The Democratic Party press is working feverishly to chronicle the Trump administration’s many sins. Thus, in just one morning’s New York Times email:
For them, it’s going to be a long four years. They may want to pace themselves.
At the top of the left’s current list, of course, is the trade war that President Trump supposedly has ignited by imposing 25% tariffs on goods imported from Canada and Mexico. Those countries promptly responded by imposing similar duties on American goods. So the trade war ostensibly is under way.
But haven’t we been here before? Trump’s first term also featured ballyhooed impositions of tariffs, and hysterical cries of “trade war” from the press. But I don’t recall that it ever came to much: Trump loves to use tariffs as bargaining chips.
So I was curious to know, what is the actual history of the federal government’s customs revenue? Did it really spiral under President Trump, and then sink back to normal under “President” Biden? This chart shows the federal government’s customs duty revenue from 2000 on, with forecasts beginning in FY 2023:
Customs revenue chugged along at a slowly growing rate until FY 2019, when it took a sizable jump. FY 2019 began in October 2018, well into the first Trump administration. It then stayed pretty constant, at around $70 or $80 billion, through FY 2021. Fiscal Year 2021 began three months before Trump left office. Customs revenue then jumped, during the first full year of the Biden administration, to a record high of $100 billion. It stayed elevated–$80 billion in FY 2023, and an estimated $97 billion in FY 1994, which ended on September 30,2024.
So tariff revenue, on average, was higher during the Biden Administration than the first Trump administration. Were the newspapers hysterical about a trade war during Biden’s term in office? Maybe I missed it.
So let’s see what happens. It is going to take a lot more than dueling press releases to constitute a trade war.
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.