President Donald Trump held a lengthy press conference in the briefing room to celebrate some important Supreme Court victories, but in his typical fashion, the question-and-answerTrump Makes Jaw-Dropping Announcement After Supreme Court Victory portion delved into a myriad of other topics.
Among those topics was tariffs and how, he says, the United States has made billions of dollars on them.
“Mr. President, a leading global economist just did a one-eighty and says your tariff plan, you may have outsmarted everybody with it. What is your message?” a reporter said to the president.
“I love this. I love this question. This is the favorite. This is the best question I’ve ever been asked because I’ve been going through abuse for years on this. Because, as you know, we’re taking in hundreds of billions of dollars, no inflation whatsoever,” he said before he was pressed further on the matter.
“Mr. President, what is your message to critics who think your tariff plan caused a recession?” he was asked.
“I think they should go back to business school. It’s so obvious. It’s so obvious. I mean, we’re taking in billions and billions of dollars from China and a lot of other countries. We took in … I had a call from somebody in the House, a high official. ‘Sir, we have a problem. We don’t know what to do. The books are a mess.’ I said, ‘what do you mean by the books?’… ‘The books, the money, the money coming in is so terrible.’ I figured, oh boy, what’s this? I don’t like this question. I said, ‘so what?’ … ‘There’s so much money coming in and there must be some kind of an accounting mistake because we have hundreds of billions of dollars more money than we thought.’ I said, ‘do me a favor. Go check the call me back. You have to call me back. Check the tariff column.’ Calls me back two hours later. ‘You’re right. We took in 88 billion in tariffs,’” the president said.
🚨 JUST IN: President Trump announces the US has already taken in $88 BILLION in tariffs, much more than expected
“I got a call from Congress: ‘we’re taking in much more money than we have scheduled.’ I said ‘so far, that sounds good!”
And the crowd started laughing 😂 pic.twitter.com/iAdHbnm1fW
— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) June 26, 2025
“They have so much money coming in, but more important than the money coming in. We have companies coming in, factories coming in, auto plants being built. AI is being built here instead of being built all over Europe and Asia. We have all of it. We have over 15 trillion dollars, just about, Scott. I think we’re right about that number. We went to Saudi Arabia. We went to Qatar. We went to UAE. Very smart people, very smart leaders, great leaders. And we took in 5.1 trillion dollars just there without the tariffs. I mean, they also like the thing called November 5th, November 6th and November 7th. That was a very good little period of time. It’s called the presidential election. You know, you used to have one-day election. Now you have it over days. But even if you just took that little period because it was pretty obvious it was going to be a landslide. But they like that. But they love the tariffs,” he said.
“I had Texas Instruments come in the other day. Big company. And they said, ‘we’re putting in 60 billion dollars into new plants and new equipment, new everything. Sir, you’re going to keep the tariffs, aren’t you?’ President Trump said.
“But if somebody got elected, they’re afraid that this was taken off. Well, we’re going to guarantee it’s never going to be taken off,” he added.
