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When you get down to it, tariffs and other trade barriers aren’t the main influence on national trade deficits or surpluses. Rather, Trump’s main “culpability” in trade is that his cuts in taxes and regulations have the U.S. economy outperforming most of the rest of the world. Future economic historians will carefully weigh all the evidence on whether there really has been a Trump bump in economic activity, so come back in 30 years for the definitive answer. For now, however, given the slow economic growth of the Obama years and the strong growth recently, it sure looks, to those of us living through the moment, like that’s what’s going on.

But if your economy is growing faster than your trading partners’ economies, you’re going to suck in imports faster than they will. Because their imports are your exports it follows that your imports will grow faster than your exports. And when that happens, your trade deficit rises.

In brief, what’s going on with the U.S. trade deficit is mainly a result of macroeconomics, not trade policy. And what’s going on in the U.S. macroeconomy under Trump is not a bad thing, it’s a good thing. The president clearly obsesses about the trade deficit, but would he really prefer that the U.S. economy not be humming along with both low inflation and also record low unemployment rates both overall and for just about every demographic group, even those demographic groups that solidly vote Democrat?

Trump is a spinner extraordinaire, the world’s greatest practitioner of the audacity of hype. Nothing bad happens that he doesn’t have an answer for, usually a smart-ass one. Most economists see the U.S. trade deficit as an unavoidable consequence, but also a reliable symptom, of macroeconomic success. It pretty clearly isn’t going away anytime soon. Trump needs to do what he does best: step forward and take brazen, braggadocious credit for it.