Trump may have chosen tariffs as his favorite word from the dictionary. But when it comes to obsessions, business investment has got to be close.
As of last month, he said more than $12 trillion (£8.8tn) had been "practically committed" on his watch. "Nobody's ever seen numbers like we have," he said, crediting his agenda of tariffs, tax cuts and deregulation with making the difference.
If true, the figure would indeed be astonishing, potentially tripling the roughly $4tn in gross private investment the US reported all of last year.
So is a sudden gush of business spending setting the stage for a new golden economic era as Trump claims, or is it all theatre?
First things first: it is too early in Trump's tenure to have clear data to evaluate his claims. The US government publishes statistics on business investment only every three months.
January to March, which reflect two months of Trump's tenure, show a strong jump in business investment, albeit one that analysts said was partly due to data skewed by an earlier Boeing strike.
Other anecdotal and survey evidence indicates that Trump's impact on investment is far more incremental than he has claimed.
According to Stanford University economist Nick Bloom, whose research examines the impact of uncertainty on business investment, "We have hardly any data at this point and almost all the information we have is probably for investment projects that were planned and ordered last year." "My guess is business investment is down a little bit, not massively... primarily because uncertainty is quite high and that will pause it."
Swiss pharmaceutical firm Roche, which announced plans to invest $50bn in the US over five years in April, is a good example.
Some of the projects included in the sum were already in the works.
Executives have also expressed concern that some of Trump's ideas, including a plan to change drug pricing, could jeopardize the company's plans. The company stated, "The pharma industry would need to review their expenses including investments."
On his first day in office, President Trump touted investment by SoftBank's Masayoshi Son, Oracle's Larry Ellison and OpenAI's Sam Altman
In most of his arguments, Trump cites high-profile companies like Apple and Hyundai for his support. The White House keeps a running tally of those announcements, but at the start of June, it put total new investments at roughly $5.3tn - less than half the sum cited by Trump.
Even that figure is inflated.
Roughly a third of the 62 investments on the list include plans that were at least partially in the works before Trump took office. For example:
US manufacturer Corning is listed for a $1.5bn investment in a new manufacturing plant, but the core $900m of the project was announced in early 2024.
Stellantis, on the list for a $5bn plan to reopen a factory in Belvidere, Illinois, initially made that promise in 2023.
Other commitments include items that are not traditionally considered investments at all - like Apple's $500bn spending pledge, which includes taxes and salaries paid to workers already at the company.
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