President Trump claims the Treasury Department has received billions and billions of dollars of revenue from import tariffs. (Joy Yi/The Washington Post)
“Billions of Dollars are being paid to the United States by China in the form of Trade Tariffs!”
— President Trump, in a tweet, Feb. 16, 2019
“The tariffs are bringing a tremendous amount of money to our Treasury.”
— Trump, in remarks to the Cabinet, Feb. 12
“Those tariffs are costing them a lot of money, and they’re going into our Treasury; remember that, we’re filling up with billions of dollars.”
— Trump, at a campaign rally in El Paso, Feb. 11
It’s become one of the president’s favorite talking points. But it’s wrong on many levels.
We have covered this claim repeatedly in our database of Trump’s false or misleading claims. But having obtained an extensive data set on the tariff revenue, we wanted to explore this issue in more depth for our readers, given that the president offered a version of this statement three times just in the past week.
The Facts
The president has claimed that the tariffs he has imposed, especially on China, have resulted in a bounty for the U.S. government — “billions of dollars.” And he has claimed that it’s been costly for China — that it is paying a lot of money to the United States.
View the complete February 22 article by Glenn Kessler on The Washington Post website here.