WASHINGTON—When U.S. President Donald Trump boasted Wednesday that he had made up a claim at a meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — telling Trudeau that the U.S. had a trade deficit with Canada before he had any idea whether that was actually true — he was not telling Trudeau anything the prime minister did not already know.

Even before the Washington Post obtained the tape of the closed-door fundraiser speech in Missouri, Trudeau’s team was well aware that Trump invents figures about trade deficits. So was everyone else who closely follows Trump’s words on trade.

In fact, Trump did it again, five times, in the very same fundraiser speech in which he told the tale of his attempt to deceive Trudeau. In rapid succession, he gave inaccurate figures for the deficit with Japan (“$100 billion,” though it was $56 billion last year according to U.S. Department of Commerce figures issued last week), with Mexico (“$100 billion,” though it was $69 billion last year), with China (“$500 billion,” though it was $337 billion last year), with the world (“$800 billion,” though it was $568 billion last year), and with Canada: he claimed in the speech that his guess had been proven right by data, since the U.S. actually does have a $17 billion deficit with Canada.

In fact, the Department of Commerce says, the U.S. had a surplus with Canada of $2.8 billion last year.

Trump kept up his assault on trade truth on Thursday morning. This time, he repeated another of his favourite false claims about trade deficits — claiming he knew he was actually right about his assertion to Trudeau that the U.S. has a deficit, even though he did not have the evidence at the time he made the assertion, because the U.S. has a trade deficit “with almost all countries.”

Not so. According to U.S. government data, the U.S. had a 2017 trade surplus with 129 countries and territories, more than half of all its trading partners, even if you only count trade in goods and ignore the services trade in which the U.S. excels. While none of the surpluses was even close to as big as the deficit with China — the biggest surplus, with Hong Kong, was $35 billion — Trump’s claim is objectively false.

The Department of Commerce figures above were calculated on a “balance of payments” basis. Using the “census basis,” another method of calculation used by the U.S. government, the figures are slightly but not meaningfully different.

There are two basic kinds of false Trump figures on trade deficits with individual countries.

His claims about Canada fall into the first category: countries for which he ignores trade in services. Trump’s regular claim, which he made on Wednesday, is that the U.S. has a $17 billion deficit with Canada. That would be correct if he specified that he was talking only about trade in goods: that figure was $17.6 billion in 2017 on the census basis. But he never specifies. And when you do count services, in which the U.S. has had a surplus of more than $20 billion for the last three years, the net balance is a clear U.S. surplus. Using the census basis, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative says the U.S. had a $12.5 billion surplus in 2016.

Trump’s Wednesday claims about Japan and China fall into the second category: countries for which he simply invents a deficit figure. There is no government data, using either method, that says the U.S. has a trade deficit of $100 billion with either of those two countries — let alone the “$130 billion” figure Trump gave for Mexico in February.

The status of individual trade deficits would not be a topic of public discussion if not for Trump’s fixation on the subject.

Though most economists say trade deficits are not the best way to measure the health of a trade relationship — and though his new chief economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, said earlier this month that “trade deficits by themselves don’t matter” — Trump views U.S. deficits as the ultimate indicator that the country is “losing” on trade.

A deficit means that Americans are buying more from another country than they are selling to that country. Economists say that Americans gain even from the buying, since they are able to obtain goods and services that may not be available from U.S. producers or may only be available at much higher costs.

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The Star is keeping track of every false claim Trump says as U.S. president. As of Monday, he had said 1,314 false claims in the first 416 days of his presidency, an average of 3.2 per day.

Prior to Monday — the most recent of the Star’s weekly updates — Trump had made 79 false claims about deficits since his Jan. 20, 2017, inauguration. Here’s that list, which does not include his five false claims on Wednesday and one on Thursday:

If Trump is a serial liar, why call this a list of “false claims,” not lies? The answer is that we can’t be sure that each and every one was intentional. In some cases, he may have been confused or ignorant. What we know, objectively, is that he was not telling the truth.

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