Fact check: Trump makes false claims about China, Japan and the EU at Cabinet meeting

By Daniel Dale, CNN

Washington (CNN) — President Donald Trump made a series of false claims in televised remarks Thursday at a meeting of his Cabinet, including inaccurate assertions about US relations with China, Japan and the European Union.

Here is a fact check of some of his remarks, most of which CNN has debunked before.

The US trade deficit with China: Trump repeated his false claim that “China has a surplus of $1 trillion” with the US on trade. That is not close to accurate. In fact, official federal statistics show the US trade deficit with China in goods and services trade was about $263 billion in 2024. Even if you exclude the services trade, at which the US excels, and count only trade in goods, the 2024 deficit with China was about $295 billion.

The US has never approached a $1 trillion trade deficit with China. The deficit in goods trade alone hit a record of about $418 billion under Trump in 2018 before falling back under $400 billion in subsequent years.

Who pays Trump’s tariffs on China: Trump repeated his frequent false claim that because of the tariffs he imposed during his first term, China paid the US hundreds of billions of dollars. In fact, US importers, not foreign exporters like China, make the tariff payments to the US government, and study after study has found that Americans bore the overwhelming majority of the cost of Trump’s first-term tariffs on China. It’s easy to find specific examples of companies that passed along the cost of the tariffs to US consumers.

The US military presence in Japan: Trump falsely claimed that the US has a deal with Japan in which the US defends Japan, spending “hundreds of billions of dollars” for that purpose, but “we pay all the money; they don’t pay anything.” In fact, Japan provides billions of dollars per year in support for the US military presence in the country.

The federal Government Accountability Office wrote in a 2021 report that data obtained from the US Defense Department showed that from 2016 through 2019, Japan provided $12.6 billion “in cash payments and in-kind financial support” for the US military presence – and also provided “indirect support, such as forgone rents on land and facilities used by U.S. forces, as well as waived taxes.” Over the same period, the report said, the US Defense Department obligated $20.9 billion for the US military presence in Japan.

The formation of the European Union: Trump repeated his false claim that the European Union was “formed for the purpose of taking advantage of the United States.”

Experts on the European Union have told CNN that there is no basis for such claims, noting that US presidents consistently supported European integration efforts.

“The President’s claims are preposterous,” Desmond Dinan, a public policy professor at George Mason University and another expert in the history of European integration, said during Trump’s first presidency. “The European Communities (forerunner of the EU) were formed in the 1950s as part of a joint US-Western European plan to stabilize and secure Western Europe and promote prosperity, by means of trade liberalization and economic growth, throughout the shared transatlantic space.”

John O’Brennan, professor of European politics at Maynooth University in Ireland, said in an interview this week that Trump’s assertion “could not be more wrong or inaccurate,” adding that it is “bizarrely at odds with the history” – in which the US provided critical support for European integration after the continent was ravaged by World War II, then continued to be supportive in the following decades.

Inflation during Trump’s first term: Trump repeated his false claim that “I went four years without inflation,” qualifying the claim moments later by saying “we had no inflation, essentially.” He gave himself some wiggle room with the word “essentially,” but there was indeed some inflation during his first four years in office; prices rose about 8% from the beginning of that presidency to the end. Year-over-year inflation was 1.4% in the month he left office, January 2021, during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Migration, prisons and mental institutions: Trump repeated his familiar claim about how foreign leaders – in countries “all over the world” – supposedly emptied their jails, “mental institutions” and “insane asylums” to somehow “dump” people from those facilities into the US as migrants during Joe Biden’s presidency. There is no evidence for Trump’s claim, which Trump’s own 2024 presidential campaign was unable to corroborate. (The campaign was unable to provide any evidence even for his narrower claim that South American countries in particular were emptying their mental health facilities to somehow dump patients upon the US.)

Trump has sometimes tried to support his claim by making another claim that the global prison population plummeted under Biden. But that’s wrong, too. The recorded global prison population increased from October 2021 to April 2024, from about 10.77 million people to about 10.99 million people, according to the World Prison Population List compiled by experts in the United Kingdom.

“I do a daily news search to see what’s going on in prisons around the world and have seen absolutely no evidence that any country is emptying its prisons and sending them all to the US,” Helen Fair, co-author of the prison population list and research fellow at the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research at Birkbeck, University of London, said in June 2024, when Trump made a similar claim.

The border wall:  Trump repeated his false claim that he had “571 miles of border wall” built on the southern border “in the first administration.” That’s a significant exaggeration; official government data shows 458 miles were built during Trump’s first term — including both wall built where no barriers had existed before and wall built to replace previous barriers.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.