Immediately after President Donald Trump boasted to White House reporters that the United States rakes in billions of dollars from China because of his tariffs, Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto issued an on-air fact-check of the president’s remarks, directly telling his viewers that Trump is wrong.
While taking questions on the White House lawn Friday afternoon, the president insisted Americans farmers are fully behind his trade war and support his latest tariffs on $300 billion worth of goods from China.
“Remember this, our country is taking in billions and billions of dollars from China,” Trump exclaimed. “We never took in ten cents from China. Out of that many billions of dollars, we’re taking a part of it and giving it to the farmers because they’ve been targeted by China. The farmers, they come out totally whole.”
Right away, Cavuto cut away from the president’s impromptu press gaggle to point out that, once again, Trump was not telling the truth when it came to who pays for tariffs.
“I don’t know where to begin here,” the Fox News host said. “Just to be clarifying, China isn’t paying these tariffs. You are. You know, indirectly and sometimes directly.”
He continued: “It’s passed along to you through American distributors and their counterparts in the United States that buy this stuff from the Chinese and have to pay the surcharges. Not the Chinese government.”
Cavuto went on to say that he does not understand what the president was talking about regarding “devaluation of added cost in China” before noting that this latest round of tariffs “will be felt by consumers directly.”
The longtime Fox News and Fox Business Network anchor has been somewhat critical of the president’s economic policies of late. Earlier this week, he got into a heated on-air debate with Trump-boosting Fox Business host Lou Dobbs over the exploding national debt and deficit under the Trump administration.