Nathan Howard/Reuters
Washington CNN —
President Donald Trump made a series of false claims in televised remarks Thursday at a meeting of his Cabinet, including inaccurate assertions about US relations with China, Japan and the European Union.
Here is a fact check of some of his remarks, most of which CNN has debunked before.
The US trade deficit with China: Trump repeated his false claim that “China has a surplus of $1 trillion” with the US on trade. That is not close to accurate. In fact, official federal statistics show the US trade deficit with China in goods and services trade was about $263 billion in 2024. Even if you exclude the services trade, at which the US excels, and count only trade in goods, the 2024 deficit with China was about $295 billion.
The US has never approached a $1 trillion trade deficit with China. The deficit in goods trade alone hit a record of about $418 billion under Trump in 2018 before falling back under $400 billion in subsequent years.
Who pays Trump’s tariffs on China: Trump repeated his frequent false claim that because of the tariffs he imposed during his first term, China paid the US hundreds of billions of dollars. In fact, US importers, not foreign exporters like China, make the tariff payments to the US government, and study after study has found that Americans bore the overwhelming majority of the cost of Trump’s first-term tariffs on China. It’s easy to find specific examples of companies that passed along the cost of the tariffs...
There are a slew of legal challenges to Trump’s war on immigrants: there are people illegally sent to Nayib Bukele’s concentration camp, most notably Kilmar Abrego Garcia (whom Chris Van Hollen man...