Donald Trump’s tariff regime or, getting straight to the point, pending litigation against the levies, indeed poses an existential question. Just not the one Trump posits.

To let him tell it, the fate of the US economy hinges on the Supreme Court declaring that he acted lawfully in availing himself of emergency powers to implement sweeping tariffs on substantially all of America’s trade partners. In reality, that’s not true. Indeed, that’s the crux of the issue: Critics contend there was no emergency and that the US economy thrived for decades while running the perennial trade deficits Trump claims will be the death of us all.

So, one argument goes, even if Trump could exercise emergency powers to implement tariffs, there’s no emergency, which in turn means the emergency powers question’s irrelevant.

Another argument says the sheer scope of the levies demands Trump’s actions be considered through the lens of the “major questions doctrine,” a roundabout way of saying he overstepped his authority — that Congress wouldn’t willingly entrust a single agency, let alone one man, with the power to unilaterally set policies with “vast economic and political significance.”

Relatedly, if you think tariffs are synonymous with taxes, you could argue Trump’s trying to implement a gargantuan tax increase without Congress, and that the legislature can’t abrogate on taxes without itself running afoul of the Constitution.

Those latter two arguments get closer to capturing what’s really at stake, even as they’re still couched primarily in economic terms — as if Trump’s not going to find a way to implement the tariffs regardless of how the Court rules. Read that again: The administration will apply most of the tariffs one way or another, but if they have to justify them via, for example, 232 and 301 investigations, implementation will be a drawn out process and in some cases, the revenue-raising potential might not be worth the trouble.

You’ve surely seen some version of the figure below by now. Ostensibly, it illustrates the economic “stakes” for America.

That data — on Treasury customs receipts — is available to the public here.

Those monthly “revenues” are up about fourfold under Trump but as the chart text notes, it’s far from clear this is worth the trouble. Even if Trump’s correct and total tariff revenue sums to $1 trillion by next summer, that’s still only ~$60 billion every four or so weeks if you date from February of 2025. The US government spends ten times that every month.

Look at the chart again: Trump’s tariffs are bringing in an incremental $22 billion on top of average customs receipts before he took office for the second time. That seems like a pittance relative to the amount of ill-will he’s engendered in pursuit of “balanced” trade which, it should be reiterated, isn’t an end in itself. (Only Trump believes trade deficits are inherently bad.)

Last week, in a fit of apparent rage at the prospect of an adverse ruling from his normally obsequious SCOTUS majority, Trump floated sending everyone in America a $2,000 “tariff dividend” (“not including high income people,” as he put it). The math on that’s, um, challenging. As Bloomberg gently noted, “if by everyone Trump meant every US citizen outside the top income decile, the bill would be above $500 billion,” or more than double the custom duties line item sum for the most recent fiscal year in Treasury’s monthly statement.

When considered with the (nearly irrefutable) contention that the tariffs aren’t going to reverse three decades of de-industrialization in America, this whole charade starts to look like… well, a charade. In a piece which describes the tariff case as “career-defining” for John Roberts, The Wall Street Journal wrote that, “Taken together, the economic stakes and [Trump’s] intense personal commitment to his tariffs almost make the case too big to lose.”

The “too big to lose” description’s accurate, but not necessarily because of any economic stakes, nor because a ruling against the levies would be seen by Trump as a denigration of what he calls “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” The economic stakes are indeed high, particularly when considered in the context of a globalized world where trade barriers are considered retrograde. And Trump does defend his tariffs with the zeal most people reserve for attacks against their family members. But the existential question here isn’t about the economy nor about Trump’s pride. It’s about the rule of law and Trump’s efforts to usurp it.

So far, Roberts has adopted an appeasement strategy, hoping to avoid a confrontation. But, as detailed in “Trump, SCOTUS And The Appeasement Paradox,” that won’t likely work forever. At some point, SCOTUS has to push back or risk being de facto relegated to something less than a co-equal branch. That’s what’s really at stake in the tariff case. As the Journal wrote, an adverse ruling would constitute “the court’s first real blow to Trump in more than five years” as president.