spending.
Sargent: He just made these numbers up, right? Just to be clear, he often goes into the trillions. And that’s always usually a pretty reliable sign that he’s pulling numbers out of his ass. That’s what happened here, right?
Jacquez: It very much seems to be the case. It is also in keeping, as you said, with many of his other claims on how much revenue we are collecting, how much money we are raising and how much prices are going down. It’s just simply hard to tell where he’s getting these numbers, if not from thin air.
Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you—the throwing around of numbers like this—we’ve kind of become numb to the sort of constant buffoonery and incompetence of this president. But this is not a small thing. He’s making up numbers in an effort to, as you said earlier, bully the Supreme Court into refraining from blocking his lawbreaking.
And this is the thing, Alex—the tariffs are a massive abuse of power, right? They’re not often talked about that way, but that’s what they are. They’re highly illegal, it seems. He’s definitely exceeding his authority. The only question is whether the Supreme Court makes up some way to pretend otherwise or not. And, you know, they might rule the right way.
But either way, now he’s lying and making up numbers to prevent the courts from enforcing the law. It’s funny, but it’s also a truly terrible situation.
But Alex, does this have any legal significance? Do the justices look at this, at a minimum maybe, and think he’s making stuff up to bully us? Does that matter or not?
Jacquez: It’s hard to tell. Justices are humans as well. I’m sure they are shrugging off these attacks, but it is also the president of United States who is coming down on them. But it really seems that during oral arguments, had very few defenders. Justice Kavanaugh seemed sympathetic to the case, but even Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett were asking extremely tough questions and did not seem persuaded in the least by the administration’s responses.
Sargent: There’s another layer to the perversity of this that I want to try to get at. In one of his tweets, he says, “Those opposed to us are giving low numbers so that the court will think that it’s easy to get out of this terrible situation that these anarchists and thugs have put us into.”
Now the anarchists and thugs are small businesses who have been perversely and badly affected by his illegal actions. Trump himself created the situation. They didn’t create it. We didn’t need the tariffs. He did this to us. If the tariffs are struck down and a lot of money has to be paid back as a result, it’s because he acted illegally and recklessly.
Jacquez: And if you look at the broader macroeconomic picture, it is just not clear at all that—certainly not clear that—these tariffs have had any beneficial impact on the economy. There’s plenty of signs that they’re actually doing the opposite of what Trump is claiming, which is to increase investment in the United States, to increase jobs, to increase manufacturing.
Actually, none of that is happening—it’s all falling. We’ve seen businesses extremely reluctant to hire and to expand because they’re so worried about what they’re going to have to be paying tomorrow, next week, next month.
And again, if these tariffs are struck down and Trump goes ahead and tries to recreate them using other statutes, that’s going to create even more economic uncertainty.
Sargent: Well, we’re looking at a fiasco either way, right? On one track, if the tariffs are struck down, as you say, there’s the logistical nightmare of paying people back. But then also Trump just starts to scour the law for other ways to act illegally, to impose tariffs that nobody wants and nobody needs and the country doesn’t need. So that’s one path. But the other path is the court somehow upholds them and he’s emboldened, right? What does that path look like?
Jacquez: Absolutely. If the Supreme Court upholds the interpretation of IEEPA that the Trump administration has used, it really is hard to see where that authority would end. And we’ve already—as hard as it is to believe or even to remember—Trump has actually walked back many of his existing, quote, “Liberation Day” tariffs and reduced those tariff rates from the absurdly high numbers that he had started with in April.
It is certainly possible that if he is given the green light to go ahead and use this tool, he may feel emboldened to go back and raise further tariffs with countries that we haven’t struck trade agreements with—or haven’t supplicated enough to him.
Sargent: This is the fundamental dynamic. Whenever Trump gets his way with his illegal actions, it encourages him to do more lawbreaking.
Jacquez: Exactly right.
Sargent: Well, and there’s also another big story here I just want to touch on, which is that on a number of fronts, he’s created this mess that he is now forced to try to clean up. So in this case here, he’s saying, okay, I’m gonna send $2,000 back to every American, nonsense won’t happen. But what he’s basically saying is, okay, you might’ve paid taxes in the form of tariffs, taxes that were passed on to you by importers who paid the taxes. Well, I’m gonna make you whole by sending you the money back. Same thing happened with China and with farmers. He’s now talking about giving lots and lots of money to farmers, but he screwed the farmers with the tariffs. And he is making this “great deal” with China, but as a lot of news organizations have pointed out, he’s simply restoring a status quo that he wrecked. So again and again and again, we’re seeing that pattern. Can you talk about that big picture?
Jacquez: Sure. I think that there is no big picture when it comes to Trump and his strategy for trade and industrial policy. What we’ve seen is jumping from issue to issue, trying to patch up these holes as they spring leaks—with no real overarching implementation agenda or strategy that is driving him forward other than making deals.
And what those deals mean, I think, are up for interpretation. They often mean whatever is good for Trump. And so being able to get something out of these countries personally—at the expense of the U.S., and of workers, and of the economy—I think has been the highlight thus far.
And so, whether it’s trying to solidify a deal with Xi and sell it as something that it is not in terms of China, whether it’s cleaning up his mess in Argentina and with the cattle farmers he has angered, or whether it’s this tariff situation in which he’s trying to give people the money back that has been collected on their backs—it really feels like he is jumping from problem to problem and trying to fix them without any sort of coherent strategy.
Sargent: Just to wrap this up, looking forward here, let’s say Democrats take back the House. We’ve seen that the Senate does seem to have a bare majority of willing, including a couple of Republicans, two or three, willing to undo the tariffs. Do you expect if Democrats take back the House will they try to take some kind of action to reverse these?
Jacquez: I anticipate that they will. We’ve seen it, as you mentioned, in the Senate—particularly these big, sweeping IEEPA tariffs that are predicated on a national emergency that I think is incredibly difficult to recognize as an actual emergency. Right? The trade deficit—which, by the way, Trump’s tariffs are not fixing in any way as we speak.
And so I expect that that specific national emergency authority will be revoked, as it is in statute, so Congress can declare the end to a national emergency. I expect some of the others will continue on.
And I think it’s important—I worked with President Biden and the administration on a number of trade initiatives—and tariffs have their place as industrial policy tools to protect against unfair behavior from our trading partners. Certainly not blanket, across the board, without any thought or discrimination about what we’re bringing in.
But I do expect some of those specific, what are called Section 232 tariffs, may stay in place—the ones we have on rare earths and semiconductors and automobiles.
Sargent: If House Democrats do revoke the emergency that these tariffs are fraudulently based on, it’ll put a lot of pressure on the Senate to pass it as well. I don’t know how that turns out, do you?
Jacquez: I believe it would be privileged, right? So they would only take 50 votes instead of the 60 to break cloture under the filibuster. So if Democrats are able to make any gains in the midterms on the Senate side, or again, some of these Republicans, Mitch McConnell has become the most strident opponent of Trump’s tariff policy right now. Rand Paul, these are pretty ideologically rigid members who might side with Democrats on this one.
Sargent: It’s really an interesting scenario to contemplate. I sure hope House Democrats go through with it if they take back the chamber though. Alex Jacquez, thank you so much. That was super illuminating. We really appreciate it.
Jacquez: Thanks for having me, Greg.