Donald trump boasts about being an idiot in talks with canada

Even for Donald Trump, this is a weird story. Here’s the setup: > President Trump boasted in a fundraising speech Wednesday that he > made up information in a meeting with the leader 

of a top U.S. ally, > saying he insisted to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that > the United States runs a trade deficit with its neighbor to the > north without knowing 

whether that was the case. >  > “TRUDEAU CAME TO SEE ME. He’s a good guy, Justin. HE SAID, > ‘NO, NO, WE HAVE NO TRADE DEFICIT WITH YOU, WE HAVE NONE. DONALD, > PLEASE,’ ” Trump 

said, mimicking Trudeau, according to audio > obtained by _The Washington Post_….“I SAID, ‘WRONG, JUSTIN, > YOU DO.’ I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW….He said, ‘Nope, we have no > trade deficit.’

 I said, ‘Well, in that case I feel > differently,’ I said, ‘but I don’t believe it.’ I sent one > of our guys out, his guy, my guy, they went out, I said, ‘Check > because I can’t 

believe it.’ ” So far, this is typical Trump: bragging about how ignorant he is but supposedly getting the better of his oh-so-urbane counterpart anyway. But then “his guy” comes back with

the numbers: > ‘Well, sir, you’re actually right. WE HAVE NO DEFICIT BUT THAT > DOESN’T INCLUDE ENERGY AND TIMBER … And when you do, we lose $17 > billion a year.’ It’s incredible.”

Energy? Timber? WTF is that supposed to be about? Here’s our actual trade deficit with Canada: For the past three years, we’ve had a trade deficit in goods with Canada of about $20 billion,

mostly because we import lots of oil and natural gas from them (about $70 billion in 2017). But that’s only tangible goods. We export a lot of services to Canada (financial services,

computer services, etc.), and as a result we’ve been running a _total_ trade _surplus_ of about $5 billion. This is what Trudeau was talking about. It has nothing to do with timber, and the

number $17 billion doesn’t show up anywhere. This information takes about five minutes to look up. What kind of “guys” does Trump have who come back to him with a cockamamie story like this?

Or did they come back with the real numbers and now Trump is just inventing a tall tale about his triumph over Justin Trudeau? Or what? Can anyone out there make any more sense of this

story than I can? POSTSCRIPT: Also, if this story is anywhere close to true, can you just imagine what Trudeau told his people when he got back? I would love to have been a fly on the wall

for that debrief.