The fundamental precept here is that foreign investment of goods is more preferable to domestic investment of goods [1], so running a negative trade balance is dispreferable.
Trump is a textbook Mercantilist (positive trade balance inherently good [2]). Rather than magazine articles, see the Palgrave (the definitive encyclopedic reference for Econ) entry [1] and the Wikipedia page [2] for the arguments and history.
I always find reading the highest quality material leads to the highest quality thinking—there’s certainly a reason why modern LLM training mixtures might weight wikipedia tokens 5x and webtext 0.5x. :>
[1]: https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1057/978-1-3...