Trump is again claiming the U.S. has a trade deficit to Canada. He's still wrong.

(Image credit: Getty Images)

published 1 June 2018

President Trump's steel and aluminum tariffs went into effect Friday, and he responded to news of U.S. allies' anger with the arrangement on Twitter that morning:

The president's central claim — that the United States has a trade deficit to Canada — is wrong. While there is a trade deficit in merchandise goods, the United States has a larger trade surplus on services. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, which is part of the executive branch, reports a net $8.4 billion U.S. surplus in trade with Canada in 2017, and other federal agencies have similar calculations.

This is not the first time Trump has propounded this whopper. When he met with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in March, he told his northern counterpart he was unhappy about the deficit. Trudeau pushed back, but the president was undeterred, boasting at a fundraiser later that though he "didn't even know," he "just said, 'You're wrong.'" White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump was not incorrect because he was only thinking of goods, not services.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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