Trump’s ‘$4 Trillion Deficit Reduction’ Is Fake News
The president says “tariffs came in at $4 trillion.” Spoiler: They didn’t.
1. MAGAsphere
If you were living in right-wing media world over the weekend, the John Bolton story barely existed. Instead, the big news was that Trump’s tariff policy had been TOTALLY EXONERATED.
On Friday the Congressional Budget Office released a report claiming that, over the next ten years, revenues from tariffs would reduce the federal deficit by $4 trillion. Trump hasn’t stopped talking about it since. This was Friday:
At a Monday press conference he continued:
“The tariffs came in at $4 trillion,” Trump said at an Oval Office event on Monday afternoon, the second time he mentioned the report that day. “The CBO, they just announced it. I told them that was going to happen, but they refused to give us credit for it. Now they’re giving us credit because the money is flowing in.”
It is already MAGA dogma that (1) $4 trillion has come off of the deficit, and (2) the mainstream media is refusing to report this fact. Here’s Hugh Hewitt pronouncing on both:
The new CBO report projecting President Trump’s tariffs to positively impact our national debt downwards by $4 trillion is even more stunning than on first reflection. . . .
Wherever you are on the “Trump Spectrum,” the CBO analysis not only validates the president’s belief in tariffs as an essential tool of economic renewal as well as statecraft, it also exposes the fundamental misapprehension of the topic by pretty much everyone on the left and the right. The fact that the report is an enormous political win for President Trump will distort coverage of it, of course, but the best economists will be indifferent to that.
We have a term for this sort of thing: Fake news.
If you’re horny for a full, deep dive into Trump’s bullshit, then I’m your guy. Because here’s the reality about tariffs, the deficit, and the CBO report: