WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has taken a whipsaw approach to tariffs, widening and shifting course in determining which countries and goods will be subject to them.
But across Trump’s political career, his case for tariffs has remained consistent, relying on a number of false and misleading claims to describe a global trade system that is “unfair” to the United States.
Although Trump abruptly announced Wednesday that he would pause steep reciprocal tariffs for 90 days, a 10% “baseline” tariff remains in place for most imports.
Here is a guide to some of his most cited claims:
Inaccurate claims about his trade policies’ impact
WHAT WAS SAID
“We’re making a fortune with tariffs. $2 billion a day.” — at a National Republican Congressional Committee event Tuesday
This lacks evidence. Trump imposed a 10% tariff on nearly all imports from most of the world, except for Canada and Mexico, that went into effect April 5.
The U.S. government collected $215 million in customs and excise taxes April 7, about a tenth of Trump’s purported number. Last week, before that rate went into effect, the United States collected $160 million to $212 million a day in customs and excise taxes.
Trump’s figure may be derived from a projection from Peter Navarro, his trade adviser, that the administration’s more sweeping tariffs would bring in $600 billion annually, or about $1.6 billion daily. But as The Washington Post has reported, that figure is not credible. And Trump’s claim is even less probable, as those tariffs had not taken effect when he spoke and were in effect for mere hours before he paused them.
WHAT WAS SAID
“If you look at China, I took in hundreds of billions of dollars in my term, hundreds of billions. They never paid 10 cents to any other president, and yet they paid hundreds of billions.” — at a Rose Garden event last week announcing tariffs
“For decades, they gave up to China. I’m the only one that — do you how much — China has paid almost $700 billion in tariffs under me.” — at the National Republican Congressional Committee event Tuesday
False. Tariffs imposed on imports of foreign goods do not mean another country is paying the bill. The costs are largely passed on to American companies and consumers, as a vast body of research has shown.
The United States has collected tariffs on Chinese products since the 1700s. In the decade before Trump took office, annual duties on Chinese imports ranged from $13 billion to $21 billion, according to data from the U.S. International Trade Commission. That rose to $23.5 billion in 2018, when Trump placed additional tariffs on Chinese imports, and totaled $85.6 billion in his first term — not quite $100 billion, let alone “hundreds of billions.” (In comparison, duties collected under President Joe Biden totaled $118.5 billion.)
Exaggerations about deficits and tariff rates
WHAT WAS SAID
“We lose close to $2 trillion a year on trade. We lose $1 trillion a year to China, a trillion.”
“We have a deficit with the European Union of $350 billion.” — in remarks Monday in the Oval Office
This is exaggerated. Trump’s figures are at least double, if not several times larger, that of official estimates of trade deficits, the gap between how much a country imports and exports with another, not a measure of that country “losing” money. While some economists see the United States’ overall trade deficit as a problem, many have questioned Trump’s focus on bilateral deficits.
The United States had a total annual trade deficit of $918 billion in 2024, including a $1.2 trillion deficit in goods and $295 billion surplus in services, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The annual trade deficit peaked in 2022, when it reached $945 billion in 2022. It has never come close to $2 trillion.
Last year, the United States had trade deficits of $263 billion with China and $161 billion with the European Union. The deficits in goods alone were still not as high as Trump’s estimate: $295 billion with China and $237 billion deficit with the EU.
A White House spokesperson said that Trump was also including $200 billion in value-added taxes American companies pay globally (citing an “internal estimate”), an estimated $225 billion and $600 billion in annual intellectual property theft perpetrated by China (based on a 2017 government report) and the Europeans benefiting from U.S. military spending and contributions to NATO.
WHAT WAS SAID
“The European Union’s been very bad to us. They don’t take our cars, like Japan in that sense.” — in the Oval Office remarks
This is exaggerated. Trump has a point that the United States imports far more Japanese and European cars than vice versa, but he is wrong that those countries import no American cars at all or that trade barriers were the sole cause.
Japan imported 19,000 cars from U.S. brands (or 22,600 cars manufactured in the United States) in 2023, according to the Japan Automobile Importers Association. In comparison, the United States imported more than 1.4 million cars from Japan that year.
The imbalance has long frustrated Trump, his predecessors and American car companies, which have accused Japan of imposing strict standards and regulatory hurdles to keep foreign cars out and offering tax incentives beneficial to domestic manufacturers.
Japanese automakers counter that the country charges no tariffs on imported cars while the United States charges a 2.5% tariff, and that U.S. automakers had not tailored or aggressively marketed their products to the Japanese market. And Japanese consumers and dealers say that American brands are seen as unreliable and fuel inefficient and often lacked right-hand-drive options.
Similarly, the EU imported about 165,000 American cars in 2024 while the United States imported about 750,000 cars from the EU, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association. The EU does charge a 10% tariff on imported cars, but again, consumer preferences and different regulations and standards play a role in the relative dearth of American cars.
WHAT WAS SAID
“Canada, by the way, imposes a 250% to 300% tariff on many of our dairy products.” — at the Rose Garden event
This is misleading. While there are high tariffs on the books for dairy imports to Canada, those rates apply only after imports reach a certain threshold and thus have never been activated.
Canada charges high tariffs on a number of dairy products if imports exceed predetermined quotas — for example, 241% on liquid milk, 245% on cheese, and 298% on butter. The United States, Mexico and Canada trade agreement negotiated by Trump in his first term increased those quotas for the United States, an achievement his administration promoted at the time.
