President Donald Trump speaks as he hosts a lunch with Republican Senators on the Rose Garden patio at the White House, Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2025, in Washington.

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump has invented yet another heroic myth about himself, this time making his own aides and staff seem like ignorant fools who needed his tutoring to understand basic functions of their own agencies in collecting import taxes.

The topic of his latest entirely fictional “sir story” is the tens of billions of dollars Americans are paying each month in new tariffs, thanks to his trade war against the world. In Trump’s telling, “his people” could not understand where the extra money was coming from.

“Our country is taking in tens of billions of dollars and trillions of dollars, actually trillions of dollars in tariffs, you know all about it. It’s been amazing. They say, ‘Why are we taking in so much money?’ Last week they found $29 billion, and they couldn’t figure out where it came from. I said, ‘Check the tariff shelf,’ and they said, ‘How did you know that’s where it came from,’” he said in an August 14 speech, in what appears to have been the first telling of the “tariff shelf” tale.

Ernie Tedeschi, an economist at Yale University’s Budget Lab and formerly a top economist in the Joe Biden White House, said, “Tariffs are taxes. When you raise them, you raise revenue.”

Tedeschi is among experts across the political spectrum, including those with substantial government experience, who said Trump’s implication that the new revenue is mystifying officials at the United States Trade Representative, which writes the language implementing the tariffs, US Customs, which collects them from importers at ports of entry, and the US Treasury, which keeps track of all incoming payments, makes no sense.

“The staffs at Treasury, USTR........

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