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In recent comments, Trump talks history of U.S. tariffs. Here’s a fact check.
President-elect Donald Trump made claims about the history of U.S. tariff collection as he defended his plan to raise tariffs on goods from countries like China and Mexico in a news conference this week, claims historians say are at odds with the facts.
In particular, Trump exaggerated the impact of tariff hikes during his first term, falsely claiming that “no other president took in 10 cents” of revenue from trade collections on Chinese imports. Trump also pointed to 19th-century tariff increases championed by former President William McKinley as evidence that his plan could benefit the economy.
But data shows the federal government had been taking in billions in revenue from tariffs on Chinese imports long before Trump came to office, and historians say the high tariff era of the 1890s was economically rocky for Americans.
Tariffs are taxes on imports, often charged as a percentage of the price that importers pay foreign sellers. They aren’t paid by foreign nations, but by U.S. companies who often pass the cost to American consumers by raising prices.
In his next term, Trump has pledged to put an additional 10% levy on all Chinese goods, along with a 25% tariff on all products from Mexico and Canada. Americans spend more than $1 trillion on goods from those three countries each year, according to data from the Census Bureau.
What Trump gets wrong about history of tariffs on China
In his news conference this week, Trump repeated a claim he made frequently on the campaign trail: that his predecessors essentially took in no money from tariffs on Chinese goods, while his administration took in billions.
Tariffs on Chinese imports have existed since the 1700s, generating billions in revenue for years before Trump came into office.
During President Barack Obama’s final year in office, tariff revenue from Chinese imports totaled over $12 billion, according to data from the U.S. International Trade Commission. That amount increased after Trump’s first round of tariff hikes to over $22 billion, the same federal data shows.
Trump did dramatically raise the total revenue generated from Chinese imports by adding tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of goods. However, even with that increase, tariff collections have not accounted for much more than 2% of federal revenue at any point in the last 70 years, according to the Congressional Research Service this month.
The president-elect has argued his tariff plan for his next term could bring in revenue to help defray the cost of income tax cuts. Goldman Sachs estimated that Trump’s proposed levies on goods from China, Mexico and Canada could generate just under $300 billion in tariff revenue per year, which would be up from $77 billion in fiscal year 2024.
But tariffs had not been viewed as a primary way to raise revenue since the federal income tax was introduced in 1913, said Judith Goldstein, a political science professor at Stanford.
“As the U.S. became more involved in the world, the effect of tariffs on domestic production and prices were increasingly a problem,” Goldstein said.
Trump has also repeatedly argued his tariff plan will help protect U.S. companies. There’s some evidence that the customs duties he imposed in his first term boosted jobs in specific industries like washing machine manufacturing, according to research from the Brookings Institution, a think tank. However, manufacturers also faced higher costs for raw materials and retaliatory tariffs from other nations, according to the Federal Reserve.
What Trump gets wrong about the McKinley tariffs
This week, Trump also cited McKinley’s 1890 tariff hikes as evidence that these customs taxes can enrich the U.S.
“You go back and look at the 1890s, 1880s, McKinley, and you take a look at tariffs, that was when we were proportionately the richest,” Trump said.
In 1890, tariff hikes raised the average duties on foreign imports from 38% to nearly 50%. McKinley, a representative for Ohio at the time, pushed for the taxes to protect his state’s steelworkers from foreign competition, according to Dartmouth College economics professor Doug Irwin.
However, the decade that followed these hikes was marked by economic trouble.
“The U.S. went into a depression in 1893, and we didn’t really emerge out of it until the mid-1890s. So in general the 1890s was not a great decade for the U.S. economy,” Irwin said.
Additionally, McKinley’s tariff bill raised prices of goods like shoes and clothes, leading to voter backlash that cost Republicans 93 seats in the next election, according to the House of Representatives Office of the Historian.
Trump’s transition team did not respond to a request for clarification on why he said America was “proportionately the richest” after this bill passed.
Historic data shows gross domestic product per capita for Americans has vastly increased from about $6,400 in the early 1890s (in 2017 dollars) to roughly $69,000 today (in 2024 dollars).
“It is unclear why he’s picking on the 1890s as this golden age. It wasn’t considered good times, at least by the people living through it at the time,” Irwin said.
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France’s anti-terrorism court on Friday convicted eight people of involvement in the beheading of teacher Samuel Paty outside his school near Paris four years ago, a horrific death that shocked the country.
