The economic policy of President-elect Donald J. Trump is still a work in progress. But if campaign rhetoric is a reliable guide, reorienting trade policy may become one of the main goals of the new administration.

Perhaps the best indication of Mr. Trump’s thinking is a report released by the campaign in September. The report, “Scoring the Trump Economic Plan: Trade, Regulatory and Energy Policy Impacts,” was written by Peter Navarro and Wilbur Ross. Mr. Navarro is an economics professor at the University of California, Irvine. Mr. Ross is an investor whom Mr. Trump has chosen to be secretary of commerce.

A major theme of the report is concern about the trade deficit. In recent years, American imports have exceeded exports by about $500 billion a year. Mr. Navarro and Mr. Ross argue that if better policies eliminated this “trade deficit drag,” gross domestic product would be higher and more people would be employed.

That conclusion is correct, but only in a superficial sense. Gross domestic product is, by definition, the sum of consumption spending, investment spending, government purchases and the net exports of goods and services. If net exports rose from their current negative value to zero, and the other three components stayed the same, domestic production would increase and, consequently, so should employment.