After months of delay, higher tariffs that President Donald Trump had vowed to impose on goods imported from dozens of countries went into effect on Aug. 7, affecting trade with most of the United States’ trading partners. But before and after he took office in January, Trump has made a series of false and misleading statements to justify his new tariff policies.
Here is a recap of some of his claims that we have fact-checked:
For starters, Trump continues to falsely claim or suggest that the tariffs will be paid by other countries and not American consumers. Just before the newest tariffs went into effect, Trump wrote on Truth Social, in all capital letters: “RECIPROCAL TARIFFS TAKE EFFECT AT MIDNIGHT TONIGHT! BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, LARGELY FROM COUNTRIES THAT HAVE TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF THE UNITED STATES FOR MANY YEARS, LAUGHING ALL THE WAY, WILL START FLOWING INTO THE USA.”
He’s wrong. Foreign businesses could decide to “lower their prices to absorb some of the tariffs,” as the Tax Foundation explains. But as we’ve written before, importers in the U.S. pay the tariffs in the form of customs duties, which are collected at ports of entry by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Then at least some of those increased costs, according to economists, are often passed on to U.S. consumers in the form of higher prices on items. Because of this, tariffs are considered to be regressive taxes, affecting lower-income households more than others as a percentage of income.
For more, read: Trump’s Agenda: Tariffs, Nov. 21
On April 2, or “Liberation Day,” as Trump labeled it, the president announced that the U.S. would begin charging a “minimum baseline tariff of 10%” on all imported goods. During that announcement, he explained that the U.S. would charge a higher tariff on imports from certain countries that was equal to half of tariff rates those countries charged for U.S. goods “including currency manipulation and trade barriers.” That means tariffs of up to 50% on imports from some countries, he said. (The tariffs that went into effect on Aug. 7 also range from 10% to 50%, depending on the country of origin.)
But we found that Trump’s so-called “reciprocal” tariff rates weren’t based on tariffs that other countries charged on goods coming from the U.S. Instead, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative came up with the rates by dividing the size of a country’s trade imbalance with the U.S. in goods by how much America imports in goods from that nation. That’s not a legitimate way to calculate reciprocal tariffs for countries, many economists told us.
For more, read: Trump’s Misleading Tariff Chart, April 3
Trump has had a habit of emphasizing the U.S. trade deficit in goods with certain countries while ignoring a surplus in services with those same nations. It’s something he has done for years.
For example, when recently explaining why tariffs on goods coming from Switzerland increased to 39% this month, Trump cited “a $40 billion deficit” with the Swiss as the reason. But when the trade surplus in services is factored in, the overall U.S. trade deficit with Switzerland was less than $9 billion in 2024, according to the trade representative’s office and the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
In January remarks, Trump similarly inflated the trade deficit with the European Union to $350 billion, when the goods-and-services deficit in 2024 was about $148.4 billion.
For more, read: Trump Exaggerates Trade Deficit with Switzerland by Ignoring Surplus in Services, Aug. 6
In late July, Trump agreed to impose a 15% tariff on most imports from the 27 EU nations instead of the 30% tariff he threatened weeks earlier. In a letter to the president of the European Commission, Trump had argued that higher tariffs were needed because EU tariffs and nontariff policies “cause the large and unsustainable trade deficits” between the U.S. and the EU. But economists disputed that statement. EU tariffs were already generally low, economists told us, and other economic factors – rather than specific trade policies or regulations – contribute more to the yearslong U.S.-EU trade imbalance, they said.
In a February report about trade between the U.S. and the EU, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service said that “many economists attribute the U.S. goods trade deficit more to macroeconomic variables, such as a relatively low savings rate and relatively high consumer spending in the United States compared to other economies, than trade practices.”
For more, read: Trump’s Misleading Justification for Higher Tariffs on Imports of EU Goods, July 29
Trump also has targeted Canada by increasing tariffs on goods from the United States’ northern neighbor. Several times this year, Trump rationalized increasing tariffs on Canadian goods by making the misleading claim that the Canadian government charges U.S. farmers a 250% or 270% tariff on dairy products exported to Canada. But, as we wrote, those high rates would only be charged if U.S. exports exceed predetermined tariff rate quotas. Currently, American producers do not export enough dairy to meet Canadian tariff rate quota thresholds. Below those quotas, American dairy sales to Canada face zero tariffs.
For more, read: Trump’s Misleading Claim on Canadian Dairy Tariffs, April 1
When a reporter asked in January about Trump’s planned tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods, Trump insisted that the U.S. didn’t need to rely on imports from those countries. “We don’t need the products that they have,” Trump said. “We have all the oil you need. We have all the trees you need, meaning the lumber.”
Experts told us that, in theory, the U.S. would be able to meet domestic demand using its own natural resources if it stopped importing crude oil and lumber from Canada and Mexico. But they said the reality is that the transition would be expensive, would not happen quickly and would be complicated by other factors.
As one example, most of the crude oil extracted in the U.S. is light, or less dense. Meanwhile, many refineries in the country were configured years ago to process the heavier crude oils that are extracted in places like Canada and Mexico. Those refineries “can’t easily or quickly switch” to using the U.S.-produced oil, David Gantz, a fellow in trade and international economics at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, told us in an interview. That currently makes imports vital to the U.S. refining industry.
