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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 concepts,” Robert C. Johnson, an associate professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame, told us.
In an April 10 article about Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro’s disputed claim that Trump’s 2025 tariff policies will raise $6 trillion to $7 trillion over 10 years, we briefly addressed the president’s statement that the U.S. is already “making a fortune with tariffs — $2 billion a day.” But Trump has said it several times since he first uttered the claim on April 8.
He even claimed in an April 10 meeting with members of his Cabinet that “the number is probably $3.5 billion a day” from tariffs. In that same meeting, he said, “Look, we’re making $2 billion a day now. And during Biden, we were losing $3 billion a day.”
Then, in an April 14 meeting with the president of El Salvador, Trump said, “on trade and other things, we’re doing great. We’re taking in billions and billions of dollars.” That was followed by his claim that “we were losing $2 billion a day. … Now we’re making $3 billion a day.”
We asked the White House how Trump arrived at those figures, but we didn’t receive a response.
Trump’s Overstating Daily Tariff Revenues
Trump’s claim of $2 billion or more a day in tariff revenue is contradicted by figures released by multiple federal departments or agencies.
As we’ve written, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which collects tariffs, or customs duties, on imports of foreign goods at ports of entry, said in an April 8 statement that it has collected over $200 million per day in “additional associated revenue” from 13 of Trump’s tariff-related executive actions that have been implemented during the current administration.
Also, as of April 15, the U.S. had received more than $2.3 billion in customs duties and certain excise taxes for the month, according to a Treasury Department daily financial statement. If that total included just tariffs, since excise taxes are different from customs duties, it still would be roughly $156 million per day in revenue. (Treasury data for only custom duties paid in April won’t be available until May. In February, there was about $259 million a day in customs duties paid, and the March per-day total was roughly $264 million.)
Economists we consulted were also skeptical of the president’s claim of billions of dollars in daily tariff collections to date.
“No, there is absolutely no way we are collecting $2b per day in tariff revenue,” Gene M. Grossman, an economics and international affairs professor at Princeton University, told us.
“If you multiply all the announced tariffs by the volume of trade with each country, you could get close to $2b per day, mostly due to the tariffs on China,” he wrote in an email. “But that assumes that there will be no fall off in imports with China despite tariffs over 145%, which is a pretty ridiculous assumption.”
And Johnson, of Notre Dame, speculated that the administration calculated the figure by taking the total value of U.S. imports in 2024 ($3.3 trillion in goods) and multiplying it by 20%, “which is roughly what the average US tariff would have been after the initial announcement” of tariffs on April 2. Divided by 365 days, it’s about $1.6 billion each day.
But, like Grossman, Johnson said that Trump’s revenue estimate appears to implausibly assume that “jacking up tariffs” won’t reduce the amount of goods imported in the long run.
“I think the $2 billion a day is the absolute upper bound on what could be collected in revenue from tariffs, and certainly more than is likely,” Johnson wrote in an email.
After announcing a minimum 10% tariff on all imports of foreign goods and some higher country-by-country tariff rates on April 2, a week later Trump paused the higher rates for 90 days – except for tariffs on goods from China, which have since increased to 145%. Other previously announced tariffs still in effect include 25% tariffs on imports of steel, aluminum, automobiles and auto parts.
Biden Didn’t Lose Billions a Day
As for Trump’s claim that the U.S. lost “$2 billion a day” or “$3 billion a day” during the Biden administration, Grossman and Johnson both said that the president’s statement appears to be based on the U.S. international trade deficit – not revenue from tariffs.
In 2024, Biden’s final year as president, the U.S. trade deficit in goods and services was more than $918 billion, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. The trade deficit in goods alone was about $1.2 trillion. Divide either by 365 days, and you get an average per-day deficit of between $2.5 billion and $3.3 billion.
“My guess is that’s what Trump is mentally doing — since trade deficits mean you’re ‘losing’ in his vocabulary,” Johnson said.
However, Grossman said “it’s ridiculous to think of that as a loss,” since the U.S. got the goods. He also said it’s ridiculous “to equate [the average daily trade deficit] in some way to tariff revenue.”
In an April 8 post for Boston University’s “Expert Take” series, Tarek Alexander Hassan, a BU professor of economics, explained why trade deficits shouldn’t be seen as money lost.
“A trade deficit sounds bad, but it is neither good nor bad,” he wrote. “It doesn’t mean the US is losing money. It simply means foreigners are sending the US more goods than the US is sending them.”
For the record, there was more than $216 million per day in customs duties paid to the federal government under Biden in 2024.
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