The Lawyer’s Theory of Trade

Trump’s top trade official gave a revealing interview. Here’s how an economist hears it.

“Yeah. I think we’ve been wildly successful.”

That’s a quote from Jamieson Greer, Donald Trump’s trade representative, speaking recently on The Daily.

It’s worth giving that episode a full listen, because Greer isn’t some random spokesperson sent out to read a talking point. He is — by all accounts — one of the central architects of Trump’s tariff agenda. Maybe the central architect.

I want to use this interview for what it’s good for: understanding the person at the center of America’s trade war, and the worldview behind it. Having gone through it closely, I came to understand both a lot better.

Here’s what struck me. Greer is a lawyer, not an economist. And I mean that as a description, not an insult. He’s got a coherent worldview, and he can argue it hard. But time after time, that worldview rests on muddled thinking about what trade is, who benefits, and what problem the policy is even trying to solve.

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Big idea #1: Trade enlarges the pie

The first thing that stood out to me in this interview is that Greer talks about trade the way other people talk about war:

“If China is not going to change its practices that we believe are harmful, then we have to take unilateral measures. We have to be policymakers, otherwise we just have to accept all these giant surpluses that they’re developing through their own policies. And I’m not going to take that. The president doesn’t want to take that, because he’s not just going to take other countries’ policies and say, oh, well, OK, I guess we’ll just hand over our industrial base to everybody else. I guess everyone else will just have subsidies, and we’ll lay down and take it on the chin again.”

I get why this lands. Some governments really do tilt the playing field. And supply-chain dependence can be a national security problem.

But Greer takes those partial truths and turns them into a universal frame: If they make more, we must be making less. If they export more, we must be losing. If we import more, we must be surrendering.

Notice the zero-sum thinking.

Economists think about trade entirely differently. We see it as enlarging the pie.

mmmm… Pie…. [Photo by Keighla Exum on Unsplash]

The easiest way to think about this is to start at home. My better half and I trade chores. She does the stuff she’s relatively better at, I do the stuff I’m relatively better at, and the whole household runs more smoothly. Our pie gets bigger, and we both get more pie. I’m Australian, she’s American, and in this case our international trade in services makes both nations better off.

You can also think about trade between states. Nobody believes that New Yorkers will get richer if they refuse to trade with Pennsylvanians. And yet, put an ocean between the two parties and suddenly it sounds reasonable (to some). But the water doesn’t change the economics — it just makes the other side easier to blame.

Now, I don’t want to over-romanticize this. Trade doesn’t only create winners.

Here’s the honest way to say it: Trade makes the pie bigger in both countries. But along the way, it redistributes the slices within each country, and that redistribution can be brutal. Economists haven’t always been good enough at admitting that. But the gains are real too. The pie is bigger. That’s why people trade.

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Big idea #2: Consumers count too

The next thing I want you to notice is who gets to be a character in Greer’s story.

Early on, he frames the whole project like this:

“We have to take measures to protect our economy, to protect our industrial base, to protect our agricultural production, to protect our factories and farms and families and the people who work there…”

And later, talking about the businesses hurt by his tariffs:

“For every small-business person that says, well, my business model is to import from China a finished good, mark it up and resell it to an American — could that impact their business? Yeah, of course it could.”

Notice who’s prioritized here: the steel company. The small manufacturer. The worker in a hard hat. The factory owner fighting off imports.

Those people — and their problems — are real. But they are not the whole story. There are at least three other groups who should matter in any honest discussion of trade policy.

First, consumers. Families buying shoes, toys, appliances, groceries, tools, school supplies, car parts. Folks like you and me.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

Second, American firms that use imported inputs. Maybe you’re assembling something in Ohio, but you need parts from Taiwan or Mexico or Germany. Tariffs raise costs on American producers but not their foreign competitors, leaving them at a disadvantage.

Third, the workers at those firms. They’re no less American — and no less deserving of concern — than the worker standing next to the blast furnace.

The New York Fed says the costs of tariffs were overwhelmingly borne by domestic businesses and consumers. And a recent study finds higher tariff exposure raised prices and cut household spending, with low-income households bearing a disproportionate share of the pain.

The protected producer is always the hero in Greer’s story, while the consumer paying more barely rates a mention.

My suggestion for the economically literate: Let’s write the consumer back into the trade story. We have to, because unlike the businesses that have powerful lobbyists defending their interests, consumers don’t have advocates marching on Washington demanding someone pay attention to them.

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Big idea #3: “Cheap” is not a dirty word

Now let’s talk about one little word that shows up again and again in this interview. (You hear JD Vance use it a lot too.)

Cheap.

