Seven of the biggest unsubstantiated claims Trump has made during his tariff announcement
US President Donald Trump has made a wave of claims ahead of his new tariffs being implemented - but not all of them are true.
On April 2, 78-year-old Trump revealed a new set of duties that would affect all countries hoping to import goods into the US.
While most countries would suffer from a sweeping 10 percent tariff, 60 countries like Thailand and those that make up the European Union will face higher levies from April 9.
According to Trump, the heightened, reciprocal tariffs have been put in place to revive manufacturing and protect jobs.
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Amid the announcement - taking place on what the Republican called ‘Liberation Day’ in the White House Rose Garden - the 47th US President has made some stark false claims.
These include alleging that the United States was ‘wealthier’ when it was a ‘tariff' country and that inflation under former US President Joe Biden was at an all-time high.
Canadian milk is expensive
CNN reports that Trump has made false claims about Canada’s dairy tariffs.
While the sitting President correctly noted that the country has tariffs exceeding 250 percent on some US dairy products, he also claimed that ‘the first little carton of milk’ exported to Canada faces a ‘very low price’ before being hit with '275, 300 percent’ tariffs.
In reality, tens of thousands of metric tons of imported milk from the US would face no tariffs in Canada as part of the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement.
$200 billion US trade deficit with Canada
Another unsubstantiated claim repeatedly made by Trump is that the United States subsidizes Canada with ‘close to $200 billion a year’ due a trade deficit.
A trade deficit is when the value of goods imported from a country exceeds the value it exports there.
However, 2024 figures show last year’s trade deficit with Canada in goods and services trade was far lower than $200 billion.
Instead, goods and services trade statistics were listed at $35.7 billion while goods alone sat at $70.6 billion.
USA was ‘wealthier’ in 20th century
During his 2024 campaign trail, the Republican claimed: “From 1789 to 1913, we were a tariff-backed nation, and the United States was proportionately the wealthiest it has ever been.”
Trump didn’t explain what he meant by ‘proportionately the wealthiest’ at the time, but this false narrative was also touted during a tariff meeting at the Oval Office on January 31.
He said: "We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913. That's when we were a tariff country, and then they went to an income-tax concept.
"And, you know, how did that work out? It's fine, it's OK, but it would have been very much better.”
Troy Senik, the author of a biography of Grover Cleveland, who was US president in the 1880s and 1890s, said that it’s ‘just flatly incorrect’ that the USA was richer in the 20th century compared to the modern day.
Figures today show the US is much wealthier, the LA Times reports.
Gas prices being ‘way under $3’
Trump has claimed he’s brought gas prices ‘way down’ since resuming office earlier this year, alleging ‘gasoline is way under $3’.
CNN says that the national average price for regular gasoline on the day he spoke (April 2) was about $3.24 per gallon, not $3.
The ‘Liberation Day’ price was also higher than the national gas average on his inauguration day (January 20) when the AAA national average was about $3.12.
Inflation under Joe Biden was all-time high
Trump claimed that under the Biden administration, the US ‘suffered the worst inflation in 48 years, but perhaps even in the history of our country’.
The BBC writes that inflation under Biden peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022 - the highest level since 1981 - so not quite as far back as the beginning of the United States, as the President claimed.
In the 1920s and 1940s, inflation was also much higher than 9 percent at several points,
Meanwhile, the highest inflation rate the country has ever seen was 29.78 percent in 1778, and since the consumer price index was formed 20.49 percent in 1917.
Disputes over who pays tariffs
Trump said that the duties he put on China during his first term in office ‘took in hundreds of billions of dollars’ that ‘they paid'.
“It’s not a tax on the middle class. This is a tax on another country,” he said during another interview.
Vice-President Vance has also touted similar claims, adding the tariffs caused prices to fall for American citizens.
“They went up for the Chinese but they went down for our people,” Vance added.
However, previous studies have found that Americans actually bore the overwhelming majority of the cost of Trump’s first-term tariffs on China, as per CNN.
China paying tariffs
Previously, the businessman has said that before his first term in the White House, China ‘never paid ten cents to any other president' via tariffs.
However, according to Factcheck.org, the US was generating billions per year in tariffs on Chinese imports before Trump took office.
Topics: Donald Trump, Politics, Republicans, US News, Money
Ella Scott