The Supreme Court may have ruled 6-3 against President Trump’s use of an international emergency law to impose tariffs. But Mr. Trump seems intent on continuing the experiment he has run with the U.S. economy over the past year, in which he has raised tariffs to levels not seen since the 1930s.
In a news conference at the White House on Friday, Mr. Trump made a series of false claims about the economic impact of tariffs, and he promised to replace, or even increase, them using laws other than the one the court rejected.
“It’s ridiculous, but it’s OK. Because we have other ways, numerous other ways,” the president said. “The numbers can be far greater than the hundreds of billions we’ve already taken in.”
“We broke every record in the book, and we are continuing to do so,” the president said about his tariffs.
By the end of Friday, he said he would impose a new set of levies, including a 10 percent across-the-board tariff. Then on Saturday, Mr. Trump suddenly raised the tariffs to 15 percent, the limit allowed by the new legal provision he was using. “During the next short number of months, the Trump Administration will determine and issue the new and legally permissible Tariffs,” he said in a post on Truth Social.
To the president, tariffs are the antidote to globalization, a way to force more manufacturing back to the United States, reduce America’s reliance on foreign products, and lower the trade deficit.
But the economic evidence so far has not been in his favor. Instead of shifting manufacturing back to the United States, Mr. Trump’s tariffs appear to have mostly reshuffled trade, at great cost to U.S. companies.
Just the day before the Supreme Court issued its ruling, the government reported annual trade data for last year, including several metrics that contradicted Mr. Trump’s claims.
The data showed that the trade deficit — the gap between what America imports from other countries and what it exports — continued to widen in December, and that the annual trade deficit in goods last year hit a record high. Exports of U.S. services, a strength of the American economy, helped reduce the overall trade deficit. But Mr. Trump has spent little time focusing on that.
One source of Mr. Trump’s anger — the trade deficit with China — did narrow. Chinese imports fell nearly 30 percent in 2025. But U.S. exports to China also fell, including soybeans.
And while American businesses and consumers may have bought fewer goods from China, imports from other countries, such as Vietnam and Taiwan, surged. Trade deficits with Vietnam, Mexico, India, and other countries were the largest on record.
The U.S. economy is generally strong, and some manufacturing sectors have been doing well. But the gains have been led by industries such as electronics and aerospace, which are less exposed to tariffs. Other sectors that face hefty tariffs, like auto manufacturers, have been struggling.
Growth in manufacturing output also hasn’t yet translated into more jobs. American manufacturers cut more than 80,000 jobs in the past year.
The president has ignored any data that does not fit his message. This past week, Mr. Trump had claimed on Truth Social that the trade deficit had “BEEN REDUCED BY 78% BECAUSE OF THE TARIFFS BEING CHARGED TO OTHER COMPANIES AND COUNTRIES. IT WILL GO INTO POSITIVE TERRITORY DURING THIS YEAR, FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MANY DECADES.”
It’s not clear what metrics the president was referring to, and the White House did not clarify.
It’s not particularly unusual that the U.S. trade deficit in goods would rise from the previous year — the U.S. economy continued to grow on an annual basis, meaning Americans grew richer and bought more foreign goods. But the trend has contrasted with Mr. Trump’s stated goals and his claims about the effects of his tariffs.
For Mr. Trump, the trade deficit has long been a sign of economic weakness.
In April, he used the law just reviewed by the Supreme Court to declare that U.S. trade deficits constituted an international economic emergency and to impose sweeping tariffs to reduce them. Though some economists worried about large trade deficits, many at the time said they were neither unusual nor an emergency, since the United States had run them for decades.
Economists also had varying views on whether tariffs would actually reduce the trade deficit, which is driven by a variety of factors, including government spending and the value of the dollar. Some economists said that tariffs might reduce the trade deficit. But that was because levies would slow the U.S. economy, making Americans poorer and less able to buy foreign goods.