For more, read: Trump on U.S. Imports of Oil and Lumber, Feb. 11
Although federal revenue from tariffs increased dramatically this year, Trump at times has exaggerated how much the government has collected from the customs duties.
In April, Trump not only wrongly claimed that the U.S. was making “$2 billion a day” from his tariffs, he falsely said that the country had lost $2 billion or $3 billion “a day” under former President Joe Biden. Experts told us that Trump was probably wrongly comparing a very high – and unlikely – estimate of potential daily revenue from tariffs he originally proposed on April 2 with a figure reflecting the average daily U.S. trade deficit during Biden’s last year in office.
Gene M. Grossman, an economics and international affairs professor at Princeton University, told us “it’s ridiculous to think of” the average daily trade deficit “as a loss,” since the U.S. got the goods that were imported. He also said it’s wrong “to equate” the trade deficit “in some way to tariff revenue.”
For more, read: Trump Expands on Dubious Daily Tariff Revenue Claim, April 17
Then in June, about two months after Trump’s 10% minimum tariff on imported goods went into effect, Trump falsely claimed that the U.S. took in $88 billion from tariffs in a two-month period. Revenue from tariffs increased substantially in April and May, setting new monthly records at the time. But the total was less than half the figure Trump cited.
Trump’s figure was closer to tariff collections during the first nine months of this fiscal year, from October to May, which totaled more than $81 billion. But that included about three and a half months under Trump’s presidential predecessor. (As of July, tariff revenue in fiscal year 2025 was about $136 billion, according to the Treasury Department.)
At the same time, Trump claimed that tariff revenue had increased significantly with “no inflation,” which isn’t accurate. Based on the Consumer Price Index, the annualized rate of inflation has been lower than it was when Trump took office earlier this year — but it isn’t 0%. The rate was 2.7% year-over-year in June and July. That’s down from 3% in January. But the July rate is up 0.4 percentage points from the 2025 low of 2.3% for the 12 months ending in April.
Economists also predict that tariffs are likely to push prices higher in the coming months. “Price increases are coming,” Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Santander U.S. Capital Markets, told the New York Times for a June story about Trump’s tariffs and inflation. That same month, Jared Bernstein, the former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Biden administration, wrote that once the “temporary factors” that are “for now, holding back price passthrough” are no longer an option, “we should see more of a tariff bump in the inflation data.”
For more, read: Trump Exaggerates Tariff Revenue, June 23
Trump has also pushed his tariff agenda by claiming that the U.S. was its “richest” or “wealthiest” between the 1870s and 1910s when tariffs were a primary source of federal revenue. But in terms of the overall U.S. economy, real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product per capita is many times higher today than it was during the so-called Gilded Age. Furthermore, economists told us that other factors, such as immigration and increased labor productivity, contributed more to the economic growth than tariffs in that post-Civil War era.
Trump even suggested that revenue from higher tariffs could replace federal income tax collections, a claim that economists have said is not realistic. Erica York, vice president of federal tax policy for the Tax Foundation, wrote in October that such a proposal is “a mathematical impossibility.”
In fiscal year 2024, the federal government received $2.4 trillion, or 49%, of its $4.9 trillion in revenue from individual income taxes. Meanwhile, the Budget Lab at Yale University projected that all of the 2025 tariffs announced through Aug. 6 would raise at most $2.7 trillion over the 10 years between 2026 and 2035.
For more, read: Trump’s Flawed Claim that Tariffs Made the U.S. Its ‘Richest,’ March 11
Trump has said higher tariffs are necessary because of a decline in American manufacturing, often claiming that “90,000 plants and factories” in the U.S. closed after the former North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico took effect in 1994. But that figure is questionable.
The Census Bureau’s most recent Business Dynamics Statistics show that there was a decrease of about 74,000 “manufacturing establishments” in the U.S. between 1995 and 2022. About one-quarter of the decline during that nearly three-decade period was in establishments with four or fewer employees — making it unclear how many were truly a manufacturing factory or plant, as some small-business manufacturers make products out of their own homes.
For more, read: Trump Uses Questionable Figure for U.S. ‘Plants and Factories’ Lost Since NAFTA, April 15
And when the stock market reacted negatively to Trump’s tariff announcements earlier this year, Trump wrote on Truth Social that the market downturn “has NOTHING TO DO WITH TARIFFS, only that he left us with bad numbers.” Trump was referring to Biden, whom he blamed when the stock market was experiencing declines in March and April. “This is Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s,” Trump said in his April 30 social media post.
While stock prices are driven by a range of economic factors, market experts said that Trump’s tariff policies did have a lot to do with the market’s volatility at the time. We put together a graphic showing how the markets responded after Trump made various tariff announcements, and how Trump took credit when stocks went up or blamed Biden when stocks went down.
More recently, Trump’s tariff announcements have had less of an impact on stock prices.
For more, read: Trump’s Stock Market Blame-Shifting, May 5
All of our articles about tariffs can be found here.
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