More of Boss Hogg’s LIES

 

Iowa farmers

Trump claimed he gave farmers from Iowa $28 billion from China: “That’s why I say I am going to win Iowa,” the former president said, adding, “I gave the farmers $28 billion, and I got it from China. Who else could do that?”

Facts First: Trump’s claims are wrong in two ways. First and most critically, this money wasn’t from China. Though the Trump administration made the payments because farmers had been hurt by his trade war with China, the aid money came from US taxpayers: Study after study, including one this year from the federal government’s bipartisan US International Trade Commission, has found that Americans have borne almost the entire cost of Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products. (And it is US importers, not Chinese exporters, who make the actual tariff payments to the government.) Second, as The Washington Post noted in a recent fact check, the payments to farmers under Trump’s program totaled $23 billion, not “$28 billion,” per the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office.