WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The devastating effects of trade deals on the U.S. economy is one of Donald Trump’s most compelling arguments in his campaign for the White House, and one of the billionaires he has recruited to advise him is working hard to spread the word.

Private-equity investor Wilbur Ross, a specialist in automotive components and other manufactured goods, is going to whatever forum will have him to talk about the negative impact of the U.S. trade deficit, the fundamental flaws in our trade accords and in the World Trade Organization itself, and how Trump, not his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, is the one to fix things.

Usually with the aid of University of California economist Peter Navarro, Ross, whose fortune Forbes estimates at $2.9 billion, argues in interviews, op-eds, and, if need be, letters to the editor that the hollowing out of American manufacturing because of disadvantageous trade policies is holding back the nation’s economy.

“Before the era of globalization,” Ross said in a Financial Times op-ed last week, “U.S. managers improved efficiency by substituting capital for labor in domestic factories. As globalization has taken hold, executives have offshored entire factories as a more effective means of maximizing profits.”

But this type of migration, which has reduced the share of manufacturing in the U.S. labor force to 8% from 20% in the 1970s, is not inevitable, he argued.

“To those who would blame this decline primarily on automation, one need only point to Germany and Japan, which retain almost 20% and 17% of their labor force in manufacturing, respectively,” Ross wrote. “These countries are worldwide leaders in robotics.”

Bad trade deals that fail to protect American jobs are mostly to blame for this development, Ross says.

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He cites the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute to effect that the U.S. has lost 700,000 jobs because of the North American Free Trade Agreement, instead of gaining the 200,000 jobs promised by President Bill Clinton when he signed the deal in 1993. We have moved from a $1.6 billion trade deficit with Mexico to a $60 billion deficit.

The 2012 bilateral trade agreement with South Korea was supposed to create 70,000 jobs in the U.S., Ross said in a CNBC op-ed, but instead has led to a loss of 75,000 jobs — again according to EPI.

The badly negotiated entry of China into the World Trade Organization — another mistake Ross lays at Bill Clinton’s feet — has not prevented “China’s questionable trade practices on products ranging from apparel, aircraft and autos to shrimp, steel, and textiles.”

In fact, WTO rules provide virtually no protection against what Ross identifies as several unfair practices that U.S. trading partners use to their advantage — currency manipulation, intellectual property theft, sweatshop labor, and rampant pollution.

For Ross, it’s “Econ 101” that a chronic trade deficit weakens the U.S. economy.

Basic economics, he wrote in a letter to the editor responding to a Wall Street Journal editorial criticizing Trump’s views on trade, shows that “GDP equals the sum of domestic economic activity plus ‘net exports,’ i.e., exports minus imports. Therefore, when we run massive and chronic trade deficits, it weakens our economy.”

He goes on to refer to Trump’s “free-trading policy” — rebutting media coverage that characterizes it as protectionist — and how it aims to boost exports and overall trade while removing some of the obstacles with “tougher and smarter trade negotiations.”

In Ross’s view, Hillary Clinton, “the Queen of the Bad Trade Deal going back some 23 years,” doesn’t have a clue, but would be guilty of the same bait-and-switch on trade as Barack Obama was in 2008 when he also promised to be tough on China, but failed to follow through.

“As an example of China’s cheating that hits Pennsylvanians right between the eyes,” Ross and Navarro wrote last month in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “Chinese steel producers lose more than $10 billion a year but the government keeps them alive and dumping with illegal subsidies.”

The WTO takes so long to adjudicate dumping complaints that American companies go bankrupt waiting for relief — which Ross says is what happened with Bethlehem and 30 other U.S. steel companies.

What would Ross’s candidate, Trump, do different?

The tougher trade deals that the author of “The Art of the Deal” would negotiate, Ross spelled out in the FT, would include safeguards such as triggers for automatic renegotiation if the trade gains are not fairly distributed, prompt relief against non-tariff barriers such as quotas, “ironclad sanctions” against currency manipulation, zero tolerance on intellectual property theft, and strict environmental and safety standards.

As Beltway pundits focused on what they see as Trump’s racism, bigotry, xenophobia, and, yes, protectionism continue to puzzle over why such an unqualified individual remains competitive against the candidate who has never, in the minds of many, been equaled in her qualifications, they might want to pay attention to this trade message from Trump’s economic advisers.