Tariffs are responsible for nearly $8 trillion in new investment commitments, President Donald Trump said at his administration’s second cabinet meeting Wednesday.
Department heads and secretaries gathered for the cabinet meeting in honor of the president’s first 100 days of his second term.
The administration had already responded to a morning report from the Bureau of Economic Analysis showing a 0.3% annualized decline in real GDP for the first quarter of 2025, blaming former President Joe Biden’s policies for the underperformance.
Trump repeated that message at the start of the meeting but also stressed that his tariffs are the reason that global companies have pledged trillions of dollars in American investment since his inauguration – something he has said before, but the $8 trillion figure is new.
“We have more money being spent than any time in the history of our country. We’re up to close to $8 trillion I believe I can say,” Trump said, appearing to receive verbal confirmation from another cabinet member, “and really, it’s gonna be a lot higher than that. Those are the ones that we know about.”
On Tuesday, Trump’s 100th day, the White House released a long list of investment commitments and touted a “$5+ trillion” number. Trump has said several times in April that the U.S. has attracted about $7 trillion in investments.
The president pointed to investment plans from Samsung, saying tariffs were the impetus.
“I heard Samsung is now – because of the tariffs – they’re going to build massive facilities in the United States. If we didn’t do the tariffs, they wouldn’t be doing that,” Trump said.
Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnik described what he observed upon visiting the site of a $165 billion semiconductor chip manufacturing plant being built by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the largest chip maker in the world.
“Four thousand employees, you know. American tradecraft. Technicians, doing every kind of work,” Lutnik said. “They’re expecting 40,000 people to build the rest of their plants and to employ 20,000 people for the rest of time, and this is all driven by your tariff policies. No chance this would be happening without you.”
