TRANSCRIPT
TRANSCRIPT – DR. NAVARRO INTERVIEW ON ABC NEWS – 07.14.2025
KAYNA WHITWORTH: Joining me now for more on this is the White House Senior Trade Advisor Peter Navarro. Mr. Navarro, thank you for being here with us.
DR. NAVARRO: Hey Kayna, how are you?
WHITWORTH: I’m wonderful, and we’re so glad to have you here with us. So, if I can –
DR. NAVARRO: Sure.
WHITWORTH: Can we start here with the President’s announcement of these potential tariffs against Russia? In your analysis here, what sectors of Russia’s economy would these tariffs target, and how does it differ from these economic sanctions that are already in place?
DR. NAVARRO: Well, uranium and oil pop first to mind. We have a lot of that going around the world, and I think that might be a focus. There’s a difference between sanctions and tariffs. The reality is that sanctions are effective, and they can be very effective. It’s also true that Russia, China, Iran, other countries have made a concerted effort to figure out workarounds around the sanctions, so a combination of sanctions and tariffs will be a much more powerful disincentive to Russia to continue its seemingly unrelenting war on Ukraine.
WHITWORTH: And try to prevent that workaround from other bad actors, as you mentioned. But what is the strategy in giving Putin 50 days here to end his offensive?
DR. NAVARRO: This is the way the President likes to negotiate. He’s letting folks know what’s going to happen ‘if.’ And, look, President Donald Trump has done everything humanly possible to try to bring the two countries together in a peace deal. And it’s been very difficult, and lately President Putin has not been cooperative, so this is the next stage of that. I just want to stress that this is the way the White House works. We negotiate, whether it’s on trade or whether it’s on the issues in – with Iran or with Russia, and we have windows that we like to give people to do the right thing. The right thing here for Russia is to go to the bargaining table and come away with an agreement so millions of people stop being killed. I mean, it’s getting into the millions now. It’s a charnel house there. It’s unimaginable, I think, to most Americans just how violent that war is and just – just the death toll. But – but if you compare, for example, the Vietnam War, we lost about 60,000 American soldiers there. Right now it’s in the millions when you combine Ukraine and Russia casualties. I mean, it’s just – it’s got to stop.
WHITWORTH: It sounds to me like you would agree with the sentiment from some Republican senators that the goal isn’t more tariffs and sanctions, the goal is to entice Putin to the peace table.
DR. NAVARRO: Of course. Of course. Exactly right. There are cases – President Trump has a strategic tariff policy, and tariffs are used in different ways. When they’re used in a trade context, the purpose is to get investment here, protect our domestic manufacturers and workers, and force the countries that we trade with to stop cheating us. I mean, the reality on trade, which is my remit here, is that every country in the world cheats us to some degree with higher tariffs than we charge them, which is not fair, and what’s even worse in many cases are what we call the non-tariff barriers, the way that Japan, for example, keeps our automobiles out of their market or Brazil keeps some of the things out of their market. So, what the President does with tariffs is level that playing field. What he’s doing, though, in the case of Russia, he’s trying to provide a strong incentive for peace. And good for President Trump.
WHITWORTH: So, let’s talk about his tariff strategy here and how it’s playing out a bit domestically. I want to – want you to take a listen to what you told Fox Business Network. This was in April. This is after the President put a 90-day pause on most of his sweeping tariffs and trade measures. Let’s play that.
[APRIL 9TH CLIP OF DR. NAVARRO SPEAKING WITH CHARLES PAYNE ON FOX BUSINESS]: There’s a – there’s a beautiful analogy President Trump likes to use. It’s like, each country, it’s not going to be like a suit off the rack. Right? It’s not one size fits all. It’s going to be every deal’s going to be tailor-made.
[CHARLES PAYNE ON FOX BUSINESS]: Right.
[APRIL 9TH CLIP OF DR. NAVARRO SPEAKING ON FOX BUSINESS]: And we’re going to see – we’ve got 90 days to do this. I’m telling you, Charles. This is going to be the biggest boom.
WHITWORTH: We run the numbers here, 90 deals in 90 days. That’s what was promised. The deadline’s come and gone. The White House has announced frameworks of deals with just two countries, the UK and Vietnam. Where do we stand on these others?
DR. NAVARRO: Well, we’re going to have 90 deals in 90 days. The only question is whether they are going to be deals that are between us and them, or whether we unilaterally impose those deals upon those countries, which is – President Trump has already begun to do with the letters he has sent out assigning tariffs to each of these countries. And with respect to the number 90, what we’ve got with just those letters alone and the tariff’s we’re going to charge, that’s over 90 percent of our entire annual trade deficit, which is well over a trillion dollars. So, we’re very pleased with where we are right now, we’re collecting about five billion dollars in tariffs a week, and the numbers are going up. We’ve collected over 100 billion dollars in tariffs since President Trump took office. Those help us cut our taxes, reduce our debt, and they act as a tariff wall to bring home investment. I don’t know if you know this, Kayna, but we’ve had commitments of over three trillion dollars of new investment coming in to this country because of a combination of the tariff wall we’ve put up, as well as very attractive investment opportunities for countries around the world.
WHITWORTH: And are you seeing some of that, the dollar amounts that you’re throwing out there, translate into metrics that the American people can benefit from? Think about families across the Rust Belt struggling with high housing cost, grocery prices, other rising costs. What are the metrics here that you have to demonstrate an uptick in that kind of economic prosperity? Maybe especially even for auto workers. I’m sure you remember at that press conference, we heard from a retired UAW auto worker who said they were very hopeful they would see results from the auto industry tariffs in six months to a year. That was five months ago. Where are we at on that?
DR. NAVARRO: Well, I love the question. It’s a great question. And the metrics are very, very straightforward. One of my favorite metrics is whether or not real inflation-adjusted wages for blue-collar workers are going up. We had that in the first Trump administration, we’re having that now in the second. That’s – that’s where the rubber meets the road. If wages are going up faster than inflation, workers are better off. So that’s number one. If you look at GDP growth, we want to grow more like three-percent real GDP growth a year rather than one-and-a-half to two like we had back in the Obama and Biden years. So that’s another important metric. And, of course, the third leg of that stool is inflation. And we’re seeing inflation continue to come down. I’m happy to report that egg prices are incredibly low today. So, go out and have an omelet on the White House, because Brooke Rollins over at the Ag Department has done a wonderful job bringing those down. And we just had a report, Kayna, from the Council of Economic Advisers, which is in the White House, which showed that the tariffs, since they’ve been imposed, the price of imports in this country have actually gone down, not up, which is a similar kind of experience we had in the first term. So, it is all about the metrics. More jobs, less inflation, higher wages. That’s a great start. And then more broadly, how many new factories are popping up.
WHITMORE: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I want to watch that closely and, of course, we’ll be awaiting this new inflation data out tomorrow. White House Trade Advisor Peter Navarro, thanks for being on with us.
DR. NAVARRO: Thank you. Good to talk to you today.
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