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Apart from golfing, grifting, and gaudy gold decorations, Donald Trump has few passions. One of them is making up numbers. And, since he also likes superlatives, the bigger they are, the better (the one exception is his weight, which he routinely understates by a few dozen pounds).

While the figures Trump throws around are generally supposed to make him look good, there’s no real rhyme or reason behind his use of numbers.

For example, he is very specific when lying about his crowd sizes but vague when he is talking about the size of golf legend Arnold Palmer’s pecker.

Consistency isn’t important. On the campaign trail, Trump kept increasing the number of undocumented immigrants who had allegedly entered the US during Joe Biden’s term in office (from 10 million to 25 million). And, more recently, the number of “wars” the president claims to have stopped also keeps going up.

THE PRESIDENT OF PEACE: 8 wars ended in 8 months. pic.twitter.com/OiAH7YfkVu

— Department of State (@StateDept) October 14, 2025

In addition, he is not bound by the laws of mathematics. Trump makes this quite clear every time he talks about wanting to reduce drug prices by 1,500 percent, which is arithmetically impossible.

Fortunately for him, the presidency affords him ample opportunities to make up numbers. After all, he oversees a country of nearly 350 million Americans (keep that figure in mind; we’ll need it in a moment) and a budget of $7 trillion.

Of all the numbers Trump invents, none is more fantastic than the massive windfall that the US is allegedly reaping as a result of his tariffs. According to the president, thanks to his amazing deal-making prowess, the country has taken in trillions of dollars.

How many trillions of dollars, you ask? Well, it depends.

On the one hand, Trump claims that his tariffs have generated a tsunami in foreign investments on US soil this year. By his latest accounting, that figure alone will reach $22 trillion by the end of the year. However, since it keeps going up (by $5 trillion in October alone), who knows what number he will finally settle on.

On the other hand, the president is also saying that the tariffs are raising unfathomable sums of hard cash in revenue. While he keeps suggesting that exporting countries and companies are paying that money, it is actually a tax on American businesses — and consumers — as the government was forced to admit before the Supreme Court this week.

To Americans who are struggling to make ends meet or who lost their jobs in the Trump economy (a new report on Thursday showed that layoffs in October reached recession-type levels and were the highest for that month in more than two decades), the numbers Trump is bandying around sound too good to be true.

And they are. Let’s take a look.

First of all, the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) is about $29 trillion, which means that the investments Trump is touting would almost double the economy. Real growth, however, is not reflecting that at all.

While it is a fool’s errand to take the president at his word, let’s do just that for a moment.

The additional investments in the US of $22 trillion that he touts would come out to roughly $125,000 per American worker (or $60,000 per citizen regardless of age).

That begs the question: Where is that money?

And why isn’t it creating jobs? Under Trump, payroll growth has stagnated, and there is good reason to believe that the economy is shedding jobs now.

But how could that be possible with all of that money coming in?

The answer, of course, is that it is not coming in at anywhere close to these levels. Instead, the White House is counting vague pledges of future investments (including those that foreign companies operating in the US had already budgeted) as solid commitments.

But what about all that hard cash from tariffs? While the administration is sometimes conflating these figures (a White House social media post from Labor Day touted investments and tariff revenue of $8 trillion each), Trump himself has said that the US has “taken in” trillions of dollars from the tariffs that it would have to pay back if the Supreme Court were to rule that he imposed them illegally.

What happened to those trillions?

The president mentioned that the European Union, Japan, and Korea alone paid the US almost $2 trillion, which is nearly one-third of the entire US budget and more than $5,000 per citizen.

So how come he wants the 40 million Americans who rely on a federal food assistance program to go hungry during the government shutdown? In fact, with all those extra trillions flowing into the country, why does anybody need to be on food stamps?

To put in perspective how much money that is, the supposed $2 trillion from the EU, Japan, and Korea could be used to build more than 6,000 ballrooms.

We’re talking real money here.

Well, actually we are not, because those trillions of dollars, apart from the import taxes the American people pay because of his tariffs, only exist in the president’s head.

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