In both legal filings and in public, President Donald Trump and his team have made fantastical claims about the calamities that would befall the nation should the Supreme Court curtail his authority to implement global tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. They allege, in the government’s opening brief for a case that will be argued before the court in November, that an adverse decision would devastate the U.S. economy, the federal government’s fiscal position, and the president’s ability to effectuate trade and foreign policy. The goal, it appears, is to pressure the court into issuing a favorable opinion for prudential and institutional reasons, even if the law demands otherwise.

Given the legal deficiencies in the Trump administration’s case, this shock-and-awe approach is understandable. Yet it suffers from a serious flaw: The underlying policy claims are ridiculous.

First, a ruling against the tariffs would not “lead to financial ruin,” as the government’s attorneys asserted in a letter to an appeals court. Between May and September, the tariffs were only around 4.5 percent of federal receipts. But even this effect is overstated because it ignores the slower economic growth and smaller tax base that the tariffs create.

In its Supreme Court brief, the government claims that “with tariffs, we are a rich nation; without tariffs, we are a poor nation.” The reality is that the United States is drowning in debt either way. The government’s fiscal trajectory is determined by other policies — in particular, social insurance entitlements — that dwarf the tariffs’ effects. Dynamic calculations from the Tax Foundation show that, between 2025 and 2054, public debt will rise from 99.9 percent of gross domestic product to 164.1 percent with the tariffs and to 171.5 percent without them. That’s one fewer deck chair on the Titanic, at best.

Warnings of massive harm to the broader economy — even another Great Depression — are similarly nonsensical. Tariff policy matters on the margins and can be especially painful for small businesses like those now before the Supreme Court. For the U.S. economy overall, however, trade policy isn’t transformative because — contrary to conventional wisdom — the United States is one of the least globally integrated countries in the world. Total trade is 25 percent of GDP, ranking us 191st among the 195 nations with data available.

Meanwhile, revenue from the tariff collections under consideration by the court are just $89 billion thus far — a rounding error in a $30.5 trillion economy. The tariffs’ modest fiscal effects mean that invalidating them would have a modest effect on the market for government debt and related securities.

And virtually all professional economic analyses have concluded that unilateral tariffs — and related policy uncertainty — harmed the economy during Trump’s first term. In short, it would be impossible for the “catastrophic consequences” warned of during an earlier appeal to result from invalidating the new tariffs. If anything, we should expect a small but real boost to the economy — a conclusion that rising equity markets confirmed when lower courts found the tariffs to be illegal.

The administration also errs when contending that the tariffs are critical to the conduct of trade and foreign policy. Since the 1977 enactment of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the United States has completed 14 comprehensive free trade agreements with 20 countries, as well as two massive multilateral agreements at the World Trade Organization. (This includes Trump’s own U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership he jettisoned on the first day of his first term.) The United States has officially ratified 538 treaties over the same period. None of these deals involved IEEPA tariffs or the threat of them, nor did the Abraham Accords, which Trump considers a signature foreign policy achievement and framework for broader Middle East peace.

Core to these and the other policy errors permeating the Trump team’s arguments before the court is a refusal to acknowledge that these tariffs could be replaced by tariffs either enacted by law or imposed by executive action under one of the many laws that explicitly provide the president with such authority. These include tariff laws that the Trump administration has itself invoked under the guise of “national security” or “unfair” foreign trade practices — precisely the objectives it now pretends only IEEPA tariffs can achieve. (At the same time, officials have promised to invoke these same laws as a Plan B were the court to invalidate the tariffs.)

The prudence of alternative tariffs is a separate question. What matters is only that alternatives exist — and rebut the government’s predictions of doom if this tariff option is struck down.

The outcome of the case should be based on law and the Constitution rather than the possible effects of the court’s decision. Still, should the justices consider the government’s extralegal claims that disaster awaits the nation in a world without these tariffs, they can rest assured knowing that those claims are incorrect.

Globalization skeptics often think of trade policy the way Homer Simpson thinks of alcohol: as the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems. The administration’s tariff claims are no exception. But tariffs are not the solution to all the nation’s problems, because — to the extent those problems even exist — trade policy was never their main cause.