Although Mr. Trump abruptly announced on Wednesday that he would pause steep reciprocal tariffs<\/a> for 90 days, a 10 percent \u201cbase line\u201d tariff remains in place for most imports.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s a guide to some of his most cited claims:<\/p>\n What Was Said<\/p>\n This lacks evidence. <\/strong>Mr. Trump imposed a 10 percent tariff on nearly all imports from most of the world, except for Canada and Mexico, that went into effect on April 5<\/a>.<\/p>\n The United States government collected $215 million in customs and excise taxes on April 7<\/a>, about a tenth of Mr. Trump\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Mr. Trump\u2019s figure may be derived from a projection from Peter Navarro, his trade adviser, that the administration\u2019s 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.<\/a> And Mr. Trump\u2019s claim is even less probable, as those sweeping tariffs had not taken effect when he spoke and were in effect for mere hours before he paused them.<\/p>\n What Was Said<\/p>\n \u201cIf 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.\u201d<\/em> \u201cFor decades, they gave up to China. I\u2019m the only one that \u2014 do you how much \u2014 China has paid almost $700 billion in tariffs under me.\u201d<\/em> False. <\/strong>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.<\/p>\n The United States has collected tariffs on Chinese products since the 1700s. In the decade before Mr. Trump took office, annual duties on Chinese imports ranged from $13 billion to $21 billion, according to data from the United States International Trade Commission<\/a>. That rose to $23.5 billion in 2018, when Mr. Trump placed additional tariffs on Chinese imports, and totaled $85.6 billion in his first term \u2014 not quite $100 billion, let alone \u201chundreds of billions.\u201d (In comparison, duties collected under former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. totaled $118.5 billion.)<\/p>\n What Was Said<\/p>\n \u201cWe lose close to $2 trillion a year on trade. We lose $1 trillion a year to China, a trillion.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cWe have a deficit with the European Union of $350 billion.\u201d<\/em> This is exaggerated. <\/strong>Mr. Trump\u2019s 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 \u201closing\u201d money. While some economists see the United States\u2019 overall trade deficit as a problem, many have questioned Mr. Trump\u2019s focus on bilateral deficits.<\/a><\/p>\n The United States had a total annual trade deficit of $918 billion<\/a> 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<\/a>. It has never come close to $2 trillion.<\/p>\n Last year, the United States had trade deficits of $263 billion with China<\/a> and $161 billion with the European Union<\/a>.<\/a> The deficits in goods alone were still not as high as Mr. Trump\u2019s estimate: $295 billion with China and $237 billion deficit with the European Union.<\/p>\n A White House spokesman said that Mr. Trump was also including $200 billion in value-added taxes American companies pay globally (citing an \u201cinternal estimate\u201d<\/a>), an estimated $225 billion and $600 billion in annual intellectual property theft perpetrated by China (based on a 2017 government report<\/a>) and the Europeans benefiting from American military spending and contributions to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.<\/p>\n What Was Said<\/p>\n This is exaggerated. <\/strong>Mr. 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.<\/p>\n Japan imported just 19,000 cars<\/a> from American 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<\/a> from Japan that year.<\/p>\n The imbalance has long frustrated Mr. Trump<\/a>, his predecessors<\/a> and American car companies, who have accused Japan of imposing strict standards and regulatory hurdles to keep foreign cars out and offering tax incentives beneficial to domestic manufacturers.<\/p>\n Japanese automakers counter that the country charges no tariffs<\/a> on imported cars while the United States charges a 2.5 percent tariff, and that American 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.<\/p>\n Similarly, the European Union imported about 165,000 American cars in 2024 while the United States imported about 750,000 cars from the European Union, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers\u2019 Association.<\/a> The European Union does charge a 10 percent tariff on imported cars, but again, consumer preferences and different regulations and standards<\/a> play a role in the relative dearth of American cars.<\/p>\n What Was Said<\/p>\n This is misleading. <\/strong>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.<\/p>\n Canada charges high tariffs on a number of dairy products if imports exceed predetermined quotas \u2014 for example<\/a>, 241 percent on liquid milk, 245 percent on cheese, and 298 percent on butter. The United States, Mexico and Canada trade agreement negotiated by Mr. Trump in his first term increased those quotas for the United States, an achievement his administration promoted at the time<\/a>.<\/p>\n The International Dairy Foods Association, which represents the American dairy industry, said in a March statement<\/a> that the United States \u201chas never gotten close to exceeding\u201d those quotas. (The group argues that other protectionist measures stand in the way of more imports.) And a recent analysis of trade data<\/a> showed that Canadian importers filled from less than 50 percent to 90 percent of the quotas across various dairy categories.