The $18 trillion in investment that Trump claimed his tariffs had secured was mostly fiction.
Following the tariff ruling, some people (including me) are wondering what happens to the trade deals extorted from our trading partners under duress. I know the president has more tariff ammunition in his pocket, and he will use it in short order. I don’t know what the final result will be for these trade deals.
What about the $18 trillion in investment pledges that the tariffs were used to extract from foreign governments and companies? If the gun is taken away, do the promises made at gunpoint disappear with it?
Well, the thing is, most of those promises were never really what they seemed in the first place, as Scott Lincicome’s detailed analysis at The Dispatch shows. So before you panic about the $18 trillion in investment that Trump claimed his tariffs had secured, it’s worth understanding what that number actually was. It was, in short, mostly fiction. What follows is based on Lincicome’s piece, which has tons of graphs and data to look at.
Start with the headline figure itself. The White House’s own list of investment announcements adds up to only $9.6 trillion — barely half of what the president kept claiming. And even that number falls apart under scrutiny. Lincicome cites a Bloomberg report that found that roughly $2.6 trillion of it wasn’t investment in any meaningful sense. It included ordinary operating costs, loosely worded purchasing commitments, and weapons deals that foreign governments had been pursuing long before Trump announced a single tariff.
The bulk of the remaining corporate pledges (about 83 percent) relate to AI and data centers. That spending is real, but it has nothing to do with tariffs. The U.S. AI boom was already well underway, powered largely by imported components and long-standing tariff exemptions. Lincicome quotes Bloomberg’s Shawn Donnan, who says that “the U.S. is ‘experiencing a potentially epochal and so far largely tariff-free technological revolution in artificial intelligence. . . . Perhaps the lesson is that innovation works best when it’s tariff-free.’ Perhaps!”
Crediting tariffs for this, as the White House has done, is wild.
Lincicome shows that foreign government pledges were stunningly hollow. The Gulf States accounted for roughly 80 percent of the foreign pledges, but Peterson Institute economists calculated that these countries’ economies are simply too small to deliver on those pledges. South Korea’s $350 billion commitment still needs parliamentary approval. The EU has no legal mechanism to direct private companies to invest abroad. According to the Financial Times, most foreign governments deliberately kept their language intentionally vague because they intended to walk back as much as possible once they faced reduced tariff pressure.
I remember telling my parents last summer that, despite the beating that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen received in the press after the trade deal between the EU and the U.S. was announced, I thought she had been quite smart. She made investment promises she had no power to enforce in order to negotiate lower import taxes for EU consumers of American products. Lincicome’s column confirms my instinct.
As for the major American corporate pledges from companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia, they largely reflected spending that had been in the pipeline for years, repackaged to flatter a new president, as companies routinely do. Lincicome writes:
The remaining $7 trillion on the White House list is split evenly between U.S. firms and overseas governments and companies, but there are big red flags here, too. “Most of the biggest investment plans,” Reynolds explains, came from large multinational corporations—Apple, Meta, Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, Micron, IBM, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Merck, Johnson &Johnson, and AbbVie—that were already investing heavily in the United States and had already planned even more spending in the future, long before any tariff-induced “Trump Effect.”
As we discussed last year, companies routinely repackage already-committed spending to curry favor with a new president, and various reports indicate that many of the “Trump Effect” investments fit that bill.
The actual data told the same story. Real foreign direct investment showed no significant uptick in 2025, and FDI had actually grown faster during the Biden years. Real manufacturing investment, which, as a reminder, was supposedly the entire point of the tariffs, has been falling, not rising.
The lesson in all of this is straightforward. The $18 trillion was never really there because it was an assemblage of recycled announcements, empty foreign promises, and an AI boom that tariffs had nothing to do with (and could have been fueled by tariff exemptions, actually). Which means that when the administration returns to Congress or the public to argue that a new round of tariffs that will surely be coming is needed to protect these investments, the right response is a simple question: What investments, exactly? The numbers didn’t hold up before the Court struck the tariffs down. They won’t hold up after, either.