Five Times What? Trump's tariff windfall claim, aired on the Mark Levin Podcast

Claim: the U.S. is taking in over $200 billion in tariffs, "5 times more than ever before" and four times more than any other country. The source is President Trump's North Carolina rally audio, aired by the Mark Levin Podcast, "9/16/26 – The Left's Dangerous Plan For AI And The Economy" (1:14:11).

Verdict: mostly-false (truth score 0.25, confidence 0.72). The dollar figure holds up on a gross basis. "Than ever before" does not, and much of the money has been ordered refunded.

We start with the strongest case for the claim. U.S. tariff collections are a record in nominal terms. USAFacts puts FY2025 customs duties at $194.9 billion net, and the Bipartisan Policy Center shows $264 billion gross in 2025. Our follow-up research found China collected about $34 billion in customs duties in 2024 and the EU about $35 billion in 2025. Against those two, the U.S. collected roughly 5.5 times as much. In absolute dollars, "four times more than any country" looks like a conservative floor. We did not tabulate every country, though, and as a share of government revenue the U.S. still ranks below many tariff-dependent economies.

The claim breaks on its baseline. The previous record was about $80–100 billion in FY2022–FY2024, so the real increase is two- to threefold. A fivefold multiple is true only against FY2016 (about $35 billion). The words "than ever before" are what make the sentence false.

"Money coming into the country" also gets the mechanism wrong. U.S. importers pay duties at U.S. ports, and foreign governments transfer nothing. The New York Fed and affiliated economists estimated about 90% of the tariff burden through November 2025 fell on U.S. entities. On 20 February 2026 the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that IEEPA does not authorise these tariffs. The Court of International Trade then ordered about $165 billion refunded. Trade-law trackers report more than $100 billion disbursed by mid-September, and the government has appealed to the Federal Circuit.

Still open: whether the refunds run through Treasury's net customs line, a full cross-country table, and whether the comparison wording is partly a transcription artefact.