Cheap, here, doesn’t just mean low-priced. It means suspect. Illegitimate. Tainted. Maybe unfair or dangerous. Definitely not something you’re supposed to like.

Now, sometimes goods are cheap because of an unfair subsidy, dumping, or distorted competition. But that’s actually pretty rare.

Here’s the thing: Another word for cheap is more. More left in your wallet. More breathing room at the end of the month. More living standard out of the same paycheck.

Low prices help consumers. They help you get more. But once low prices are treated as morally suspect, making things more expensive starts to sound like patriotism.

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Big idea #4: Nostalgia isn’t a policy

In this interview, we also hear Jamieson Greer speak with a special reverence for manufacturing. But why?

Manufacturing matters. Especially for specific communities and sectors. A plant closure can wreck a town, and you’ve lived through one, you don’t need an economist to explain that to you.

Listen closely and you’ll hear Greer treat manufacturing as the moral center of the economy.

Photo by Michael Pointner on Unsplash

Here’s a simple fact: Average hourly earnings in manufacturing in June 2026 were about $36.71. Across the whole private sector, average hourly earnings were about $37.64. This means manufacturing pays a bit less than the private-sector average.

Increasingly, manufacturing jobs aren’t unionized, they’re not high-paying, and they’re not a road to long-term security. There was a time when “factory job” was basically shorthand for a middle-class wage, but that’s no longer reliably true.

I’ve noticed that manufacturing jobs are what a lot of rich people think poor people want. But ask a worker who’s busting their back on a factory floor what they want for their kids, and they’re usually pointing somewhere else.

America’s future is further up the value chain, and I’m looking forward to it.

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Big idea #5: Deficits are accounting totals not economic scoreboards

Jamieson Greer — and many others in the White House — talk about the trade deficit as though it’s a scoreboard for whether America is beating other countries.

Here he is:

“Our trade deficit exploded by 40% in the five years before President Trump’s second term. It was $1.2 trillion at the end of 2024. This is crazy. So for us, this is an emergency.”

And later:

“We want the trade deficit in goods to go down.”

But a trade deficit is not the same thing as being ripped off.

I have a trade deficit with Trader Joe’s. I buy a ton of stuff from Trader Joe’s, and it never buys a single thing from Platypus Economics. You probably have one too.

And if someone told you Trader Joe’s was winning and you were losing, you’d tell them to take a long look at the frozen aisle and reconsider.

Trader Joe’s isn’t exploiting me; it’s feeding me.

Are you being exploited by all this choice? [Photo by Franki Chamaki on Unsplash]

That may sound silly, but that’s the point. Bilateral-deficit logic is silly.

At the macro level, a trade deficit reflects a broader gap between national saving and investment. A trade deficit can also be explained as an investment surplus.

Folks from all around the world want to invest their money in the United States. They send their dollars from abroad, either so they can invest directly in our businesses or lend to Americans who think they’ve got a better use for those dollars.

It’s literally the same idea, but when you state it from the other side of the accounting ledger, it hits different.

And even on Greer’s own terms, these bilateral deficit numbers don’t prove what he wants them to prove.

He pointed out that last year the U.S. deficit with China fell to about $202 billion. And he’s not wrong. But our trade deficit with Vietnam rose to about $178 billion, up nearly $55 billion.

In fact, every dollar shaved off our trade deficit with China has shown up in our deficit with one of the eleven members of ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations).

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Pulling the threads together

Trade is complicated. I get it. That’s why muddled thinking about trade is everywhere.

My task today wasn’t simply to argue with Jamieson Greer and the broader set of ideas animating Trump’s trade policy.

Instead, I wanted to equip you with a few ways to sort out good trade policy arguments from bad ones. It’s a skill that’ll be useful well beyond this administration.

The next time you hear someone talk about trade, listen for the tells of sloppy thinking:

• Are they treating it like war instead of cooperation?

• Are consumers disappearing from the story?

• Is “cheap” being used as a slur — a word that takes a benefit and rebrands it as a shame?

• Is manufacturing being treated like magic?

• And is a deficit being waved around like a scoreboard at halftime?

And after all that, here’s Greer’s own grade for the policy:

“I would give us an A.”

Not in my class, Jamieson.

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One more thing (for the stats nerds)

When I create these videos, I often crunch a few numbers in Stata, with whom I’ve got a paid partnership.

Today, I used it to explore our trade relationship with China and the eleven members of ASEAN. Before the 2025 tariffs, America bought more from ASEAN whenever it bought more from China; since then, every dollar shaved off our trade deficit with China shows up somewhere in Southeast Asia.

You can use this worksheet to run the regressions and measure the flip yourself.