Team,
This is my full interview with Miranda Devine on Pod Force One.
In the interview, I discuss the weaponized injustice perpetrated by the Biden regime and the need to hold those involved accountable.
This includes, among others, Brennan, Clapper, Page, Strzok, Comey, Wray, and Walter Giardina, the disgraced former FBI agent who coordinated my circus arrest at Reagan National Airport and was involved in virtually every attempt to put President Trump in prison.
I write about Giardina in my book I Went to Prison So You Won’t Have To and in my pieces “The New York Times Canonizes a Weaponized FBI Agent,” “At the FBI, the Rotten Apple Doesn’t Fall Far from the Tree,” and “Time to Investigate the FBI Agent Who Tried to Take Down Trump and Me.”
This in-depth article, “Peter Navarro Blasts Leftist ‘Canonization’ of Disgraced Ex-FBI Agent Walter Giardina,” also delves into the — very deep indeed — Deep State background and actions of Giardina.
I look forward to your comments, and please share this.
Peter
TRANSCRIPT
MIRANDA DEVINE: Hello, and welcome back to Pod Force One. I’m Miranda Devine, and joining me today is economist Peter Navarro, President Trump’s Senior Counselor for Trade and Manufacturing.
DEVINE: Peter Navarro, thank you so much for joining Pod Force One.
DR. NAVARRO: My pleasure. Always a pleasure to be with the great Miranda Divine. Love your stuff. And you know this.
DEVINE: Thank you. Likewise. And we are very lucky to be talking to you now, just a few days after the Supreme Court struck a blow to your tariffs, really, that you and Donald Trump designed and that were up until now doing so well. And I know you have a Plan B. What is it?
DR. NAVARRO: We don’t see this as having struck a heavy blow, and we believe that this will actually be a very good thing for the Trump tariff policy, because if you analyze the decision, Miranda, it was very narrow in scope. It did one thing and one thing only. It struck down the use of tariffs under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, IEEPA. So it struck down the IEEPA tariffs in a very narrow way. It didn’t resolve any major questions. And in the process of striking it down, it actually significantly strengthened virtually every other power that the President has been using and can use for tariffs in the future. So, let me just unpack that a little bit. Right now, President Trump is using section 301 for country-specific tariffs. Those are the ones that we imposed, for example, on China back in 2018. And what the U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer is going to be doing and has been doing is steadily adding countries to the 301 investigation. So, that will give us great power to address the problems on a country-by-country basis. So, that will not allow any country to use the striking down of the IEEPA tariffs as a reason to back off from the negotiating table.
DEVINE: Just one question, though. Why did you not use those 301 or whatever number tariffs that you’re talking about? Why did you not use them first? Why use the emergency powers?
DR. NAVARRO: We believe that the law is on our side, was on our side when we used the IEEPA tariffs. It’s a very flexible tool, and we believe that the Supreme Court, there was a good chance of its supporting it. Look, the President thinks, as do I and everybody else on the trade team, that this decision was a bad one. It basically came to the conclusion that these tariffs are taxes, and because of that they struck it down, because Congress has the authority to tax. Well, we don’t see it that way. We didn’t argue it that way. Judge—Justice Kavanaugh, which I think is—he was the smartest one in the room on this, wrote a very eloquent dissent describing how the court was wrong based on the law and based on 200 years of history. So, I think the strategy was perfectly fine. We knew going in that there was a possibility that they would be struck down.
In the meantime, we developed Plan B, but as part of our thinking, I mean, look, again, I want to get back to this point. It’s what the Supreme Court did and did not do. It did strike down the IEEPA tariffs, the emergency tariffs. It did not strike down 232, 301, 122, 338, all the different powers that the President has been delegated by Congress and can use, and we will be using. And the decision itself, because those powers were referenced repeatedly by a number of justices, have been strengthened. So, when we go to court the next time—they always drag us into court—we have the Supreme Court on our side. So, there’s 301 for the countries, 232 for specific commodities. They’re run through the Commerce Department, 301s through the Trade Rep, 232s, we already have them on steel and aluminum, critical minerals, pharmaceuticals. We’re having other investigations on a wide variety of other things. So, we’re going to have that covered. And in the meantime, as we move forward with those powers, the President has put Section 122, which is 150-day global tariff of 15 percent.
