Greer Tells G20 in Milwaukee: U.S. Goods Exports Top $1.4 Trillion, On Track for a Record Year

America’s top trade negotiator used the world’s biggest economies as his audience to deliver a scorecard the tariff doomsayers did not see coming. Speaking to reporters in Milwaukee on Oct. 1 after hosting the G20 Trade Ministers’ Meeting, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said the United States had exported more than $1.4 trillion in goods through July and was on track for its highest annual goods exports on record.

That is not the result the critics forecast. When President Trump began imposing tariffs in pursuit of what he calls reciprocal trade, the warnings were loud and consistent: retaliation, collapsing exports, a trade war America would lose. Instead, after two days of talks with his foreign counterparts in Milwaukee, Greer told reporters the opposite was happening.

The Milwaukee scorecard

The G20 ministerial ran from Sept. 30 through Oct. 1, with the United States holding the group’s presidency this year. Afterward, according to an IANS report from Milwaukee, Greer argued that in about a year the president has essentially remade the global trading order through tariffs and bilateral deals.

He backed that up with numbers. The United States has signed 10 reciprocal trade agreements and nine joint statements, which Greer said cover more than 40 percent of U.S. goods trade, with talks continuing with other partners. Fourteen countries have agreed to accept U.S. motor vehicle standards, 10 have agreed to accept FDA approvals for new medicines, and 52 have agreed not to impose duties on electronic transmissions, he said. He contrasted that with the World Trade Organization, which in his view has failed to deliver comparable results for America over decades.

The official data point the same direction. The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis reported on Sept. 3 that U.S. exports of goods and services for January through July 2026 were up $237.2 billion, or 12 percent, from the same period in 2025. Over the same stretch, the combined goods and services trade deficit fell $188.4 billion, or 29.6 percent.

Greer has been making this case for months. In the spring he pointed to monthly U.S. exports topping $300 billion in each of the first three months of 2026, levels he described as the highest in 250 years of American history.

What the rest of the G20 heard

The ministerial itself was a clear-eyed exercise in American priorities. In his opening remarks on Sept. 30, Greer laid out four workstreams for the U.S. presidency: the weaponization of food, structural excess industrial capacity, reform of the Most-Favored-Nation principle, and forced labor in global supply chains.

Ministers reached consensus on the first, agreeing to condemn the use of food trade as a coercive weapon. They did not reach consensus on statements about forced labor or excess capacity, Reuters reported. Greer did not name the holdouts, but the target of the excess-capacity push is no mystery: China, whose state-subsidized factories have flooded global markets with cheap steel, cars and electronics. Beijing rejects the charge.

Greer said “nearly all countries agree that this is an issue that requires action,” and that “our current system of trade remedies or responses is inadequate to solve this problem”, which is why the United States has acted on its own with tariffs. On the Most-Favored-Nation rule, which requires a country to give every trading partner the same tariff treatment, he argued the system “fails to promote reciprocity and balance in the trading system.”

That is the core of the Trump approach in one sentence. For decades, the United States kept its markets open while competitors kept theirs protected, and the global rules treated that imbalance as normal.

Incomes at a record, too

The trade numbers landed alongside other good economic news. On Sept. 15, the Census Bureau reported that median household income rose 2.6 percent to $87,460 in 2025, and said household income was “the highest on record dating back to 1967.” The official poverty rate fell half a point to 10.2 percent, and child poverty fell to what the bureau called a historic low of 13.4 percent.

Those figures cover the first year of the president’s second term, the same year critics insisted tariffs would push families into hardship.

The critics’ rebuttal

Not everyone accepts the victory lap. Free-trade analysts at the National Taxpayers Union argued in June that Greer’s earlier record-month claims were inflated by re-exports, foreign-made goods that pass through the United States and ship back out, and by a surge in gold and silver exports, which by their count made up more than half of the goods export increase in early 2026. They also noted that exports as a share of the economy in the first quarter remained below their 2000 to 2025 average.

Those are fair caveats, and they are worth knowing. But they do not change the basic picture: the export collapse that was supposed to follow American tariffs never arrived, and the trade deficit is shrinking, not growing. Talks with Canada continue, and Greer said a handful of outstanding issues there remain difficult to resolve.

The G20 leaders will meet in Miami later this year, and Washington will arrive with leverage it did not have a few years ago.

They promised tariffs would wreck American trade, and instead America’s trade chief walked out of a room full of foreign ministers with exports on track for a record year.

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