Trump Uses Phony Numbers To Justify His Massive Tariffs: ‘The President Straight Up Lied’
AP Photo/Alex Brandon
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs on all imports into the U.S. As a starting point, the administration is implementing a baseline tariff of 10% on all foreign goods. He also singled out dozens of countries for higher tariffs. For example, Vietnamese imports were hit with a 46% tariff while the European Union was slapped with a 20% one.
While doing so, he cited utterly fraudulent data.
Despite the Trump administration’s previous insistences to the contrary, tariffs are paid by businesses that import tariffed goods – not the exporting country. These costs tend to be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. This is why economists – and even pro-Trump Republicans – have said tariffs are effectively a tax.
Trump announced the tariffs at a Rose Garden event that lasted nearly an hour, during which he presented a list of countries. Next to each country were two columns. The first was labeled “Tariffs Charged to the U.S.A.” But again, the U.S. does not pay tariffs on U.S. exports tariffed by other countries. The importing entities in those countries do.
The White House
Moreover, the first column contains a qualifier stating that the “Tariffs Charged to the U.S.A.” account for “currency manipulation and trade barriers.” It is unclear how the Trump administration calculated the alleged manipulation and trade barriers when incorporating them into its already flawed description of “Tariffs Charged to the U.S.A”
The second column is labeled “U.S.A. Discounted Reciprocal Tariffs,” which implies that Trump’s tariffs are merely a response to tariffs levied by other countries on U.S. goods and that Trump’s tariffs are “discounted,” as if their imposition were modest by comparison.
Looking at the alleged tariffs other countries are supposedly levying on U.S. goods, one might be struck by the exorbitant rates in some cases. For example, if China were really imposing a 67% tariff on U.S. goods or if Vietnam were implementing a 90% tariff on U.S. products, that’s something that likely would have been retaliated against a long time ago. But in fact, these numbers do not represent “tariffs.”
Take the E.U. “tariff” on U.S. goods of 39%. In 2024, the U.S. exported $370.2 billion to the E.U., according to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. Meanwhile, the U.S. imported $605.8 billion from the E.U. That means the U.S. ran a trade deficit with the E.U. of $235.6 billion.
What the Trump administration seems to have done is taken the deficit ($235.6 billion) and divided it by the total number of imports from the E.U. ($605.8 billion), yielding a figure of 38.89%, which the administration rounded up to 39% and called a “Tariff to the U.S.A.” imposed by the E.U. But obviously, that is not a tariff.
Similarly, the U.S. ran a trade deficit with Norway of $2 billion in 2024 as the U.S. imported $6.6 billion in Norwegian goods. Hence, in the Trump administration’s calculation ($2 billion divided by $6.6 billion = 0.30), Norway has a 30% “tariff” on U.S. goods.
Moreover, not even countries with which the U.S. has a trade surplus were spared. For example, in 2024, the U.S. had a trade surplus of $11.9 billion with the U.K., which Trump’s list claims had imposed a 10% “tariff” on U.S. goods. The same goes for Honduras, which ran a trade deficit with the U.S., which accused the Central American country of hitting American goods with a 10% “tariff.”
And as CNBC’s Steve Liesman noted on BlueSky, Trump “straight up lied.”
“The President straight up lied when he said the US is now charging tariffs at half the rate other countries charge,” he wrote. “They made up those tariffs out of whole cloth. We now likely have the highest tariffs in the developed world, and even higher than many developing countries.”
Shortly after Trump concluded his Rose Garden speech, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned other countries not to levy reciprocal tariffs.
“My advice to every country right now is do not retaliate,” he said. “Sit back, take it in. Let’s see how it goes because if you retaliate, there will be escalation.”
