Donald Trump on trade: what the evidence says · JRE #2219
SUBJECT: TRADE
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
I'm for having countries pay us billions and billions and trillions, even dollars. I took in hundreds of billions of dollars from China. Nobody took in 10 cents, not one other president.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Trump has repeatedly claimed that China, or other foreign governments, directly pay the United States tariff revenue. In practice, tariffs are customs duties collected by U.S. Customs and Border Protection from the American companies that import the goods, not from Chinese exporters or the Chinese government. Economists and fact-checkers have found that at least part of that added cost is typically passed through to U.S. businesses and consumers in the form of higher prices, rather than being extracted from China. While tariff collections rose substantially during and after Trump's trade war with China, characterizing this revenue as money taken in from China mischaracterizes who bears the cost, since it is paid by U.S. importers at the border. FactCheck.org has documented this pattern of claims as false or misleading across multiple Trump statements, both in 2019 and again during his second term.