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> to Canada last year.<\/p>\n What Was Said<\/p>\n \u201cChina charges American rice farmers an over-quota, it\u2019s called, a tariff rate of 65 percent. South Korea charges 50 \u2014 actually they charge different, from 50 percent to 513 percent. And Japan, our friend, charges us 700 percent, but that\u2019s because they don\u2019t want us selling rice.\u201d<\/em> This needs context.<\/strong> As Mr. Trump\u2019s phrasing notes, those high rates again apply only after imports exceed quotas.<\/p>\n China charges a tariff of 65 percent, South Korea 513 percent and Japan 258 percent (not 700 percent) on rice imports if the amount imported exceeds predetermined quotas, according to a 2021 Agriculture Department analysis.<\/a> The analysis argues that the rice quotas set by these countries \u2014 as well as the sugar quota set by the United States \u2014 are insufficient to meet demand and that the over-quota rates are prohibitively high.<\/p>\n Under its World Trade Organization commitments, Japan is obligated to import 682,000 metric tons<\/a> of rice annually. About half of that comes from the United States, according to USA Rice<\/a>, a trade association. South Korea is obligated to import 408,700 metric tons of rice at a rate of 5 percent, about a third of which comes from the United States, according to the Agriculture Department<\/a>.<\/p>\n China charges an in-quota tariff rate of 1 percent on more than five million metric tons<\/a>. But it imports almost exclusively from other Asian countries.<\/a><\/p>\n What Was Said<\/p>\n False. <\/strong>No metric supports Mr. Trump\u2019s repeated assertion that the Gilded Age<\/a> was the most prosperous time period in United States 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.<\/p>\n The United States is far richer now than it was from the 1870s to 1910s, even when accounting for inflation. Gross domestic product<\/a> and G.D.P. per capita<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n The income tax did not appear out of the blue, as Mr. Trump implies. Rather, the Underwood-Simmons Act of 1913 created a federal income tax after decades of efforts<\/a> from Congress and presidents of both parties and ratification of the 16th Amendment<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cI chuckle over \u2018for reasons unknown to mankind,\u2019\u201d said Douglas Irwin, a trade historian at Dartmouth College. \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n The Underwood Act also reduced tariff rates from about 40 percent to about 25 percent. While the legislation led to income taxes, rather than tariffs, generating most of federal revenue, tariffs were not abandoned altogether before the Great Depression.<\/p>\n In fact, \u201csubstantial\u201d 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 percent<\/a>. From 1920 to 1929, the average rate<\/a> on all imports was 13 percent and 35.1 percent on imports subject to duties.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> on the Senate\u2019s website characterizes Smoot-Hawley as \u201camong the most catastrophic acts in congressional history.\u201d<\/p>\n The White House spokesman pointed to a recent book by the economist Art Laffer and others arguing that tax increases were a primary cause of the Great Depression<\/a>. But the book, which features a foreword written by Mr. Trump and challenges the consensus view of the Great Depression<\/a>, notably includes the Smoot-Hawley Act as one of the causal tax cuts.<\/p>\n Asked whether Mr. Trump\u2019s claim had any merit, Professor Eichengreen asserted, \u201cThere\u2019s no way to recover a sensible statement from the sentence you quote.\u201d<\/p>\n What Was Said<\/p>\n \u201cIt was formed to really do damage to the United States in trade. That\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/em> False.<\/strong> European nations did not band together to scheme against the United States through trade, despite Mr. Trump\u2019s repeated accusations<\/a>. The European Union 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.<\/p>\n The White House spokesman argued that the United States\u2019 trade deficit with the European Union has more than doubled in the past 20 years.<\/p>\nInaccurate claims about his trade policies\u2019 impact<\/h2>\n
\u2014 at a Rose Garden event last week announcing sweeping tariffs<\/a><\/p>\n
\u2014 at a National Republican Congressional Committee event on Tuesday<\/a><\/p>\nExaggerations about deficits and tariff rates<\/h2>\n
\u2014 in remarks on Monday in the Oval Office<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Video](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2025\/04\/10\/us\/politics\/FACTCHECK-TRUMP-JAPAN-0000000\/FACTCHECK-TRUMP-JAPAN-0000000--superJumbo.png\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>![\"Video](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2025\/04\/10\/us\/politics\/FACTCHECK-TRUMP-CANADA-0000000\/FACTCHECK-TRUMP-CANADA-0000000--superJumbo.png\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>
\u2014 at the Rose Garden event<\/p>\nMisrepresenting trade history<\/h2>\n
![\"Video](\"https:\/\/i3.wp.com\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2025\/04\/10\/us\/politics\/FACTCHECK-TRUMP-1789-0000000\/FACTCHECK-TRUMP-1789-0000000--superJumbo.png\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>
\u2014 in the Oval Office remarks, referring to the European Union<\/p>\n