Trump’s America Is Exporting, and the Trade Deficit Is Shrinking
By Peter Navarro | RealClearMarkets | June 9, 2026
The latest trade report delivers a simple but powerful message: America is selling more to the world, importing more of what it needs to rebuild at home, and steadily shrinking the trade deficit.
This is the unmistakable triumph of Trump tariff and tax policy. President Trump is the strategist who changed the battlefield, and his field-general trio — U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick — is executing the campaign.
The weapons are familiar but too long underused: Section 232 to defend critical industries from national-security threats, Section 301 to punish predatory and unfair trade practices, and hard-nosed renegotiation to replace one-sided trade terms with reciprocal ones.
These negotiations include not just China, but a host of so-called “allies” that have grown fat on American market access while protecting their own markets, subsidizing their own industries, and running persistent surpluses against the United States. The old Washington consensus treated those arrangements as diplomacy. Trump correctly treats them as economic surrender — and he is reversing them.
That is not the story the globalist intelligentsia want you to hear. They would rather treat every trade number as another excuse to recycle the same tired catechism: tariffs bad, deficits inevitable, manufacturing gone forever. But the April numbers tell a very different story.
The overall U.S. trade deficit fell by $700 million in April to $55.9 billion, better than market expectations. The goods deficit fell by an even stronger $2.4 billion. Over the past year, the total deficit is down meaningfully, and the goods deficit has also narrowed.