In President Trump’s reckoning, international trade is a zero-sum game with distinct winners and losers. Exports are Team America’s points. Imports are the foreign team’s points. The trade account is the scoreboard, and the deficit on that scoreboard proves that the home team is losing at trade. Accordingly, the president considers blocking imports and promoting exports to be integral to effective trade policymaking.

In 2018, Trump put that theory to the test. For a variety of reasons, including a desire to reduce the trade deficit, Trump imposed tariffs on $250 billion of imports from China.