“We have slashed our gaping trade deficit by a staggering 77 percent.”

The trade deficit barely budged: Bureau of Economic Analysis data released February 19, 2026 show the U.S. trade deficit in goods and services fell just 0.2%, about $2.1 billion, from 2024 to 2025. The 2025 deficit of roughly $901.5 billion was the third largest on record going back to 1960.

The 77% number is cherry-picked from two single months. Trump compared January 2025, when the monthly deficit was artificially inflated because importers stockpiled foreign goods ahead of his threatened tariffs, to October 2025, a 16-year monthly low. Economists call this comparison meaningless: monthly trade figures are volatile, and "economists almost never evaluate claims about the 'trade deficit' based on comparisons between two individual months," as UC San Diego economist Kyle Handley told FactCheck.org. Even using Trump's own monthly method, the January-to-December 2025 decline was 45.2%, not 77%, and the early-2025 import surge that set up the comparison was itself caused by Trump's tariff announcements, which pushed the monthly trade imbalance to between roughly $120 billion and $136 billion in the first three months of 2025. "Large month-to-month swings are common, even in periods with no underlying structural change in trade policy or economic conditions. For that reason, economists almost never evaluate claims about the 'trade deficit' based on comparisons between two individual months." — Kyle Handley, professor of economics, UC San Diego, to FactCheck.org