General Discussion

how much the bribes added up to.

The threatened tariffs were much higher than the actual collections -- probably in the range of $500B beyond what was actually collected. How much were other countries willing to pay in order to avoid $500B worth of tariffs? The tariffs would have been paid by importers, and I doubt many of the importers would pay the extortion money, unless loss of those imports would have put them completely out of business. For example, Amazon had no incentive to pay any bribes. Amazon has about 500,000,000 SKUs. If they lost a supply of 50 million SKUs for a while, that wouldn't really affect them very much.

Many of those lost SKUs would have come from Chinese manufacturers, so China (the country) might have made some deal with Trump. My guess is that any such deal would be non-cash -- perhaps some special opportunities for Kushner and his lovely bride. I'm not sure the EU countries would have paid big bribes. If Trump shook them down, I'd expect somebody to be talking about that.

Any bribes that Trump got probably came from particular industries he targeted. For example, the raid on the Hyundai plant was obviously an attempt at extortion, and it would not surprise me to learn Hyundai paid some tribute. There may be 25 other cases like that.

So, if I were guessing, I'd say that Trump was probably able to engineer on the order of $1-2 billion in tribute payments specifically related to tariff shakedowns. Of course, Trump has been running other shakedowns, selling pardons, greasing federal contracts, and very likely selling classified information, so 2025 was a very good year.