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 ...
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