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Team,
This conversation with Carl Higbie on Frontline lays out, in plain English, the real battle over inflation—and why the Democratic attempt to pin Biden’s legacy inflation on President Trump simply won’t fly. We walk through shelter, food, transportation, and wages, and I break down why some price categories turn quickly (like chicken and eggs) while others take years (like beef and housing).
We also get into the larger contrast: Biden’s bonfire of fiscal stimulus and war on fossil fuels versus Trump’s focus on boosting real wages, rebuilding supply, and driving affordability back into the American household budget. This is the honest, sector-by-sector explanation voters deserve—and the roadmap for avoiding a repeat of the Reagan-era midterm trap Democrats are banking on.
Watch the video or read the transcript below.
Carl Higbie: Frontline – Senior Trade Counselor Peter Navarro Interview
CARL HIGBIE: Peter Navarro, Trump, senior counselor for trade in manufacturing, sir, all this going on, economic data not being released, all these things. Meanwhile, most people are just trying to put gas in their car and their kids in school and put food in their lunchbox.
SENIOR COUNSELOR NAVARRO: Carl, the Democrat Con job right now is to blame Donald Trump for Biden’s legacy inflation. And this can’t work. I mean, the solutions they’re offering will basically destroy this country. What I think we need to do is have a sober and clear-eyed discussion about inflation one by one. You got shelter housing, you got food, you got transportation. And go through the difference between Biden and Trump and show the great progress we are making here in the Trump administration against the backdrop, Carl, that this all takes time. This all takes time. There’s some things you can flip a switch on. Let me give you an example. The difference between chicken prices and egg prices out of control versus beef prices. It’s about six months, Carl, from the egg to the slaughterhouse for chickens. That’s a manageable short amount of time. It’s about three years for beef cattle. So you’re not surprised to know that we’ve already solved the chicken problem. The egg problem, Brooke Rollins at Ag went right at this, at the request of Donald Trump. We solved that one. But the cattle one is going to be more difficult just because it takes time to breed cattle and restore the herds. If you look at that shelter is really interesting, Carl, I tell you the lag, there is 18 months in order to get a policy in place and to see material benefit. Trump’s only been in office for 10 months and they’re blaming him. The Democrats are blaming him for high rent. So what we have to do is, and what we’re doing at the White House is we’re feeling the pain of America, number one. Number two, we’re going piece by piece, looking at each of the contributors at a micro level that feed in to the consumer price index and addressing that forcefully with policies, which are basically the mirror image of what was Biden doing to get us into it.
And then the other part of the equation, Carl, is the wage side, the affordability side. I mean, look, if inflation is going up, but your real inflation adjusted wages are going up faster, affordability is improving, things are getting better. Your purchasing power increases. And the data here is really interesting. Carl, in the first term, Trump saw real wages rise by 8%. Biggest in history. In Biden’s they went down by 3%. That’s a huge double digit swing. So this is what we’re trying to do. And the last thing I should say, Carl, go ahead.
HIGBIE: Yeah, but this whole thing, look, I’m talking about eliminating the filibuster. Yes, it would be an unprecedented move. But here’s the thing. What’s stopping us from just saying, you know what? We’re getting rid of the filibuster because you Democrats are sticks in the mud and you don’t want to do anything. Anyway, we’re going back to pre-COVID budgets. So we stopped printing so much darn money. So we stopped devaluing the dollar we got here because the last administration did extreme stuff. We kind of need to do that. Republicans only hold the line. We never come back. Okay, why can’t we just do something serious here? And a lot of people would be like, yes, thank God they did something.
SENIOR COUNSELOR NAVARRO: Well, that one is outside the scope of what I do. But what I can tell you is if you look at what the Democrat party stands for now, and what Joe Biden actually did, it was basically a bonfire of inflation. If you look at the massive fiscal stimulus coupled with the war on fossil fuels, that alone. Was enough to ignite inflation in both food and housing. If you think about food, it was like driving up the price of fertilizer because oil creates fertilizer, driving up the transportation costs. If you look at housing, the inflation that Biden created drove up interest in mortgage rates and put a halt to everything and everything we do, Carl, I was there for all four years of the first term. Everything we do is designed to boost real wages and decrease inflation. And some things are going to move faster than other things. I mean, if you look at the miracle of oil price, I mean, we went down from mid-seventies on oil all the way down to the low sixties, and that’s a huge percentage thing. But again, things take time because that’ll take time to filter through in terms of the fertilizer prices, things like that, and getting things to the grocery store. And I tell you, so we’re working hard on this, but we can’t let what the Democrats did to Reagan happen in the 2026 congressional elections. Carl, we have a template for this. Reagan came in with a humongous inflation problem and he basically put in place his supply side fixes. He had Paul Volcker at his side doing that, and they broke the back of inflation. But the pain was still in evidence in the midterm elections and we lost the house there and we got gridlock. We cannot let those sobs in Democrat land, the AOCs, the Jeffries. These people, they’ll want to take what we have, including our freedom
HIGBIE: And burn it down.
SENIOR COUNSELOR NAVARRO: I know that personally, and they’re going to lie about inflation.
HIGBIE: Yeah. Well, I tell you, if anything else, I actually have been looking for small to medium beef farms to actually purchase myself because I think that is going to be a currency coming in the next few years. So Peter Navarro, we do appreciate it, sir.
SENIOR COUNSELOR NAVARRO: By the way, if you eat that much beef every day, I think you should have your own farm at your house there.
HIGBIE: I’ve got some good friends who make sure I’m well fed. But Peter Navarro, we appreciate it, sir. Alright,
SENIOR COUNSELOR NAVARRO: All right, my brother, always a pleasure, Carl.
