There is nothing more infuriating than Donald Trump’s repeated insistence that the U.S. “loses over 800 Billion Dollars a year on really dumb Trade Deals.” (The random capitalizations are Trump’s, not mine.)

One loses money to the house at a gambling casino. One loses money selling a home below the purchase price. One loses money when a cash-filled wallet is stolen. And one loses money when a company goes belly up — except, of course, in the case of Donald Trump and his Atlantic City casinos.

But on a voluntary transaction between two parties, there is no “loss” unless one party misrepresents the product he is selling or delivers less than the contractual amount, in which case it falls to the courts to remedy the buyer.

Trump might want to consult the dictionary to alleviate his confusion. Trade is defined as the activity of buying and selling goods and services, especially between countries. A trade is the act of “exchanging one thing for another.” Nothing there about one side “losing.”

Trade is also a verb: to buy, sell or exchange goods. It’s hard to find any meaning of the word that comports with Trump’s definition of other countries ripping off the U.S. through long-standing trade agreements, the effect of which has been to reduce tariffs and other trade barriers over time. (I’ll leave it to the hipper set to decipher the Urban Dictionary definition.)

So why does Trump persist in advocating something that makes him look stupid? For someone whose policy preferences blow with the prevailing winds, Trump has been amazingly consistent in his commitment to protectionism and his insistence that trade is a zero-sum game.

He cannot, or will not, be convinced by research and statistics that trade creates more jobs than it eliminates because access to cheaper imports enables consumers to spend more on something else.

He cannot, or will not, be convinced by research and statistics that trade does not affect the total number of jobs in an economy over the long run; just the particular types of jobs, which will reflect the areas in which that nation excels.

And don’t even try to explain the notion of comparative advantage to him: the idea first proposed by David Ricardo in 1817 that a country benefits from producing items in which it specializes, or has a comparative advantage, and buying lower-cost goods from another country. That is true even if one country excels, or has an absolute advantage, in producing all goods.

This is why the U.S. imports T-shirts and sneakers from less-developed countries and specializes in manufacturing high-tech fabrics for NASA astronauts.

And no, those jobs aren’t coming back to the U.S., which would be tantamount to putting the car into reverse. It’s true that as wages rise in developing nations, businesses may find it advantageous to relocate to the U.S. to be closer to their biggest customers and afford themselves the legal protections offered by this country.

But in general, the goal should be to create an environment to attract new, high-tech manufacturing industries, such as the plants that were lured to Mississippi’s Golden Triangle, one of the poorest regions of the country. (This “60 Minutes” segment from December 2016 is inspirational and well worth your time.)

All countries are losing, or will lose, manufacturing jobs to automation over time. That’s what happened in agriculture.

The U.S. was once a nation of farmers. In 1800, 83% of the U.S. labor force was employed in agriculture. Today it’s about 1.7%. Between 1948 and 2011, U.S. farm output rose 1.5% a year, according to a 2015 U.S. Department of Agriculture study. The “extraordinary performance of the U.S. farm sector was driven mainly by productivity growth:” specifically, by total factor productivity, or the more efficient use of inputs.

Then there’s Trump’s refusal to acknowledge that there’s more to the economy than manufactured goods. After all, the U.S. is a services economy. Last year, private goods-producing industries accounted for 18.4% of gross domestic product. Services? 68.9%. (The residual, 12.7%, is government.) So service-producing industries are responsible for more than two-thirds of U.S. economic output, but in Trump’s world, services don’t count.

The U.S. ran a $552 billion trade deficit in 2017: a goods deficit of $807 billion, partially offset by a services surplus of $255 billion. Trump focuses solely on the goods deficit, not to mention his mistaken categorization of it as a “loss.”

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump fashioned himself as the second coming of Ronald Reagan. Towards that end, he has extrapolated the message of one of Reagan’s classic remarks, only to apply it mistakenly to international trade.

Asked about his Cold War strategy, Reagan offered a terse response: “We win, they lose.”