Seventeen days ago, President Donald Trump made a dramatic claim in an interview on the business news channel CNBC. As part of his July trade agreement with the European Union, he said, the EU gave the United States a $600 billion present he could spend however he wanted.
“They gave me $600 billion. And that’s a gift,” he said. “That’s not like, you know, a loan, by the way. That’s not a loan that, oh gee, three years comes up, we have to pay it back. There’s nothing to pay back. They gave us $600 billion that we can invest in anything we want.”
A CNBC journalist said she appreciated the information, since they had been trying to figure out the details surrounding the $600 billion. Trump responded: “There are no details. The details are, $600 billion to invest in anything I want. Anything. I can do anything I want.”
Trade experts were highly skeptical of Trump’s claims, especially because the European side had said in July that the $600 billion figure referred to private-sector European companies’ “intentions” to invest in the US over time rather than some sort of lump-sum EU handout to the Trump administration. But it wasn’t possible to definitively debunk Trump’s narrative at the time of the CNBC interview, since the US and EU had not released an official joint text on what had been agreed between the two sides.
The two sides published a “framework” on Thursday. It’s brief and vague – but it shows there is no $600 billion gift.
Rather, the framework includes a clause that says this: “The United States and the European Union share one of the world’s largest economic relationships, supported by mutual investment stocks exceeding $5 trillion, and intend to promote and facilitate mutual investments on both sides of the Atlantic. In this context, European companies are expected to invest an additional $600 billion across strategic sectors in the United States through 2028.”
That doesn’t match Trump’s claim that the EU “gave me” a $600 billion sum to “invest in anything I want.” Justin Wolfers, a University of Michigan economics professor, said on social media on Thursday that Trump “didn’t get a penny” of the $600 billion “gift” he had claimed to receive.
Wolfers added in an interview with CNN that “there is no commitment; ‘expected to’ is not a commitment.” And he said the text makes clear that any money that does get invested won’t be handed to the president to control, as Trump had claimed, nor even given to the US government more broadly; instead, Wolfers said, it would be invested “by Europeans in whatever, presumably, Europeans want,” with the profits going to those Europeans.
Asked for comment on the gulf between how Trump described the $600 billion and what the official document says about it, White House spokesperson Kush Desai responded that this was “pointless nitpicking” about Trump’s “historic win for the American people.”
Desai said, “The President is right. The European Union is investing $600 billion in strategic sectors that will create thousands of jobs across the United States thanks to President Trump’s negotiating skills.”
But Trump himself didn’t merely say the EU is investing $600 billion in strategic US sectors. (Even then, it’s worth noting that Desai’s “the European Union is investing” phrasing is firmer than the text’s “European companies are expected to invest” phrasing.) Trump asserted that the EU “gave me” a $600 billion “gift” to “invest in anything I want.”
That simply isn’t what the EU has done or has agreed to do.
Differences with Japan
The European Union trade agreement isn’t the only agreement about which Trump’s description has diverged from the description offered by the other side.
Trump said in the same CNBC interview in early August that “I got a signing bonus from Japan of $550 billion; that’s our money. It’s our money to invest as we like.” But Japanese officials have described the promised money differently. Its chief tariff negotiator, Ryosei Akazawa, said in July, according to The Japan Times, “It’s not that $550 billion in cash will be sent to the US.”
Instead, Akazawa said there would be $550 billion in a combination package made up of Japanese investments, loans and loan guarantees, with investments making up just 1% or 2% of the total (and the US taking 90% of the profits of those investments). He said this month that investment could end up being more than 2% of the total, but he continued to describe something other than a supposed $550 billion lump sum the US could spend as it deemed fit.
The US and Japan have not yet released an official joint text.
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