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The truth behind the rhetoric.

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By Glenn Kessler

As he hosted the NATO secretary general on Thursday, President Donald Trump once again took the opportunity to bash NATO member Canada. “We don’t need their cars. We don’t need their energy. We don’t need their lumber. We don’t need anything that they give,” he said, arguing that Canada’s 40 million people should give up their sovereignty and agree to become the 51st state.

We were curious about Trump’s math about the alleged $200 billion subsidy. Trump has a habit of exaggerating trade deficits to justify tariffs, but the $200 billion figure is so off-kilter that we suspected Trump was counting something else. Indeed, a White House official said he was also counting military expenditures allegedly spent on behalf of Canada.

So we did the math, after receiving information from a White House official. We added up trade deficits (which as we’ve explained before are not a “subsidy”), NATO expenditures that Canada is falling short on and the U.S. share of North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), a combined U.S.-Canada air defense program originally aimed to detect Soviet bombers.

Does this even come close to $200 billion? To read the full fact check and find out the Pinocchio rating, click the link below.

Read the full fact check

Unpacking the White House spin on the impact of ‘globalist’ policies

With worldwide stock markets plunging because of a trade war unleashed by President Donald Trump, the White House was quick to defend itself this week. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt asserted that “we are in a period of transition from the mess that was created under Joe Biden” and claimed that Trump inherited a “country in an economic disaster.”

This is the kind of hyperbole one would expect from a White House spokesperson. Never mind that The Economist magazine, in a cover story that appeared a month before the presidential election, declared the U.S. economy to be “The envy of the world” — and that it had “left other rich countries in the dust.”

We were interested in a specific statement made by Leavitt to justify tariffs: “Our country has lost more than 5 million jobs in more than 90,000 factories due to devastating globalization over the last three decades alone.” The manufacturing jobs figure is real but the “factories” is rather dubious.

To read the full fact check, click the link below.

Read the full fact check

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About the cats: It’s a Friday and sometimes our fact checks deal with heavy subjects. So we hope to bring a smile to your face.

Scroll down to read other fact checks on trade.