It was just last week when Donald Trump used his social media platform to boast, “The United States is taking in RECORD NUMBERS in Tariffs.” It was not an isolated claim: The president has repeatedly asserted of late that, thanks to his highly controversial tariffs policy, American coffers are filling at a rate of roughly $2 billion per day.

CNBC reported that data from Customs and Border Protection appear to contradict the Republican’s claims, and a new analysis from The Associated Press advanced the reporting, documenting the extent to which Trump has wildly inflated the facts. Indeed, the AP concluded that the president’s preferred statistic is simply “false.”

Trump began raising tariffs in February. That month, about $7.247 billion in customs duties were collected, or $258.82 million per day. In March, the most recent monthly figure available, a total of about $8.168 billion in customs duties was collected, or approximately $263.48 million per day. A customs duty is a type of tariff. … The U.S. has collected approximately $3.076 billion in customs and certain excise taxes so far this month, coming out to about $180.94 million per day, according to the Treasury Department’s data.

Complicating matters, the president didn’t stick to his false claim about $2 billion a day in tax revenue: At a White House event last week, Trump decided that his boasts were understating matters. “Now we’re making $3 billion a day,” he claimed on April 14.

The Washington Post published a fact-check report noting data from the Treasury Department and Customs and Border Protection that showed that Trump was “way off the mark.” Indeed, the Post’s analysis concluded that the president peddled “nonsense numbers.”

And while I’ll concede the point that Trump getting caught saying something that isn’t true hardly constitutes a stop-the-presses development, I continue to believe there’s a broader significance to all of this.

For one thing, the White House is doing real and consequential harm — to the U.S. economy, to the country’s international credibility and reputation, and even to our global partnerships and alliances — based on Trump’s assumptions about the value of his trade tariffs. If he’s wrong about the most basic elements of the policy, it’s a painful and timely reminder that the American president is harming his own country as a direct result of his incompetence.

But let’s also not forget that the Republican continues to suggest — out loud, on the record, in apparent seriousness — that tariffs will generate so much revenue that income taxes might soon be unnecessary.

This idea, which he’s peddled before, has always been bananas. In fact, “It is literally impossible for tariffs to fully replace income taxes,” as Kimberly Clausing and Maurice Obstfeld, two senior fellows at nonpartisan think tank the Peterson Institute for International Economics, wrote last year.

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Trump keeps talking about the idea anyway. Three months ago, shortly before his second inaugural, the Republican announced plans to create an “External Revenue Service,” so that the U.S. would no longer have to rely on the IRS. He repeated this in his inaugural address, boasting that this External Revenue Service would collect “massive amounts of money pouring into our treasury.”

The president’s allies quickly chimed in. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick boasted last month, “We’re gonna make the External Revenue Service replace the Internal Revenue Service.” Around the same time, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri added, “I love Trump’s idea to get rid of the Internal Revenue Service. Let’s make it the External Revenue Service.”

But the latest data reinforces the inconvenient fact that this entire approach is folly. The White House is clearly destabilizing the existing tax agency, but if the president and his cohorts believe the IRS can simply be mothballed while the U.S. government relies on tariff revenue, the evidence proves otherwise.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.