No matter how you look at it, Trump’s trade policy has failed. No surprise but still:
The U.S. merchandise trade deficit hit a record $1.2 trillion last year, despite President Donald Trump’s promise to eliminate it by imposing the highest tariffs in eight decades on foreign-made products.
Thursday’s Commerce Department report represents the first full-year assessment of the president’s ambitious reordering of global trade. The persistence of the deficit in the face of steep new taxes on imports from China, the European Union and scores of other nations reflects the limits of Trump’s preferred policy tool, economists said.
The president has described the trade deficit in goods, which the U.S. has run every year since 1975, as a “national emergency” resulting from unfair trade practices on the part of foreign nations.
[…]
Exports of goods and services rose 6.2 percent to a record $3.4 trillion. Imports rose nearly 5 percent to a record $4.3 trillion.
The goods and services deficit for the month of December widened more than Wall Street analysts had expected, reaching $70.3 billion, up from $53 billion in November.
Everyone said that Trump had no understanding of trade and merely thought that he could “make money” for the country by imposing tariffs. He’s an idiot so it’s no shock that he didn’t understand how tariffs work. Now it turns out that even if you believed that the “trade deficit” was a massive emergency, his policy didn’t even succeed on its own terms.
Today, it seems that Trump just sees tariffs as a form of blackmail he can use against foreign countries to do his bidding. There’s really nothing more to it than that. And I suspect that’s losing its salience as time goes on as well. The entire tariff scheme is daft on every level.