Fact check: Trump’s WSJ op-ed was littered with false and misleading claims
By Daniel Dale, Alicia Wallace, Tami Luhby, CNN
(CNN) — The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed on Friday under the name of President Donald Trump. Trump criticized experts who warned that his tariff policies would cause economic destruction, writing that “the spectacular economic numbers coming out every single day” are proof that he was right and they were wrong.
But Trump’s rosy case was based in part on figures that are plain false or highly misleading, using cherry-picked beginning and ending points for various calculations to serve the president’s argument. And some of his qualitative claims were also inaccurate.
Here is a fact check.
Investment in the US
Trump repeated his regular false claim that in less than one year back in office, “we have secured commitments for more than $18 trillion” in new investment in the US, “a number that is unfathomable to many.” The number is not only unfathomable but factually incorrect. As of Tuesday, four days after the op-ed came out, the White House’s own website said the figure for “major investment announcements” during this Trump term was $9.6 trillion, and even that is a major exaggeration; a detailed CNN review in October found the White House was counting trillions of dollars in vague investment pledges, pledges that were about “bilateral trade” or “economic exchange” rather than investment in the US, and vague statements that didn’t even rise to the level of pledges.
A growth estimate from a Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta model
Trump accurately noted that gross domestic product grew by an annual rate of 4.4% in the third quarter of 2025, but then he said that, despite the impact of the fall government shutdown, “the fourth quarter is projected by the Atlanta Fed to be well over 5%, a number like our country has not seen in many years.” While the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model was estimating fourth-quarter 2025 growth of more than 5% just over a week ago, the latest update from the model, released four days before Trump’s op-ed was published, was down to 4.2%. Also, some other estimates suggest fourth-quarter growth was lower than 4.2%.
Trump didn’t define “many years,” but 4.2% growth in the fourth quarter of 2025 would be the fastest since the third quarter of 2023, during the Biden administration, aside from the 4.4% growth in the third quarter of 2025 under Trump.
The trade deficit
Trump claimed that, in an incredible achievement, “we have slashed our monthly trade deficit by an astonishing 77% — all with virtually no inflation, which everyone said could not be done.” We’ll address the “virtually no inflation” claim below, but the claim of a 77% decline in the trade deficit is misleading — an apparent reference to a one-time decline in October that quickly reversed in November.
Here are three big reasons why the “77%” claim is misleading.
1) The trade deficit jumped in November after a sharp fall in October. The trade deficit — the difference between the value of goods and services imported to the US and goods and services exported from the US — has been volatile this year amid the trade turmoil caused by Trump’s tariff policies. In October, the deficit fell sharply to just $29.2 billion, the lowest for any month since 2009. This was down about 77% from January 2025, the month Trump returned to office, and down about 39% from September.
But experts cautioned that the sharp October decline was likely to prove short-lived, the result of temporary fluctuations in the trade of pharmaceuticals and gold. And the deficit then spiked in November, jumping 95% back up to $56.8 billion. The November figure was still 56% lower than the January 2025 figure, but 56% is not 77%.
The November figure was released the day before Trump’s op-ed was published. (It’s not clear when Trump’s team submitted it to the Journal.)
2) January 2025 is a flawed starting point. January 2025 had the largest trade deficit on record to that point, $128.8 billion. Trump only returned to office on January 20, 2025, but experts widely attributed the giant deficit figure that month to a corporate rush to import products to the US ahead of the big tariffs Trump had promised as a candidate. So comparing any recent monthly figure to January 2025 — or to February and March 2025, when the import rush continued — is bound to show a large decline.
3) The overall trade deficit has been higher in 2025 than it was in 2024. Through November, the total goods and services trade deficit in 2025 was $839.5 billion. That’s up 4% from the 2024 deficit through November, $806.6 billion. So although Trump was at least directionally correct in the op-ed when he wrote that “American exports are up by $150 billion” — through November 2025, goods and services exports were about $185 billion higher than they were through the same period in 2024 — he didn’t mention that the increase in imports was even bigger, about $219 billion through November.
