As investors and consumers fretted in recent weeks about the fallout if President Trump unleashed a massive trade war, Trump himself kept looking to the past. 

The rest of the world has been ripping off the U.S. for 40 years, he told advisers who asked him to articulate his economic vision. It was, he and his advisers would note, an argument he has been making on television since the 1980s. Before his second term ends, he said, he feels he has to right those wrongs. 

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