The Trump administration’s trade war with the world has been a haphazard, often chaotic affair, but if you had to identify a single, guiding principle for the administration’s actions, it would be balancing America’s trade deficits.
President Donald Trump has been talking about the trade deficit for years (even though he sometimes seems to confuse it with the federal budget deficit, which is a very different thing). During his second term, the president’s top trade officials have also stressed the trade deficit as a key metric by which to measure the effectiveness of Trump’s tariffs.
For example, when pressed by Rep. Brendan Boyle (D–Pa.) during a hearing last year on what results a successful tariff policy would produce, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said “the [trade] deficit needs to go in the right direction”—meaning that it needs to fall. More recently, Greer has talked about how “overproduction” in other countries “displaces existing U.S. domestic production” as a justification for Trump’s tariffs.
The short version of all this: Hiking taxes on imports is supposed to spur domestic production of all sorts of goods, and help America export more than it imports. Many economists might say the trade deficit isn’t really something worth worrying about, but the Trump administration’s view is quite clear. The White House wants America to export more, import less, and run trade surpluses rather than deficits.
But Trump’s latest tariff maneuver seemingly defies that logic.
On Wednesday, the White House announced a new 25 percent tariff on thousands of products imported from Brazil. The new tariffs are being imposed under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, and are effectively meant to replace the previous “emergency” tariffs on Brazilian goods that were struck down by the Supreme Court in February. In a statement, Greer said the tariffs were meant to counter “unfair trade practices.”
But if the guiding principle is reducing trade deficits, here’s an uncomfortable fact: America exports way more to Brazil than it imports from there.
“The U.S. goods trade surplus with Brazil was $14.4 billion in 2025, a 112.8 percent increase ($7.7 billion) over 2024,” according to Greer’s office. When services are included in the calculation, the trade surplus with Brazil grows by another $23 billion.
Last year was no aberration. Over the past 15 years, the U.S. has run a cumulative trade surplus with Brazil that totals more than $424 billion, according to a statement from Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Trump administration officials have offered a variety of overlapping and competing justifications for the new tariffs in comments to The New York Times, including “inadequate policing of deforestation” and the fact that Brazilian courts had tried to order “U.S. social media companies to take down certain political content.”
Those might be real problems, but how will tariffs address them? Forcing American businesses and consumers to pay higher prices on imports from Brazil seems like an odd way to combat deforestation or stand up for free speech.
“These tariffs are a blunt tool with a weak connection between the practices at issue and the American companies that will bear the costs,” Dan Anthony, executive director of We Pay the Tariffs, a nonprofit coalition representing more than 1,200 American small businesses, said in a statement. “Businesses buying everyday products from Brazil will now pay new tariffs because of disputes over digital payment rules and other policies they have nothing to do with.”
For all the talk about trade deficits, the new tariffs once again reveal that there are no principles underpinning the Trump administration’s trade policies. The president will use any and every justification to slap new tariffs on foreign imports and leave Americans with the bill.
