Headline Roundup • April 18th, 2025
Fact Check: How Much Revenue Are Trump's Tariffs Generating?
Trade,Money,Banking And Finance,Tariffs,Donald Trump,Taxes,Business,Customs And Border Protection,Facts And Fact Checking
Summary from the AllSides News Team
President Donald Trump recently claimed that the US is earning “$2 billion a day” from tariffs, but fact-checkers have called that number misleading.
The Numbers: US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which is responsible for collecting tariffs, says it has collected $21 billion in total tariff revenue since Inauguration Day. CBP said Monday that the $21 billion figure includes over $500 million since the introduction of the latest tariffs on April 5 — “Liberation Day” — and that its current revenue stream amounted to $250 million a day, on average. The Treasury Department's daily statement on Monday showed total deposits for “Customs and Certain Excise Taxes” were $305 million.
Trump's Claim: Economists writing for Poynter (Center bias) and Factcheck.org (Lean Left) suggested that Trump may have gotten his figure by taking the US 2024 trade value ($3.3 trillion in goods), dividing it over 365 days for a daily trade value, and applying the tariff rates that were set to kick in. That calculation comes to nearly $2 billion a day. However, it assumes that 2025 trade levels will be similar to 2024. Economists said the tariffs are likely to reduce imported goods from the US and suppress trade.
How The Media Covered It: Outlets on the left and center offered context around Trump's claim, often framing it as misleading. As of Friday morning, no outlets on the right covered the story.
Written by the AllSides staff (of humans). Learn more. Support our mission. Suggest an improvement to this summary.
Featured Coverage of this Story
U.S. Customs and Border Protection appears to be contradicting President Donald Trump’s comments on the daily revenue generated by his latest slate of tariffs.
The agency said in a statement to CNBC on Monday, “Since April 5, CBP has collected over $500 million under the new reciprocal tariffs, contributing to more than $21 billion in total tariff revenue from 15 presidential trade actions implemented since Jan 20, 2025.”
The update comes after a 10-hour glitch in the finance system prevented U.S. importers from inputting a code that would have exempted freight that...
President Donald Trump has added to his unsupported claim that the U.S. is making “$2 billion a day” from tariffs by saying that the country was losing $2 billion or $3 billion “a day” under President Joe Biden. Economists told us that Trump appears to be wrongly comparing a very high – and unlikely – estimate of potential daily revenue from his tariffs with a figure reflecting the average daily U.S. trade deficit during Biden’s last year in office.
“My best guess would be that Trump is probably conflating different...
AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein
Before pausing country-by-country tariffs for 90 days, President Donald Trump repeatedly said tariffs were bringing in immense revenue.
At an April 8 executive order signing, Trump said, “We’re taking in almost $2 billion a day in tariffs. Two billion a day.”
He repeated the $2 billion figure during an April 8 speech to the National Republican Congressional Committee. Trump did not cite a source for the figure.
