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Of all Donald Trump’s policy positions, his sympathy for tariffs is among the most controversial. We are constantly told that “Trump’s tariffs” will ignite a trade war, damage the world economy, and raise prices in the U.S. As with other hysterical fears of what Trump might do in his second term–internment camps!–it makes sense to look at what actually happened during his first term.

The simplest source is the U.S. Treasury Department’s summary of the government’s sources of revenue from FY 2015 to FY 2024. This chart, interactive at the link, shows the data:

That skinny gold line at the top represents customs duties. Do you see any evidence of a trade war during Trump’s term? These are the amounts collected in customs duties for each fiscal year, in trillions of dollars (FY 2025 began on October 1, 2024):

2015: 0.05T
2016: 0.05T
2017: 0.04T
2018: 0.05T
2019: 0.09T
2020: 0.08T
2021: 0.09T
2022: 0.11T
2023: 0.08T
2024: 0.08T

During this period, customs duties peaked during the Biden Administration, and were generally at least as high during Biden’s administration as during Trump’s. So speculation about massive tariff increases should be treated with more than a grain of salt.

This morning, the Washington Post published a story, sourced anonymously from people close to Trump, to the effect that the incoming administration is planning selective tariffs, not the across-the-board increases that Trump talked about on the campaign trail:

Preliminary discussions have largely focused on several key sectors that the Trump team wants to bring back to the United States, the people said. Those include the defense industrial supply chain (through tariffs on steel, iron, aluminum and copper); critical medical supplies (syringes, needles, vials and pharmaceutical materials); and energy production (batteries, rare earth minerals and even solar panels), two of the people said.

If accurate, those plans represent what I consider to be a consensus within the conservative movement. With respect to widgets, free trade is the default rule, as long as it is free on all sides. But there are certain goods of which, for reasons of military and economic security, we need to have an assured supply. The industries identified in the Post story are exactly the ones to which this consensus most clearly applies.

Trump immediately denounced the Post’s story as fake news, but I hope it turns out to be correct. Trump will make noises about across-the-board tariffs, mostly, I think, for purposes of negotiating more favorable deals with trading partners. This is how Trump operates; if you haven’t already watched it, check out his brilliant Senate committee testimony on the renovation of the U.N. building in New York City. If someone is going to negotiate trade deals on our behalf, I am happy for it to be Donald Trump.