Trump continues to believe trade deals are his personal slush funds [View all]

For a dude that is supposed to be such a master negotiator, President Donald Trump sure doesn’t seem to be getting the deals he’s touting. Turns out that bragging about other countries personally giving you hundreds of billions of dollars to do whatever you’d like requires those other countries to go along with the boast, and that’s just not happening.

Earlier this month, Trump went on CNBC to say that the European Union had given him a $600 billion “gift” as part of trade negotiations:

They gave me $600 billion. And that’s a gift. 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.

In trying to verify that $600 billion deal sweetener, CNN found that the grown-ups in the room did not describe the deal in those terms at all. The fact sheet issued by the European Union in late July simply said that “E.U. companies have expressed interest in investing at least $600 billion” in “various sectors in the U.S.”

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/8/22/2339686/-Trump-continues-to-believe-trade-deals-are-his-personal-slush-funds