What Was Said
“When they charge 40 percent tariffs on our cars going into China, and we charge them nothing coming to our country. When they raise their tariff from 10 percent to 25 percent then 40 percent, and they said to me, ‘We expected somebody would call and say, you can’t nobody called so we just left it.’”
This is misleading.
President Trump’s account of China’s tariff rates and his role in relation to them is distorted.
The United States charges a tariff of 2.5 percent — not “nothing” — on foreign car imports and raised the rate on Chinese vehicles to 27.5 percent over the summer.
China previously imposed a 25 percent tariff on foreign car imports but lowered that rate to 15 percent in July. As trade tensions between Beijing and Washington escalated, China then increased the tariffs on American cars to 40 percent to retaliate against Mr. Trump’s new tariffs before agreeing in December to temporarily suspend them.
What Was Said
“The Green New Deal, I encourage it, I think it is really something that they should promote. They should work hard on, it is something the country needs desperately. They have to go out and get it, but I will take the other side of that argument, only because I am mandated to. But they should stay with that. Never change. No planes. No energy. When the wind stops blowing, that’s the end of your electric.”
False.
Mr. Trump has escalated a previously exaggerated claim to a false one. The Green New Deal is a proposal by liberal Democrats to combat climate change. It was introduced by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts.
The legislation does not call for eliminating airplanes, though a draft summary of the plan on Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s website did refer to getting rid of “emissions from cows or air travel.” Her staff has since retracted the post and said that it was incomplete and published by accident.
It is wrong to claim that enforcement of the Green New Deal would lead to “no energy” or no electricity. The legislation calls for the expansion of renewable energy sources, which accounted for about 17.1 percent of electricity generated in the United States in 2018.
What Was Said
“Then in 1913, they ended tariffs.”
False.
The Revenue Act of 1913, or the Underwood Tariff Act, reduced tariff rates to 25 percent from roughly 40 percent but did not eliminate them completely. Tariffs still accounted for nearly one-third of federal revenue in 1915. Rates were…
