"More Trade With China Than Anyone" - mostly-false: Census Puts China Third at 6.6%

On the PBD Podcast (26 Aug 2026), guest Roman Yampolskiy said the US has more economic trade with China than with any other country.

We rate that mostly-false, truth score 0.15: Census Bureau data for June 2026 puts China third at 6.6%, behind Mexico (17.0%) and Canada (12.9%).

The statistic was scaffolding for a bigger argument — that a US-China treaty on frontier AI is achievable because the two economies are already fused. That argument has real support. China led the US trading-partner table from roughly 2014/2015-2018 and again in 2020, and PIIE's August 2026 policy brief finds China's direct share of US imports fell 7 points from 2017-2024 while Chinese value added in US imports fell only 2, with Taiwan, Vietnam and Mexico absorbing the rerouting. On the 2025 goods deficit, China was still #1 at $202.07B, about $5B ahead of Mexico.

The specific claim still fails. Mexico has held the top spot since 2023; in 2025 US-China trade fell 28.74% to its lowest level since 2009 and dropped below 10% of US trade for the first time in more than three decades. The companion line — "everything we have is made in China" — is the weaker half: San Francisco Fed research puts "Made in China" goods at about 2.7% of US personal consumption spending, with roughly 55 cents of every such dollar going to US transport, retail and marketing.

We do not score what we did not check: the speaker's intent (volume, deficit, or the world), the services-inclusive cut for 2026, and the companion line about not attacking 50 countries in 50 years are all left open in the brief. June 2026 is also a single unrevised month, and the trade truce expires around November 2026.