AP Fact Check: Trump's week of fiction: trade, Google, polls

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is playing loose with the facts in his exuberance to push through a trade agreement with Mexico.

He insists the deal reached this past week between the United States and Mexico to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement is "one of the largest trade deals" ever. It's not.

And in an effort to pressure Canada to join the reimagined trading bloc, or dismiss Canada as irrelevant if it doesn't, Trump also wrongly suggests that Mexico is a bigger and more important trading partner.

The trade comments came in a week of outright fiction in which Trump also kept asserting that Mexico will pay for his long-promised wall along the southwest border despite Mexico's statements to the contrary; falsely accused Google of shunning his State of the Union address while promoting Barack Obama's; and cited high poll ratings for himself that don't appear to exist.

A sampling of the claims and the reality behind them:
TRADE

TRUMP: "This is one of the largest trade deals ever made. Maybe the largest trade deal ever made." — phone call Monday with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.

THE FACTS: Not even close. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, negotiated by the Obama administration, included the three NAFTA partners — United States, Canada and Mexico — plus Japan and eight other Pacific Rim countries. Trump withdrew the United States from the pact in his third day in office.

Even the TPP shrinks in comparison to Uruguay Round of trade negotiations. Concluded in 1994, the round created the World Trade Organization and was signed by 123 countries. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston found the following year that the WTO's initial membership accounted for more than 90 percent of global economic output.

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