In his first televised interview post his re-election, the incoming President conveyed several inaccuracies and unfounded statements that were consistent with his 2024 campaign. Among the highlighted issues were discussions on trade imbalances with Canada and Mexico, which the President-elect Donald Trump overstated during the dialogue.
This interview, broadcasted on a prominent Sunday news program ‘Meet the Press’ featured on NBC, saw Mr. Trump disseminate misinformation about the impact of tariffs. He overstated the volume of unauthorized immigrants permitted under the preceding Biden administration and incorrectly claimed an all-time peak in crime rates. Additionally, he gave a misleading depiction of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s military expenditure and overexaggerated his polling stats.
Among his comments on trade and the economy, Mr. Trump falsely claimed that his first term experienced ‘no inflation’, asserting that it only started after more than a year into Biden’s administration. However, measures of annual inflation consistently fluctuated between 1% and 2% from 2017 through 2020, before rising to 4.7% in 2021.
Mr. Trump also presented exaggerated trade deficit figures with Canada and Mexico. The figures he quoted were $100 billion and $300 billion respectively, likening these statistics to a form of financial aid. However, the actual trade deficit for goods and services cast a more modest figure of $41 billion with Canada and $162 billion with Mexico. A trade deficit fundamentally signifies that consumers from one country are purchasing more from the other nation; this is not synonymous with gratuitous financial transfers.
Claims that Europe rejects any import of American cars or food products were also proclaimed by Mr. Trump. He stated, ‘they don’t take our cars, they don’t take our food product, they don’t take anything.’ Contrastingly, real figures paint a different picture. Europe is, in fact, a major market for American automobile exports and recorded a significant trade worth almost $415 billion in American goods in 2023.
The President-elect further discussed the topic of tariffs stating that they yield no additional costs for Americans. This claim is not substantiated by the vast majority of economists who agree that any costs associated with tariffs will eventually transfer to the end consumer.