Donald Trump’s trade war has begun. On Liberation Day, the U.S. President announced a huge increase in tariffs on America’s trading partners.
However, his historic speech is riddled with falsehoods and misleading claims, from providing wrong numbers to making exaggerated statements. Here are some of the biggest false claims he made during his tariff announcement at the White House Rose Garden on Wednesday, and some of them have already been debunked previously.
Donald Trump said, “And with countries like Canada, you know, we subsidize a lot of countries and keep them going and keep them in business. In the case of Mexico, it’s $300 billion a year. In the case of Canada, it’s close to $200 billion a year.” He additionally used the “$200 billion” figure to describe the nation’s trade deficit with Canada. But the numbers did not add up. According to The Washington Post, in 2024, the deficit with Maple country in goods and services trade was estimated at roughly $45 billion, whereas, the trade deficit with Mexico was around $172 billion last year.
One of his major misleading claims was, “Canada, by the way, imposes a 250 to 300 percent tariff on many of our dairy products. They do the first, the first can of milk, and they do the first little carton of milk at a very low price. But after that, it gets bad, and then it gets up to 275, 300 percent.”
However, the President forgot that he himself fixed this when he eliminated the high dairy tariff through the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement during his first term. Canada has since committed to the agreement, as tens of thousands of metric tons of imported American milk face no tariffs.
The president lied that there’s a low tariff on merely “the first little carton of milk” exported to Canada, but after that, it’s a massive Canadian tariff. In fact, *as negotiated by Trump’s first administration in the USMCA,* *tens of thousands of metric tons per year* of US…
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) April 2, 2025
Donald Trump also falsely claimed, “I took in hundreds of billions of dollars in my term” from China due to tariffs he imposed during his first term in office. “They [China] never paid 10 cents to any other president, and yet they paid hundreds of billions,” he added, but this is also false. The United States has been collecting tariffs on Chinese goods since President George Washington signed the Tariff Act of 1789. Former President Barack Obama imposed additional tariffs on Chinese imports. Since 2009, tariffs on China generated at least $8 billion each year.
One of his shocking claims was about inflation. The Republican leader insisted that during Joe Biden’s administration, the United States witnessed “the highest” inflation in the history of the nation. However, this is also false, as the inflation rate reached a peak of 23.7% in 1920, whereas in December 2024, it was about 2.9 percent, as reported by The Mirror UK.
At the same time, Trump also made another false claim that Biden has “the worst approval ratings of the history of our country.”
😂 PRESIDENT TRUMP:
“This country was headed for a collapse under the people that you saw. They were horrible.”
“I think that’s one reason for my approval rating — they’re comparing me to the worst administration in the history of our country. I appreciate that” pic.twitter.com/YjqS2TQiRZ
— The Washington Observer (@WashObserver) April 2, 2025
Donald Trump’s speech was littered with another falsehood when he said that the United States “was proportionately the wealthiest it has ever been” between 1789 to 1913, when federal revenue was mostly made of tariffs. However, as per the records, the country is much wealthier today than it was in the 20th century.
Although his announcement contained many falsehoods and misleading claims, it managed to generate explosive buzz. Donald Trump announced a universal baseline 10 percent tariff on all goods from all countries except for those with a free trade agreement between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada.
For the rest of them, the baseline tariff will be imposed from midnight on Saturday. The President emphasized this move would “punish other countries” for years of unfair trade practices. However, economists have warned that Trump’s tariffs threaten to worsen inflation while suppressing growth for the United States.
