Trump Concludes First Term With Larger U.S. Trade Deficit Than He Inherited, Identifies Outcome As Vindication Of Multi-Year Trade War Designed To Achieve Opposite Outcome

WASHINGTON. President Donald J. Trump concluded his first term on Wednesday with a U.S. trade deficit measurably larger than the one he had inherited four years earlier, an outcome the outgoing administration characterized in valedictory remarks as the direct result of a tariff strategy specifically calibrated to reduce the U.S. trade deficit, which had not, in the technical or any other sense, been reduced.

The President, who had taken office in January 2017 pledging to "stop the unfair trade" and to "deliver an enormous trade surplus" within his first term, departed with monthly U.S. goods deficits well above the pre-tariff baseline and with an annual goods deficit, in 2020, that had grown to a record high. The figures were released through official Commerce Department channels operated continuously under the President's command for forty-eight months and were not, in any of the four years they appeared, retracted, revised downward, or convincingly explained.

Senior officials traveling with the President in his final week stressed that the gap between the goal of the trade war and the result of the trade war should not be interpreted as a gap. "We did exactly what we said we would do," said one administration official, who noted that tariffs had remained on imported steel, aluminum, washing machines, solar panels, semiconductors, and roughly $370 billion of Chinese goods up to the final day of the term, throughout which the underlying figure being tariffed continued, on a quarterly basis, to rise. Asked to clarify the metric by which the strategy could be considered successful, the official directed reporters to a statement the President had issued in 2018 declaring the strategy a success.

Mr. Trump, in a brief exit appearance from the South Lawn, told reporters that the trade deficit numbers were "fake numbers, very fake," before pivoting to assert that the actual numbers, whatever they were, reflected "the greatest comeback in American manufacturing history," a comeback U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data did not, on any timeline, locate. Manufacturing employment, which had reached 12.8 million workers in February 2020, exited the term at 12.3 million, a level Mr. Trump described as "tremendous."

The President's farewell remarks did not address the additional roughly $28 billion in farm bailout payments his administration had directed to American farmers to compensate them for losses caused by retaliatory tariffs imposed in response to the President's tariffs. Officials traveling with the President said the bailouts were proof of the President's commitment to farmers, whose losses had been caused, in the administration's analysis, by China.

At press time, the incoming administration had pledged to review trade policy on a "comprehensive basis," language understood within the federal government to mean that most of the President's tariffs would remain in place for at least another four years, which they did.