WASHINGTON (AP) — Reflecting on the first year of his second term, President Donald Trump boasted: revived the American economy by forcing high import taxes About overseas products. he made his point Recent opinion articles Writing in the Wall Street Journal, he scolded the paper and its critics, including mainstream economists, who predicted the tariffs would backfire, raising prices and threatening growth. “Instead,” he wrote, “they created the American economic miracle.”
But the evidence he presents is often beside the point or flat out wrong.
Let’s look at the facts about President Trump’s customs assessments.
Claim: “About a year ago we were a ‘dead’ country. Now we are the ‘hottest’ country anywhere in the world!”
Fact: This is a standard statement from President Trump. But when Trump returned to office last year, the U.S. economy was not yet “dead,” and his second term, despite a rocky start, was performing well.
In 2024, the final year of Biden’s presidency, America’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew by an inflation-adjusted 2.8%, faster than any other wealthy country in the world except Spain. It also expanded steadily from 2021 to 2023.
Full numbers for 2025 are not yet available. But for the first three quarters of this year, President Trump’s tariffs, or threats thereof, have had mixed results for the American economy.
From January to March, US GDP actually contracted for the first time in three years. The main cause was easy to identify. The amount of imports deducted from GDP soared as American companies rushed to buy foreign goods before President Trump imposed tariffs.
However, growth picked up in the second half of this year. From April to June, the economy expanded at a healthy pace of 3.8%. And from July to September, it grew even faster, at 4.4%. A major part of the surge was a drop in imports, likely reflecting President Trump’s tariffs and the fact that importers had already built up inventories at the beginning of the year. Robust consumer spending also drove economic growth.
Mr. Trump also likes the strong rise in the U.S. stock market. He pointed out that stock prices hit new highs 52 times in 2025. It’s true that the US stock market did well last year. However, it underperformed many overseas stock markets. The benchmark S&P 500 index rose 17%, a respectable gain, but less than the gains of 71% in South Korea, 29% in Hong Kong, 26% in Japan, 22% in Germany and 21% in the UK.
___ Claim: “Over the past three months, annual core inflation has fallen to just 1.4%, which is much lower than most people but me had expected.”
Fact: The president uses cherry-picked data to vastly exaggerate the current state of inflation.
His annual inflation rate (which excludes volatile food and energy prices) for the past three months has been low, but reflects data skewed by the government shutdown in October and November. The government shutdown disrupted government data collection, forcing the agencies compiling the numbers to apply rough estimates in some categories, artificially lowering the overall inflation rate.
The annual core inflation rate for the last six months of 2025 is even higher at 2.6%. This is down from the January 2025 level, but approximately the same as the October 2024 level. Inflation has been flat this year as a whole, and in September before the government shutdown was at 3%, the same as in January 2025.
It’s true that inflation is not as high as many economists feared when President Trump began imposing tariffs last spring, in part because many of the “Emancipation Day” tariffs have been rescinded, reduced, or waived. When Democrats won a high-profile election last year emphasizing concerns about “affordability,” the administration reversed existing and planned tariffs on coffee, beef, and pantry staples, for example, flippantly acknowledging that tariffs were driving up prices.
The impact of tariffs can be seen more clearly in the prices of core goods excluding food and energy. Before the pandemic, the cost of core goods typically rose little or even fell each year, but last December they rose 1.4% year-on-year. This was the largest increase since 2011, excluding the pandemic.
“The impact of tariffs on the tariffs is likely to increase,” said Alberto Cavallo, a Harvard University economist and author of a study on the impact of tariffs that President Trump cited in his op-ed. I found it President Trump’s tariffs have pushed up overall inflation by about three-quarters of a percentage point. ____
Claim: “Data shows that the burden of tariffs, or “incidence,” falls overwhelmingly on foreign producers and intermediaries, including large non-U.S. companies. According to a recent report, study According to Harvard Business School, these groups pay at least 80% of the tariff costs. ”
Fact: Studies cited by Trump appear to conclude the opposite of what he claims. The report, written by Cavallo and two colleagues, found that “U.S. consumers were responsible for approximately 43% of border costs due to tariffs after seven months, with U.S. businesses primarily paying the rest.” Import prices have not fallen much, Cavallo said in an email. “This suggests that foreign exporters have not reduced their pre-tariff prices enough to shoulder most of the burden.” ___ Trump claims: “We have reduced our monthly trade deficit by an astonishing 77%.”
Fact: This claim includes more excerpts that reflect the percentage decline from a very high trade deficit in January 2025, when the president took office, to a very low trade deficit in October.
The story is more complicated than the president is making it out to be. The trade deficit (the difference between what the United States sells to and what it buys from other countries) has actually increased since he returned to the White House.
From January to November 2025, the United States accumulated a trade deficit of nearly $840 billion, an increase of 4% compared to the same period in 2024. In the first three months of 2025, importers rushed to buy foreign goods before President Trump imposed tariffs. After that, the monthly trade deficit was consistently lower than in 2024. However, the import surge from January to March was so large that the 2025 year-to-date trade deficit is still higher than the 2024 trade deficit.
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Claim: “I have successfully used the tariff tool to secure huge investments in the United States, the likes of which no other country has ever seen. …In less than a year, we have secured more than $18 trillion in commitments, an unfathomable number to many.”
Fact: In fact, President Trump used the threat of tariffs to extort investment commitments from America’s major trading partners. The European Union, for example, has pledged $600 billion over four years.
However, President Trump has not disclosed how he came up with the $18 trillion. the white house announced The figure of $9.6 trillionThis includes private and public investment commitments from other countries.
Researchers at the Peterson Institute for International Economics last month estimated investment commitments from the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and the Persian Gulf states of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates at $5 trillion.
and they raised The question is whether the money will actually materialize, This is partly because the agreements are ambiguous and partly because countries sometimes have difficulty fulfilling their commitments.
But nevertheless, all the numbers are huge. Total private investment in the United States has recently trended at $5.4 trillion annually. In 2024, the last year for which statistics are available, total foreign direct investment in the United States reached $151 billion. Direct investment includes funds invested in factories, offices, etc., but does not include financial investments such as stocks and bonds. ___ Find AP Fact Checks here: https://apnews.com/APFactCheck.
