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.”
The "framework” was released on Thursday. It’s brief and vague – but it shows there is no $600 billion gift.
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.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/22/polit...ump-eu-us-gift