Nearly lost in the uproar surrounding an intensifying trade war and a series of tiffs with longstanding American allies was President Trump’s startling suggestion last month that he’s really a free-trader at heart.

“You want a tariff-free, you want no barriers, and you want no subsidies, because you have some cases where countries are subsidizing industries, and that’s not fair,” he said at the Group of 7 meeting in Quebec. “So you go tariff-free, you go barrier-free, you go subsidy-free. That’s the way you learned at the Wharton School of finance. I mean, that would be the ultimate thing.”

But he also lamented that the United States is “a piggy bank everybody is robbing,” spurned the G-7’s joint communiqué that rejected protectionism, and is imposing tariffs on $34 billion of Chinese exports, all signs that he’s actually moving in the opposite direction.

But let’s take his statement at face value.

“If Trump is serious about zero tariffs, then let’s make it part of the agenda,” said Edwin J. Feulner, founder and former president of the conservative Heritage Foundation. “I’d be all for it.”