Facts on Trade
At a rally on Sept. 20, President Donald Trump returned to a regular applause-line, promising the crowd in Las Vegas, “We’re renegotiating the worst trade deals ever made by any country at any time.”
The idea that the U.S. has long been taken advantage of in trade deals with other countries has been a staple of Trump’s speeches, both during the campaign and in his tenure as president. But his rhetoric often has been at odds with the facts.
Here we highlight a number of key statistics about trade, and summarize some of the stories we have written when these facts have been misrepresented. It is part of a larger effort by North American fact-checkers to highlight various facts about trade and international commerce, timed around the 25th anniversary (roughly) of the completion of negotiations on the North American Free Trade Agreement. The work of other fact-checking organizations can be found here.
Fact: The total U.S. trade deficit has gone up slightly, by $3.2 billion or 6.8 percent, since January 2017.
In his 2018 State of the Union address, Trump said: “America has also finally turned the page on decades of unfair trade deals that sacrificed our prosperity and shipped away our companies, our jobs, and
