Does it make sense to treat trade deficit as tariffs?

This week, Donald Trump announced what he called "reciprocal tariffs" on goods imported from nearly all countries in the world. That tit-for-tat policy doesn't sound totally nonsensical. But he didn't actually reciprocate based on the other countries' tariffs. Instead, the amount of each country's tariff comes from a formula based on the trade deficit: each country's tariff rate was based on the U.S. trade deficit with that country, divided by the value of that country's exports to the U.S. Trump then cut that number in half, saying he was being "kind." There's also a minimum tariff of 10% on each country. While trade deficits can be influenced by government trading policies, I think for the most part they occur organically -- the trading partner simply has more things that we want than we have that they want. Consider an extreme hypothetical. A tiny country happens to have one of the only mines for a valuable mineral that US chip manufacturers need, and the population is just the people who run that mine. The US is likely to import an enormous amount of this mineral, but it doesn't have a large enough population to import much from the US, so the trade deficit will be large. There's actually a real example like this. Trump is imposing a 50% tariff on Saint Pierre and Miquelon, an archipelago near Newfoundland. Their population is less than 6,000. The US imports \$3.4 million worth of goods from them, mostly from their fishing industry, while it exports only about \$100,000. What could such a small territory do to increase their US imports and close this gap? Does treating trade deficits as effective tariffs make any economic sense? It seems like they may have done this just to have a simple, objective formula that doesn't require analyzing each trading partner's policies.