Trump’s recent Wall Street Journal piece is not just a defense of tariffs. It is a claim of intellectual discovery in economics. He argues, in effect, that the vast majority of experts have been looking at tariffs backward, and that his critics keep repeating a superstition: tariffs are a tax on Americans. In his telling, tariffs are a way to make foreigners pay, raise revenue, boost domestic production, and still keep inflation tame.

If Trump remains fixated on the Nobel Peace Prize, he is aiming at the wrong category. His real ambition, at least on the page, is the science of economics. Even though he did not explicitly state his discoveries, we can infer the economic laws he implied and name them in his honor.

The first Trump Tariff law is as follows: tariffs are not taxes on domestic consumers but levies on foreigners. The second Trump Tariff law states that tariffs are not inflationary and can even be a tool for disinflation. The third law says that tariffs promote economic growth. In his article, Trump refers to empirical studies and government statistics that, in his view, substantiate his discoveries. He points to Harvard-affiliated research as support for the proposition that mainstream economics got tariff incidence wrong.

Let us examine his discoveries and the data.

Trump writes that “the burden, or incidence, of the tariffs has fallen overwhelmingly on foreign producers and middlemen, including large corporations that are not from the U.S.” The first thing that caught my eye is that he is no longer talking about foreign countries, but about companies. This is indeed progress. Second, the word “overwhelmingly” implies that the opposite outcome, the burden falling on domestic consumers, can be........

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