President Trump’s trade dispute with China has obviously gotten serious, kneecapping stocks, collapsing interest rates and generating worries about a Trump-induced recession.

Trump has highlighted legitimate problems with Chinese trade practices, such as the theft of western technology and barriers to U.S. firms operating in China. But his prescribed solution—slapping tariffs on Chinese imports to force trade concessions—is counterproductive, harming the U.S. economy in order to harm China’s.

Worse, Trump has based his entire trade policy toward China on three falsehoods, suggesting garbage in will yield garbage out. Here are Trump’s three lies on trade:

China is a currency manipulator. The Treasury Department made this official designation on Aug. 5, breaking with its ordinary semiannual reporting timeline to do so in an urgent way suggesting some kind of emergency. But China doesn’t meet Treasury’s own standards for currency manipulation, and this is clearly a Trump power play meant to increase his leverage over China in trade negotiations. The Chinese renminbi has fallen against the dollar only modestly this year, and it has been much weaker before. “The U.S. decision to label China a currency manipulator is on shaky economic grounds,” notes Capital Economics. “If anything, the renminbi would be even weaker than it is now without policy support.”

China has basically decided to stop intervening to prop up the value of its currency, which is very different from deliberately trying to drive the value of the currency down. This matters because a weaker currency makes a country’s exports less expensive in foreign markets, while making imports more expensive. That would ordinarily reduce the trade deficit. But a weak currency also gives investors a reason to move money out of the country into stronger currencies that normally correlate with higher interest rates. So there are major downsides to a currency devaluation. By misstating what China is doing, Trump is further vilifying an opponent he can’t seem to defeat or make a deal with on the merits.

China is paying the Trump tariffs. This is an outright lie Trump has repeated many times. U.S. importers pay the Trump tariffs directly, with the money going straight to the Treasury. Those importers can absorb the added cost of the tariffs or try to pass cost hikes onto their own customers by raising prices. Once these American firms have paid the Trump tariffs, there may be negotiations with Chinese suppliers, leading to lower prices that offset some of the tariffs. But this is incidental and after-the-fact. The billions of dollars in new revenue Trump keeps crowing about comes from higher taxes on Americans.