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. 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.
President Donald Trump has cited a $40 billion trade deficit with Switzerland to justify a new, high tariff on imported Swiss goods. But his figure ignores trade in services. The overall goods-and-services deficit is less than $9 billion.
About six months into the second term of President Donald Trump, Republicans and Democrats are making conflicting and often misleading assessments of the Trump administration’s impact on inflation and prices. Both sides cherry-pick examples of consumer products to support their claims, while sometimes wrongly taking credit for lower prices or falsely casting blame for rising costs.
The United States and the European Union have reached a preliminary trade deal to avoid a 30% U.S. tariff on imported goods from the EU that President Donald Trump threatened would go into effect on Aug. 1. 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.
In recent speeches and media scrums, President Donald Trump has lauded the federal budget surplus for the month of June, claiming the surplus had not happened in “many, many years” or “decades.” To be clear, the U.S. had not recorded a surplus in June since 2016 – but the country has had several surpluses in other months since that time.
Treasury Department data show that revenue from tariffs on imported foreign goods increased substantially in April and May, setting monthly records. But the total is less than half the figure President Donald Trump has cited. At least twice this month, the president has wrongly claimed that the U.S. “brought in $88 billion” from tariffs in “two months.”
A TV ad from a group supportive of President Donald Trump makes misleading claims, and uses outdated data, to argue that he is “fixing” an economy “ruined” by Democrats.
President Donald Trump said the faltering stock market “is Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s” and that a downturn wasn’t due to tariffs. Our graphic shows how the markets responded after Trump made various tariff announcements.
We look at a half dozen of Trump’s most consequential pledges – ones that he said would happen immediately — and the progress Trump has made toward fulfilling them.
President Donald Trump has added to his unsupported claim that the U.S. is making “$2 billion a day” from tariffs by saying that the country was losing $2 billion or $3 billion “a day” under President Joe Biden. Economists told us that Trump appears to be wrongly comparing a very high – and unlikely – estimate of potential daily revenue from his tariffs with a figure reflecting the average daily U.S. trade deficit during Biden’s last year in office.