President Donald Trump is taking heat for making a wild claim about how he concocted at least one of his tariffs ― and it seems to undermine his own argument for imposing them in the first place.
“I had an incident with a very nice country, Switzerland,” he told Larry Kudlow during a Fox Business interview that aired on Tuesday. “They were paying no tariffs, sending stuff over here like nobody could believe.”
Trump claimed the United States had a $42 billion trade deficit with Switzerland, a number similar to one he’d used before and one that analysts said ignored trade in services, which actually put the deficit at $8 billion.
Trump said he imposed a 30% tariff on goods from Switzerland, leading to “an emergency call from, I believe, the prime minister of Switzerland.”
But that call didn’t seem to go the way Trump wanted.