Paty, 47, was killed by an Islamic extremist outside his school on Oct. 16, 2020, days after showing his class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad during a debate on free expression. The assailant, an 18-year-old Russian of Chechen origin, was shot to death by police.
Those who have been on trial on terrorism charges at a special court in Paris since the end of November were accused, in some cases, of providing assistance to the perpetrator and, in others, of organizing a hate campaign online before the murder took place.
STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN/AFP via Getty Images
The 540-seat courtroom was packed for the verdict, which marked the final chapter of the Paty trial. Heavy surveillance was in place, with more than 50 police officers guarding the proceedings.
Seated in the front row was Paty’s 9-year-old son, accompanied by family members. As the lead judge, Franck Zientara, delivered sentences one after the other, emotions in the room ran high.
“I am moved, and I am relieved,” said Gaëlle Paty, Samuel Paty’s sister, as she addressed a crowd of reporters after the verdict. “Hearing the word ‘guilty’ — that’s what I needed.”
“I spent this week listening to a lot of rewriting of what happened, and it was hard to hear, but now the judge has stated what really happened, and it feels good,” she added, her voice breaking as tears filled her eyes.
Families of the accused reacted with gasps, cries, shouts, and ironic clapping, prompting the judge to pause multiple times and call for silence.
“They lied about my brother,” shouted one relative. Another woman, sobbing, exclaimed, “They took my baby from me,” before being escorted out by police officers.
The seven-judge panel met or went above most of the terms requested by prosecutors, citing “the exceptional gravity of the facts.”
Naïm Boudaoud, 22, and Azim Epsirkhanov, 23, friends of the attacker, were convicted of complicity in murder and sentenced to 16 years in prison each. Neither can be paroled for two thirds of their term, about 10 years. Boudaoud was accused of driving the attacker to the school, while Epsirkhanov helped him procure weapons.
Brahim Chnina, 52, the Muslim father of the schoolgirl whose lies sparked the events leading to Paty’s death, was sentenced to 13 years for association with a terrorist enterprise. Prosecutors had sought 10 years for him.
Abdelhakim Sefrioui, a Muslim preacher, was given 15 years for organizing a hate campaign online against Paty.
The shocking death of the 47-year-old teacher left an indelible mark on France, with several schools now named after him.
The trial had begun in late November. The defendants were accused of assisting a perpetrator or organizing a hate campaign online in lead-up to the murder.
At the time of the attack, there were protests in many Muslim countries and calls online for violence targeting France and the satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo. The newspaper had republished its caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad a few weeks before Paty’s death to mark the opening of the trial over deadly 2015 attacks on its newsroom by Islamic extremists.
The cartoon images deeply offended many Muslims, who saw them as sacrilegious. But the fallout from Paty’s killing reinforced the French state’s commitment to freedom of expression and its firm attachment to secularism in public life.
Chnina’s daughter, who was 13 at the time, claimed that she had been excluded from Paty’s class when he showed the caricatures on Oct. 5, 2020.
Chnina sent a series of messages to his contacts denouncing Paty, saying that “this sick man” needed to be fired, along with the address of the school in the Paris suburb of Conflans Saint-Honorine. In reality, Chnina’s daughter had lied to him and had never attended the lesson in question.
Paty was teaching a class mandated by the National Education Ministry on freedom of expression. He discussed the caricatures in this context, saying students who did not wish to see them could temporarily leave the classroom.
An online campaign against Paty snowballed, and 11 days after the lesson, Anzorov attacked the teacher with a knife as he walked home, and displayed the teacher’s head in a post on social media. Police later fatally shot Anzorov as he advanced toward them, armed.
Chnina’s daughter was tried last year in a juvenile court and given an 18-month suspended sentence. Four other students at Paty’s school were found guilty of involvement and given suspended sentences; a fifth, who pointed out Paty to Anzorov in exchange for money, was given a 6-month term with an electronic bracelet.
Sefrioui, the preacher on trial, had presented himself as a spokesperson for Imams of France although he had been dismissed from that role. He had filmed a video in front of the school with the father of the student. He referred to the teacher as a “thug” multiple times and sought to pressure the school administration via social media.
Some of the defendants expressed regrets and claimed their innocence on the eve of the verdict. They did not convince Paty’s family.
“It’s something that really shocks the family,” lawyer Virginie Le Roy said ahead of the verdicts. “You get the feeling that those in the box are absolutely unwilling to admit any responsibility whatsoever.”
“Apologies are pointless, they won’t bring Samuel back, but explanations are precious to us,” Le Roy said. “We haven’t had many explanations of the facts.”
