White House tells Supreme Court it doesn't care about the tariff money raised [View all]

President Donald Trump has repeatedly boasted that the government is making a “fortune.”

The Trump administration told the Supreme Court on Wednesday that raising government revenue is not the purpose of the emergency tariffs that President Donald Trump imposed this year on all imported goods.

Though the president has repeatedly boasted that the government is making a “fortune” from his new import taxes, Solicitor General D. John Sauer denied that the tariffs are equivalent to a tax and said they would work best if they were never paid.

“These are regulatory tariffs. They are not revenue-raising tariffs. The fact that they raise revenue is only incidental. The tariffs would be most effective, so to speak, if no person ever paid them,” he told the justices.

Sauer’s comments were striking since they follow months of the president’s repeated celebration of the revenue gained from the 10 percent universal tariff he has imposed on all foreign goods and the higher levies he has applied to products from specific nations including China, Mexico, Vietnam and Canada.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/11/05/trump-emergency-tariffs-revenue-supreme-court/