'Doesn't add up': CNN anchor takes a sledgehammer to Trump's 'magic' tariff formula
CNN’s Erin Burnett eviscerated the “magic formula” behind Donald Trump’s massive new set of tariffs, which she flagged for viewers in a stinging takedown of the president's economic policy.
The primetime host on Thursday subjected Trump’s math – and the chart he propped up during his Rose Garden “liberation day” announcement – to a thorough analysis during her show’s opening monologue.
“Nothing was spared,” Burnett said as she put up for viewers a map of the market showing a “sea of red.”
“As we came to air yesterday that chart had just come out – the math looked odd – and I can now confirm to you that it doesn't add up,” Burnett said. “So what Trump said you were looking at in those two charts was the tariff rates that other countries are putting on American goods. One top investor called the math, though, illogical and absurd and full of factually incorrect numbers.”
Burnett then offered her own explanation.
“It doesn’t add up, and here's why,” she said, using Vietnam as an example. “Trump claims that they have a 90% tariff on U.S. imports, so to retaliate he would only hit them with 46%.”
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But the reality, according to the CNN host, is that Vietnam’s average tariff rate “is only about 9%, not 90%, and they didn't have a typo; they got to that number a very specific way.”
“They took the trade deficit that the United States has with Vietnam, which is large $23.5 billion, and then they just divided it by the value of Vietnam's exports to the U.S., which in a big trade deficit is a small number relative to the deficit, and that's how they got to the 'tariff number,' quote unquote, that Vietnam is charging.”
She left viewers with a “bottom line” from her breakdown of the numbers.
“If the U.S. buys more from a country than it sells to that country, Trump is calling that a tariff, but that is not a tariff that is capitalism,” Burnett said.