Trump tweeted at China to cut trade deficit by $1 billion. He was supposed to say $100 billion.

Hey, he was only off by 99 Billion Dollars!

Shanghaiist.com
Shanghaiist
2 min readMar 8, 2018

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Donald Trump was mocked on Wednesday after tweeting that his administration had asked China for a “One Billion Dollar” reduction in the US-China trade deficit — a cut that would reduce that deficit by a whopping 0.27%.

Well, you can all stop laughing now because it turns out the president actually meant to tweet about a “One Hundred Billion Dollar” reduction in the trade deficit, he just missed a few zeros. Whoops!

The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that when Liu He, China’s top economic adviser came to Washington last week, the Trump administration asked that China develop a plan to cut the annual US trade deficit by a whopping $100 billion.

At the meetings, Liu reportedly expressed interest in narrowing the trade deficit, with China now looking to transition away from its export-led growth model, however, while $1 billion may have been a piece of cake for Beijing, $100 billion is a different story entirely.

In Trump’s first year of office, the US trade deficit with China actually rose by $28 billion to $375.2 billion a year. Meanwhile, Trump has placed that figure even higher at $504 billion, though it’s not clear where he got that number from. Presumably, being the “very stable genius” that he is, he just made it up.

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