CNN’s Daniel Dale Fact-Checks Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ Remarks: He Also Offered ‘Pretty Brazen Alternative History’

EXCERPT:

DALE: “And that was just one of the false claims he made, Jake. He also offered what I think is some pretty brazen alternative history, saying that the U.S. was at proportionally its wealthiest from 1789 to 1913. The U.S. is way wealthier today by any reasonable measuring, including per capita income, living standards. And then he said that the U.S. would not have had the Great Depression had the U.S. stayed with tariffs. Well, there was a pretty infamous tariff in 1930, the Smoot-Hawley tariff, that is widely seen to have contributed to worsening that Great Depression. He also repeated his claim that the U.S. took in hundreds of billions of dollars that China paid because of tariffs he imposed in his first term. It is U.S. importers who made those tariff payments. Study after study has found that U.S. consumers and businesses ate the overwhelming majority of the costs of those tariffs.”