Shipping containers at the Port of Baltimore in June. The United States has run a trade deficit since the late 1970s, but it reached a historic $1.2 trillion last year.
When President Trump announced sweeping tariffs on the rest of the world in April, he said those levies were in response to something he described as an emergency: the trade deficits that the United States runs with foreign trading partners.
The designation of the trade deficit as an emergency made it possible, in the administration’s view, for the president to address it by using the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, a 1970s law that is now at the center of a Supreme Court challenge against Mr. Trump’s tariffs. The law allows the president to act swiftly and with few guardrails in such cases.
But Mr. Trump’s claim that a trade deficit constitutes an emergency is contentious, even among economists and policy
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