2026-02-03T19:51:35.443Z / 美国有线电视新闻网（CNN）
《华尔街日报》周五发表了一篇署名唐纳德·特朗普总统的专栏文章。特朗普批评了那些警告其关税政策将导致经济毁灭的专家，称“每天公布的惊人经济数据”证明他是对的，而专家们错了。
但特朗普的乐观论调部分基于明显虚假或极具误导性的数据，他为各种计算挑选了特定的起始和结束时间点，以服务于其论点。此外，他的一些定性表述也不准确。
以下是事实核查内容：
虚假投资数据
特朗普重复了其惯常的虚假说法，称在上任不到一年的时间里，“我们已确保超过18万亿美元的新投资承诺”，“这个数字对许多人来说难以想象”。这个数字不仅难以想象，而且与事实严重不符。截至周二（专栏文章发表四天后），白宫官网显示，在特朗普任期内“重大投资公告”的总额为9.6万亿美元，即便如此，这一数字也被严重夸大；2025年10月的一份详细的CNN分析发现，白宫将数万亿美元的模糊投资承诺（这些承诺涉及“双边贸易”或“经济交流”而非美国国内投资）以及一些甚至未达到承诺水平的笼统表述都计入了统计。
GDP增长的误导性表述
特朗普准确指出，2025年第三季度美国国内生产总值（GDP）年增长率为4.4%，但随后他声称，尽管政府秋季停摆产生了影响，“亚特兰大联储预计第四季度GDP增长率将远超5%，这一数字是我国多年未见的”。尽管亚特兰大联储的GDPNow模型一周前还预测2025年第四季度增长率将超过5%，但该模型在专栏文章发表前四天发布的最新更新显示，增长率已降至4.2%。此外，其他一些估算也显示第四季度增长率低于4.2%。
特朗普没有定义“多年”，但2025年第四季度4.2%的增长率将是自拜登政府2023年第三季度以来的最快增速，除了特朗普2025年第三季度的4.4%增长外。
贸易逆差的虚假宣称
特朗普声称，“我们将月度贸易逆差大幅削减了惊人的77%——几乎没有出现任何通胀，而所有人都说这是不可能的。”我们将在下文讨论“几乎没有通胀”这一说法，而贸易逆差下降77%的说法具有误导性——这显然指的是10月一次性下降后迅速在11月反弹的情况。
以下是“77%”这一说法具有误导性的三大原因：
- 贸易逆差在11月大幅反弹。贸易逆差（美国进口商品和服务价值与出口商品和服务价值的差额）在特朗普关税政策引发的贸易动荡中今年波动剧烈。10月，逆差大幅降至仅292亿美元，为2009年以来最低。这一数字较特朗普2025年1月上任当月（2025年1月）下降约77%，较9月下降约39%。
但专家警告称，10月的大幅下降可能是短暂的，这是药品和黄金贸易暂时波动的结果。随后逆差在11月飙升，反弹95%至568亿美元。11月的数据仍比2025年1月下降56%，但56%不等于77%。
11月的数据在特朗普专栏文章发表前一天公布。（目前尚不清楚特朗普团队何时将其提交给《华尔街日报》。）
- 2025年1月是一个有缺陷的起点。2025年1月的贸易逆差达到当时有记录以来的最高水平，为1288亿美元。特朗普于2025年1月20日重返白宫，但专家普遍将当月的巨额逆差归因于企业在特朗普作为候选人承诺的高额关税实施前匆忙进口商品到美国。因此，将近期任何月度数据与2025年1月（或2025年2月和3月，进口热潮持续期间）进行比较，必然会显示出大幅下降。
- 2025年整体贸易逆差高于2024年。截至11月，2025年商品和服务贸易总逆差为8395亿美元，较2024年同期（8066亿美元）增长4%。尽管特朗普在专栏中至少在方向上是正确的，他写道“美国出口增长了1500亿美元”——截至2025年11月，商品和服务出口较2024年同期增长约1850亿美元，但他没有提到进口增长甚至更大，截至11月约增长2190亿美元。
股市与工厂建设的夸大说法
特朗普称，自2025年4月2日“解放日”（他宣布实施全面全球关税政策，其中许多政策最终被削减）以来，“股市飙升”。事实上，他在专栏中提到的道琼斯工业平均指数自“解放日”收盘至2026年2月2日（上周一）上涨了约17%，但他没有提到同期许多外国股市表现超过道琼斯指数。
例如，日本日经225指数上涨约47%，中国上证综合指数上涨约20%，韩国综合指数上涨约98%，加拿大标准普尔/多伦多证券交易所综合指数上涨约27%，英国富时100指数上涨约20%。
特朗普写道：“自2022年以来，工厂建设增长了42%。” 考虑到这篇专栏文章旨在证明其关税政策的成功，特朗普选择2022年作为计算起点具有误导性：他于2025年上任并实施关税政策，而2025年工厂建设支出实际上比2024年有所下降。从图表中可以看到，超过2022年数据的增长高峰主要发生在2023年，当时是乔·拜登政府执政时期。
建筑行业协会首席经济学家阿尼尔班·巴苏在周一接受采访时表示：“有趣的是（特朗普）会为拜登政府任内发生的事情邀功。” 巴苏指出，拜登签署了2022年两项主要法律——《通胀削减法案》（推动清洁能源和电动汽车制造）和《芯片与科学法案》（推动半导体制造），随后工厂建设支出出现激增，但数据显示“这一繁荣在2025年结束”。
联邦数据显示，特朗普政府引用的美国制造业建设总支出在2025年前10个月比2024年同期下降约5%，且2025年10月前连续九个月下降。巴苏表示，特朗普的关税政策似乎是2025年下降的主要原因之一，导致企业可用于扩张的资金减少，并促使许多企业因关税水平可能随时大幅变动而采取观望态度。