Stocks since “Liberation Day”
Trump wrote that “the stock market has skyrocketed” since “Liberation Day,” April 2, 2025, when he announced he was imposing sweeping global tariffs (many of which he ended up paring back). It’s true that the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the market index he mentioned in the op-ed, had increased about 17% between its close on “Liberation Day” and this Monday, February 2, 2026 — but Trump didn’t mention that many foreign stock markets have outperformed the Dow over the same period.
For example, Japan’s Nikkei 225 was up about 47%, China’s SSE Composite up about 20%, South Korea’s Kospi Composite up about 98%, Canada’s S&P/TSX Composite up about 27%, and the United Kingdom’s FTSE 100 up about 20%.
Factory construction
Trump wrote, “Factory construction is up by 42% since 2022.” Trump’s choice of 2022 as his starting point for this calculation is misleading given that the op-ed was purporting to provide evidence of the success of his tariffs: he took office and imposed the tariffs in 2025, when spending on factory construction actually declined from 2024. The spike above the 2022 numbers largely occurred in 2023, under President Joe Biden, as you can see in this chart.
“It’s interesting (Trump) would take credit for something that transpired during the Biden administration,” Anirban Basu, chief economist for construction industry group Associated Builders and Contractors, said in a Monday interview. Basu said that after Biden signed two major 2022 laws, the Inflation Reduction Act (which promoted clean energy and electric vehicle manufacturing) and the CHIPS and Science Act (which promoted semiconductor manufacturing), there was a boom in factory construction spending — but the data shows “that boom ends in 2025.”
The federal data set a White House official said Trump was citing here shows that total US spending on manufacturing construction was down about 5% in the first 10 months of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024, the last calendar year of the Biden administration, and that it fell for nine consecutive months in 2025 through October. Basu said Trump’s tariff policies appear to be one of the major reasons for the 2025 decline, leaving companies with less capital to potentially pursue expansion and causing many of them to adopt a wait-and-see approach in response to tariff levels that can change significantly at a moment’s notice.
Trump’s claim in the op-ed was at least more transparent than the similar claim he made in his January address to the World Economic Forum in Davos, when he said “factory construction is up by 41%” without explaining he was using 2022 as the starting point.
But the op-ed didn’t mention the decline in manufacturing jobs in this presidential term to date. Through December 2025, the economy had shed 63,000 manufacturing jobs since January 2025 — and was down 72,000 manufacturing jobs since April 2025, the month of “Liberation Day.”
Biden and real wealth
Trump claimed that by causing an inflation crisis, Biden and his allies in Congress cost “the typical American family $33,000 in real wealth.” But this figure is misleading: real wealth increased significantly for the middle class, as well as all other groups, if you look at Biden’s presidency from beginning to end. Trump’s claim about a decline in real wealth for the “typical” family is accurate only if you look at a mere fraction of Biden’s presidency.
“There was a dip in 2022-2023 but a clear rebound in 2024,” Emmanuel Saez, a University of California, Berkeley economics professor who studies the issue, told CNN on Monday.
When CNN asked the White House where it got the claim of a $33,000 reduction in real wealth, an official responded by saying it was from an analysis by Senate Republicans on how much the average household had paid in extra costs because of Biden-era inflation. But that doesn’t make sense; you simply can’t track “real wealth,” which measures assets versus liabilities, by looking at inflation-related spending.
It appears possible that the White House, like Trump’s 2024 campaign, actually got the $33,000 figure from a Bloomberg report in July 2023 that noted that tracking by Saez and Berkeley colleagues found that, since the Federal Reserve had started raising interest rates in March 2022, average real wealth had dropped more than $33,000 per middle-class household.
Saez said his team didn’t update the tracker after 2023, but he said the longer-term picture can be seen in public Federal Reserve data – which shows that wealth for the middle class bounced back sharply over the course of 2023 and 2024, finishing Biden’s presidency at a much higher level than where it started.
Bloomberg’s report defined middle class as households in the 50th to 90th percentile, so we’ll do the same. These households had about $37.5 trillion in total real wealth in the first quarter of 2021, Biden’s first in office, and about $48.4 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2024, Biden’s last full quarter in office, according to the Federal Reserve data.
