‘Brazen alternative history’: CNN fact-checker shocked by Trump's Rose Garden claims
President Donald Trump’s Rose Garden remarks as he touted his “liberation day” tariffs on Wednesday were littered with falsehoods, according to CNN’s in-house fact-checker Daniel Dale, who fired off a stinging fact-check just moments later.
“It was not even close to accurate,” Dale said of Trump’s comments regarding Canadian dairy tariffs.
“President Trump said Canada treats the first little carton of milk that the U.S. exports as a low tariff product, but then after that, Canada applies massive tariffs in excess of 200%,” Dale told viewers. “It is not just the first little carton of milk that has low tariffs; in fact, under the [United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement] that Trump himself negotiated, tens of thousands of metric tons per year of U.S. milk are treated as tariff-free by Canada."
The key point, according to Dale, was that the United States “is not exporting even close to that tariff-free quota maximum, so none of those hefty Canadian tariffs above the quota level are actually being applied.”
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“And that was just one of the false claims he made,” Dale said as he next took on Trump’s claim that the U.S. was “proportionately the wealthiest it has ever been” when it was a “tariff-backed nation” from 1789 to 1913.
“He also offered what I think is some pretty, pretty brazen alternative history,” Dale, a senior reporter, said. “The U.S. is way wealthier today by any reasonable measure, including per capita income living standards.”
The CNN fact-checker closed by quickly squashing Trump’s claim that the country would not have endured the Great Depression had it continued imposing tariffs and his repeated assertions that the U.S. had the highest inflation in history under President Joe Biden.
“Yes, of course it was high, it was troubling, not even close to a record,” Dale concluded.