这篇专栏文章没有提及截至目前（2025年底）制造业就业岗位的减少情况。截至2025年12月，自2025年1月以来，美国经济已减少63,000个制造业岗位——自2025年4月“解放日”以来，制造业岗位减少了72,000个。
拜登政府的“真实财富损失”
特朗普声称，由于拜登及其国会盟友引发的通胀危机，“普通美国家庭损失了33,000美元的实际财富”。但这一说法具有误导性：如果从拜登任期开始到结束来看，中产阶级以及所有其他群体的实际财富都有显著增长。特朗普关于“普通家庭”实际财富下降的说法，只有在仅关注拜登任期的一小部分时才成立。
加州大学伯克利分校研究该问题的经济学教授伊曼纽尔·赛兹周一告诉CNN：“2022-2023年有下降，但2024年明显反弹。”
当CNN询问白宫该数据来源时，一名官员回应称，该数据来自参议院共和党人对普通家庭因拜登政府通胀额外支付的费用的分析。但这显然不合理；你无法通过追踪通胀相关支出就直接衡量“实际财富”（资产与负债的差额）。
可能的情况是，白宫与特朗普2024年竞选团队一样，确实从2023年7月的一篇彭博社报道中获取了33,000美元这一数字，该报道指出，萨伊兹及其伯克利同事的追踪显示，自美联储2022年3月开始加息以来，中等收入家庭的平均实际财富下降了超过33,000美元。
萨伊兹表示，他的团队在2023年后没有更新追踪数据，但从美联储公开数据可以看出更长期的趋势——这显示中产阶级财富在2023年和2024年显著反弹，在拜登任期结束时达到了远高于任期开始时的水平。
彭博社报告将中产阶级定义为收入处于50-90百分位的家庭。根据美联储数据，这些家庭在拜登任期开始时（2021年第一季度）总实际财富约为37.5万亿美元，在拜登任期结束时（2024年第四季度）增至约48.4万亿美元。
特朗普与战争的虚假宣称
特朗普重复了其惯常的虚假说法，称“在九个月内，我解决了八场激烈冲突，战争，”并表示“关税功不可没”。尽管特朗普在解决一些战争方面发挥了作用（至少是暂时的），但“八场”这一数字明显夸大。
特朗普曾解释称，他列出的所谓已解决的战争包括埃及和埃塞俄比亚之间的冲突，但这实际上并非战争；这是一个长期存在的关于尼罗河支流上埃塞俄比亚大坝项目的外交争端。他的清单还包括另一场在其任期内并未真正发生的塞尔维亚和科索沃之间的“战争”（他有时声称自己阻止了这两个实体之间新战争的爆发，但未提供细节，这与解决实际战争不同）。他的清单中还包括刚果民主共和国和卢旺达之间的战争，但尽管特朗普政府2025年促成了和平协议（但未被主要交战叛军联盟签署），这场战争仍在继续。
他的清单还包括泰国和柬埔寨之间的武装冲突，尽管特朗普政府2025年初促成了和平协议，但2025年12月冲突再次暂时爆发。
关税与联邦预算赤字的谎言
特朗普声称，“借助关税，我们在一年内将联邦预算赤字削减了惊人的27%。”但白宫得出这一“27%”的数据采用了非典型的计算方法，具体来说是挑选了方便的起始和结束时间点。
一名白宫官员周一告诉CNN，他们通过比较2025年2月（特朗普上任第一个完整月）至2025年11月的累计赤字与2024年同期（2月至11月）的累计赤字，得出了“27%”的数字。2025年该时期的赤字约为1.4万亿美元，比2024年同期减少约5160亿美元，降幅约为27%。
可以肯定的是，特朗普关税政策带来的联邦收入增长帮助缩小了预算缺口。2025年2月至11月，政府通过关税等渠道共获得2290亿美元净海关收入。
然而，衡量赤字变化的常规方法是比较完整的财政年度。2025财年（截至9月30日）的赤字较2024财年下降410亿美元，降幅为2.3%，远小于特朗普引用的数字。
2025财年（2024年10月1日开始）包含了拜登政府最后四个月的大部分时间。但特朗普的计算方法不仅排除了拜登任期的月份，还选择了一个预算缺口异常狭窄的特定时期。
财政监督组织“负责任联邦预算委员会”政策主任克里斯·汤纳表示，特朗普政府任期前10个月赤字下降有几个一次性原因：
- 2025年10月和11月期间，联邦政府停摆约六周，这延迟了部分联邦支出和支付，暂时减少了月度预算赤字（这些支出将在后续月份反映出来）。
- 由于2025年2月1日为周末，当日到期的款项在1月底支付，减少了2月的联邦支出。
- 白宫选择的期间包含了《一项大而美丽法案》中4.1万亿美元（包括利息支出）的学生贷款变化带来的1300亿美元一次性节省，但这些措施尚未立即生效。
特朗普没有提到的是，无党派国会预算办公室（CBO）预计赤字减少不会长期持续。CBO表示，该法案中的巨额减税和国防与国土安全支出增加预计将在未来十年内增加4.1万亿美元的赤字（包括利息支出）。
Fact check: Trump’s WSJ op-ed was littered with false and misleading claims
2026-02-03T19:51:35.443Z / 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.
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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.
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