Various claims about inflation
Trump boasted of the stock market repeatedly setting record highs since he was elected again in 2024, then added that this has happened “with virtually no inflation.” He gave himself some fact-check wiggle room with the word “virtually,” but the US certainly has inflation. In December 2025, average consumer prices were up 2.7% from December 2024, Consumer Price Index figures show. Trump also claimed in the op-ed that “inflation has fallen dramatically” despite a sharp increase in tariff rates, but that 2.7% year-over-year rate was only slightly lower than the 2.9% rate of December 2024, Biden’s last full month in office, and the 3.0% rate of January 2025, the month of Trump’s inauguration.
And while Trump attributed the 40-year high in US inflation (9.1% in June 2022) solely to the Biden administration’s “trillions of dollars in wasteful spending” and “extremist green energy agenda,” the real story is more complicated.
Inflation’s rapid ascent, which began in early 2021, was the result of a confluence of factors. Those included effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, such as snarled supply chains, and geopolitical issues, notably including Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, that caused shocks in energy and food prices. Heightened consumer demand boosted in part by pandemic-era fiscal stimulus from both the Trump and Biden administrations also led to higher prices.
Trump and wars
Trump repeated his regular false claim that “in nine months, I settled eight raging conflicts, WARS,” saying that “tariffs deserve much of the credit.” While Trump has played a role in resolving some wars (at least temporarily), the “eight” figure is a clear exaggeration.
Trump has previously explained that his list of supposed wars settled includes a war between Egypt and Ethiopia, but that wasn’t actually a war; it is a long-running diplomatic dispute about a major Ethiopian dam project on a tributary of the Nile River. Trump’s list also includes another supposed war that didn’t actually occur during his presidency, between Serbia and Kosovo. (He has sometimes claimed to have prevented the eruption of a new war between those two entities, providing few details about what he meant, but that is different than settling an actual war.) And his list includes a war involving the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, but that war has continued despite a peace agreement brokered by the Trump administration in 2025 — which was never signed by the leading rebel coalition doing the fighting.
Trump’s list also includes an armed conflict between Thailand and Cambodia, where fighting temporarily erupted again in December despite a peace agreement brokered by the Trump administration earlier in 2025.
The federal budget deficit
Trump claimed that “with the help of tariffs, we have cut that federal budget deficit by a staggering 27% in a single year.” But the White House arrived at this “27%” figure by calculating changes in the deficit in an atypical way, specifically by cherry-picking convenient start and end dates.
A White House official told CNN on Monday that it got the “27%” figure by comparing the cumulative deficit from February 2025 (Trump’s first full month back in office) to November 2025 with the cumulative deficit over the same February-to-November period in 2024. The deficit during the 2025 period was about $1.4 trillion, or roughly $516 billion less than it was in 2024. That equates to a 27% reduction.
To be sure, the increase in federal revenue from Trump’s tariff changes helped narrow the budget gap. The government took in a total of $229 billion in net customs duties, which include tariffs, between February and November of 2025.
However, the typical method of measuring changes in the deficit is to compare one full fiscal year to the next. The deficit dipped by $41 billion, or 2.3%, in fiscal year 2025 (which ended September 30) compared to fiscal year 2024, a much smaller change than the one Trump cited.
The 2025 fiscal year, which started October 1, 2024, included most of the last four months of the Biden administration. But Trump’s methodology isn’t just eliminating the Biden months, it is also selecting a specific period where the budget gap was unusually narrow.
There are several one-time reasons why the deficit dropped during the first 10 months of the Trump administration, according to Chris Towner, policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a fiscal watchdog group.
The federal government was shut down for about six weeks during October and November 2025, which delayed some federal spending and payments —temporarily reducing the size of the monthly budget deficits. That spending will be subsequently reflected in the months the payments were eventually made.
Also, because February 1 fell on a weekend in 2025, the payments due that day were made at the end of January, reducing federal spending for February. Plus, the period the White House chose includes $130 billion in one-time savings from the student loan changes in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act Trump signed in 2025, though those measures don’t take effect right away.
What Trump didn’t mention is that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office expects that the deficit reduction won’t last long. The hefty tax cuts and increases in defense and homeland security spending in the legislation are expected to add a total of $4.1 trillion (including interest payments) to the deficit over the next decade, according to the CBO.
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