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But as Vietnamese manufacturing has boomed, so has the nation’s trade surplus with the U.S., rising fourfold since 2015 to $123.5 billion last year.

Navarro was the author of the infamous equation that set so-called reciprocal tariff rates in proportion to the size of a country's trade surplus with the US, calling it "the sum of all cheating".

He pledged that his nation – which has been slotted for tariffs of 17% – would drop its trade barriers and move to eliminate its trade surplus with the US.

A closer look at the, at-first, complicated looking equation revealed it was simply a measure of the size of that country's goods trade surplus with the US.

Trump is incandescent about the EU's massive trade surplus.