I’m old enough to remember conservatives freaking out over the Keystone Pipeline. Now Trump is telling business leaders at Davos that we don’t need any stinking oil from Canada. During what critics panned as a “blathering” speech full of “lies and moronic claims,” here’s Trump lying about the economy during his first term, lying about our trade deficit with Canada, and pretending our economy won’t suffer if he imposes the tariffs he keeps threatening.
TRUMP: You know, during my four years, we had the cleanest air, we had the cleanest water, and yet we had the most productive economy in the history of our country.
We had the most productive economy until COVID came, we had the most productive in the history of our country by far. And actually you can look worldwide, we were beating everybody from China to everybody else.
So, and we think we really now with what we have learned and all of the other things that have taken place, we think we can even far surpass that, actually far, far surpass it.
But we do, one thing we’re going to be demanding is we’re going to be demanding respect from Other nations, Canada, we have a tremendous deficit with Canada. We’re not gonna have that anymore. We can’t do it.
It’s, it’s, I don’t know if it’s good for them. As you probably know, I say you can always become a state, and if you’re a state, we won’t have a deficit, we won’t have to tariff you, etc.
But Canada has been very tough to deal with over the years, and it’s not fair that we should have a $200 billion or $250 billion deficit.
We don’t need them to make our cars, and they make a lot of them. We don’t need their lumber because we have our own forests, etc. We don’t need their oil and gas. We have our, we have more than anybody.
CNN’s Daniel Dale fact-checked Trump’s speech shortly after it aired.
BASH: I want to start with that explanation of how tariffs work.
DALE: Yeah, this is how the president habitually describes how tariffs work, tariffs work. He warns foreign countries they’ll have to pay them.
In fact, it is US importers, not those foreign exporters who pay the tariffs, and we know from study after study and from just our experience living in the world that those importers often pass on the increased costs caused by the tariff to US consumers, so it is Americans who are paying, not the foreign companies.
Dana, there are also a bunch of additional inaccuracies, exaggerations, misstatements on the subject of trade.
He said it’s not fair that we have a $200 billion or $250 billion trade deficit with Canada. Well, good news, it is not $200 billion or $250 billion. It’s actually about $41 billion in goods and services. It’s about $72 billion even if you only count goods, and it’s important to note that deficit is overwhelmingly.
By the fact that the US imports a large quantity of cheap Canadian heavy crude oil that helps keeps gas prices down, so that’s why there is that smaller deficit.
He also said the EU essentially doesn’t take US farm products. He said this over and over again.
In fact, the EU, Dana, is the US’s 4th biggest export market for agricultural products, taking about $12 billion worth per year.
He complained that Joe Biden left the trade deficit with China get out of hand. In fact, the record trade deficit with China was actually set under the first presidency of Donald Trump in 2018. It’s come down under Joe Biden.
And he again referred to an electric vehicle mandate saying that he’s determined to let Americans buy whatever car they want.
This is, I think, at least an exaggeration. It is true that Biden imposed strict new tailpipe rules that aim to push automakers towards making electric vehicles, depending on how automakers respond, those rules could require them to make up to 2/3 of new cars sold in the US be electric by 2032, but there has never been a Biden rule requiring any individual consumer to buy any individual kind of car.
And then finally he repeated his claim that he said, I think under Biden we had probably the highest inflation in US history. Yes, it was high, about a 40 year high at one point in 2022. Never close to the all-time record of more than 20 percent decades past.
