By and
Published On 10 Feb 2025
In his Super Bowl Sunday interview, President Donald Trump defended efforts by Elon Musk to slash the federal budget, including at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and he said more is coming.
Trump told Bret Baier of Fox News that “maybe in 24 hours” he would tell Musk, the billionaire leading the Department of Government Efficiency, to “check the Department of Education” and the “military”.
“We’re going to find billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse,” Trump said in the interview, taped at Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach estate in Florida. “But I campaigned on this, Bret.”
Without citing specifics during the seven-minute segment, Trump alluded to a list of “ridiculous” USAID spending projects. As Trump, Musk and the White House have described what they see as wasteful spending, we have found that not all of their singled-out programmes involved USAID funding.
The interview then turned to something that Trump did not campaign on: making Canada the 51st state. When Baier asked whether Trump’s idea was a “real thing”, he said, “yes”, and then talked about the US trade deficit with its northern neighbour, using an inflated number.
Trump attended the Kansas City Chiefs-Philadelphia Eagles game in New Orleans, the site of a deadly attack weeks earlier. In a statement, Trump called for remembering the 14 people who were murdered while celebrating the new year on Bourbon Street.
Here’s a rundown of interview moments. PolitiFact sent an email to the White House press office for comment and did not immediately hear back.
Trump’s assessment of trade deficit with Canada
Trump defended his Canadian trade policy by telling Baier, “Why are we paying $200bn a year, essentially in subsidy to Canada?”
The $200bn figure is far higher than the US trade deficit with Canada, something Trump has cited in his effort to hit the neighbouring country with tariffs. (Those tariffs are on a 30-day pause.)
The US trade deficit in goods with Canada was about $63bn in 2024. The overall trade deficit with Canada falls to about $41bn when factoring in a US surplus in services.
A trade deficit is not a subsidy. It might be considered a subsidy if the US transferred billions of dollars every year to Canadian companies purely “out of goodwill”, analysts from TD Economics, a Canada-based think tank, wrote in January. Rather, the money going from the US to Canada is to buy goods and services with a monetary value.
What else might the $200bn figure include? The Trump transition team previously told CNN that much of it stems from US defence spending directly benefitting Canada. Canada’s current defence expenditures amount to less than 1.4 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP), which is less than the 2 percent NATO target.
However, Canada spent an estimated $30.5bn on defence in 2024, ranking sixth highest among all NATO countries. That was far less than what the US spent that year, $968bn, but Canada has one-eighth the population of the US and one-13th its GDP.
Comparing US wealth with peers
Baier noted “jittery” signs with stock markets and consumer confidence, asking when families would be able to feel lower grocery and energy prices he promised.
“Look, we’re not that rich right now,” Trump said. “We are $36 trillion [in debt]. That’s because we let all these nations take advantage of us.”
Compared with the rest of the world, though, the US is rich indeed. The US GDP is the world’s highest, at $27.7 trillion. The GDP of China, the second closest, is $17.8 trillion.
Adjusting for population, the US ranks fourth richest, trailing only three smaller countries: Luxembourg, Norway and Switzerland.
A different measurement (GDP per capita), by Global Finance magazine, ranks the US ninth globally on a list also dominated by smaller countries, including Macau, Singapore, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and San Marino.