The International Dairy Foods Association, which represents the American dairy industry, said in a March statement that the United States “has never gotten close to exceeding” those quotas. (The group argues that other protectionist measures stand in the way of more imports.) And a recent analysis of trade data showed that Canadian importers filled from less than 50% to 90% of the quotas across various dairy categories.
As a result, the effective tariff rate on dairy products from the United States remains zero. The United States exported more than $1 billion in dairy products to Canada last year.
WHAT WAS SAID
“China charges American rice farmers an over-quota, it’s called, a tariff rate of 65%. South Korea charges 50 — actually they charge different, from 50% to 513%. And Japan, our friend, charges us 700%, but that’s because they don’t want us selling rice.” — at the Rose Garden event
This needs context. As Trump’s phrasing notes, those high rates again apply only after imports exceed quotas.
China charges a tariff of 65%, South Korea 513% and Japan 258% (not 700%) on rice imports if the amount imported exceeds predetermined quotas, according to a 2021 Agriculture Department analysis. The analysis argues that the rice quotas set by these countries — as well as the sugar quota set by the United States — are insufficient to meet demand and that the over-quota rates are prohibitively high.
Under its World Trade Organization commitments, Japan is obligated to import 682,000 metric tons of rice annually. About half of that comes from the United States, according to USA Rice, a trade association. South Korea is obligated to import 408,700 metric tons of rice at a rate of 5%, about a third of which comes from the United States, according to the Agriculture Department.
China charges an in-quota tariff rate of 1% on more than 5 million metric tons. But it imports almost exclusively from other Asian countries.
Misrepresenting trade history
WHAT WAS SAID
“From 1789 to 1913, we were a tariff-backed nation, and the United States was proportionately the wealthiest it has ever been. In 1913, for reasons unknown to mankind, they established the income tax so that citizens, rather than foreign countries, would start paying the money necessary to run our government. Then in 1929, it all came to a very abrupt end with the Great Depression, and it would have never happened if they had stayed with the tariff policy.” — in the Rose Garden event
False. No metric supports Trump’s repeated assertion that the Gilded Age was the most prosperous time period in U.S. history. He is also wrong that the country grew less prosperous in 1913, when a permanent federal income tax was introduced. Historians also disagreed with his assessment that reducing tariffs caused the Great Depression.
The United States is far richer now than it was from the 1870s to 1910s, even when accounting for inflation. Gross domestic product and GDP per capita are higher now than they were then. And relative to other countries, the United States was just as rich or richer in the post-World War II era than in the Gilded Age. Inequality, though, reached a peak during the Gilded Age.
The income tax did not appear out of the blue, as Trump implies. Rather, the Underwood-Simmons Act of 1913 created a federal income tax after decades of efforts from Congress and presidents of both parties and ratification of the 16th Amendment.
“I chuckle over ‘for reasons unknown to mankind,’” said Douglas Irwin, a trade historian at Dartmouth College. “We made the change because the tariff is a regressive tax, hitting lower-income households more, and the income tax was progressive, making higher income households pay more.”
The Underwood Act also reduced tariff rates from about 40% to about 25%. While the legislation led to income taxes, rather than tariffs, generating most of federal revenue, tariffs were not abandoned altogether before the Great Depression.
In fact, “substantial” tariffs remained in place throughout the 1920s, said Barry Eichengreen, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert on the Great Depression. The Fordney-McCumber Tariff Act of 1922, for example, raised tariffs to an average of 36.2%. From 1920 to 1929, the average rate on all imports was 13% and 35.1% on imports subject to duties.
After the Great Depression started in 1929, President Herbert Hoover signed into law the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 in an effort to protect domestic industries. Historians broadly agreed that the policy deepened the Great Depression by causing many foreign countries to impose retaliatory tariffs and further slowing international trade. A historical primer on the Senate’s website characterizes Smoot-Hawley as “among the most catastrophic acts in congressional history.”
The White House spokesperson pointed to a recent book by economist Art Laffer and others arguing that tax increases were a primary cause of the Great Depression. But the book, which features a foreword written by Trump and challenges the consensus view of the Great Depression, notably includes the Smoot-Hawley Act as one of the causal tax cuts.
Asked whether Trump’s claim had any merit, Eichengreen asserted, “There’s no way to recover a sensible statement from the sentence you quote.”
WHAT WAS SAID
“It was formed to really do damage to the United States in trade. That’s the reason it was formed. It was formed with all of the countries from Europe. I guess, most of them, not all of them, but most of them and they formed together to create a little bit of a monopoly situation to create a unified force against the United States for trade.” — in the Oval Office remarks, referring to the EU
False. European nations did not band together to scheme against the United States through trade, despite Trump’s repeated accusations. The EU was created in 1993, with the support of the United States, to expand cooperation among member states, establish European citizenship and introduce a single monetary policy with the euro.
The White House spokesperson argued that the United States’ trade deficit with the EU has more than doubled in the past 20 years.
After World War II, European countries created several predecessor organizations to foster cooperation and prevent further bloody conflicts.
The EU was specifically formed at the end of the Cold War to strengthen security and economic integration, goals strongly supported by the United States, said Desmond Dinan, a professor at George Mason University who has written several books on the EU.
U.S. government officials, business leaders and researchers believed that deeper European integration would increase prosperity and, thus, trans-Atlantic trade with and investments in the United States. The United States had already “benefited greatly from European economic integration since the 1950s and looked forward to benefiting even more from the launch of the EU,” Dinan said.