DEVINE: So, does that mean, you know, that there are going to be refunds that America’s going to have to pay?
DR. NAVARRO: I can’t do better than the Boss on this one. I mean, he was just, like, unbelievable. It’s like the court, they take so long—so long—to make this decision and they don’t give us any guidance or say anything at all about refunds. And what that is going to entail is years—years of litigation. But I think the important point, Miranda, to understand is that what we saw is how much money tariffs can actually collect. And the importance is how that helps our fiscal situation in the United States. And we learned through that process that the foreigners pay the tariffs, not American consumers. That seems to be a point of dispute with various studies that have been put out, but the data doesn’t reflect the studies. It’s, like, absurd. So, we’re no strangers to bad studies trying to undermine the tariffs and saying consumers pay for them. There’s no evidence in the inflation data of that.
DEVINE: And, was that, I mean, you’re a student of tariffs. You’ve been—as Donald Trump. I mean, Donald Trump I think has been hot on tariffs since the 1980s. And was that something that you anticipated that there would be, contrary to all the experts, there would be no inflation effect?
DR. NAVARRO: Of course. If you just go back in a time machine, when I was in the first Administration, I was there all four years—one of only three people who actually was in the Trump Administration from the campaign to the end—we said going into 2018, when we started putting the tariffs in, the 301s and the 232s on steel and aluminum, that foreigners would bear the largest portion of the burden of the tariffs for the simple reason is that countries like China or Germany are highly dependent on our economy. They’re export-driven, so they can’t afford to lose our business. So, what do they do? They lower their prices, they change things around. It’s a complex adjustment process, but in the end they eat the tariffs. We don’t. And, actually, a good economic theory on this that people ignore in the international trade literature verify this.
So, what happens in 2018, we put tariffs on, and for the next couple of years everybody’s saying there’s going to be a recession, inflation, stagflation, this, that, and the other thing. And all we get is low inflation, robust growth, and a beautiful Trump economy. So, fast forward to this Administration, when we put the tariffs in, we got the same identical people, the same think tanks, the Heritages [Heritage Foundation], the Catos [Cato Institute], the same newspapers, the same trade associations, the Goldman Sachs of this world. It’s like, ‘Oh, it’s going to cause inflation.’ And all we have to do is go back and say, ‘Hey, you were wrong the first time. Why are you going to be right this time?’ And guess what, you haven’t been right.’ So, this is the debate. This is why having a podcast like yours is good, because I just want to remind people that they said the same crap the last time, and it was BS then, but they’re saying [it] now, and it’s BS now.
DEVINE: So, have you ever seen the President waver? He seemed pretty angry the other day after the Supreme Court brought down that decision. He talked about foreign influence on the court. Do you know what he was talking about? Was he talking about China?
DR. NAVARRO: Miranda, there’s a whole diaspora of globalism out there that puts political pressures in many, many ways on our institutions, whether it’s the Supreme Court, Congress, or the White House itself. We know they’re there. China’s a big deal, but there’s also, it’s like the corporate types who offshore want to sell in that have tremendous political power, that lobby and everything like that. I mean, being in the White House, you see these people come by, like, every day. They say, ‘Don’t do the tariffs.’ And then, when you do the tariffs, they say, ‘Well, do them on everybody else. Give us an exclusion or exemption.’ This, that, and the other thing. So, it’s very powerful.
DEVINE: Like, who? Like Apple? Like Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg? Who?
PETER NAVARRO: Individuals, certainly, yeah. But they’ve got the institution behind them. I mean, Tim Cook, I mean he’s the king of evading tariffs, and we let him get away with it in the first term because he promised he would basically bring his iPhone production here or out of China, and he lied through his teeth, and he’s doing it again. Yeah, that’s quite par for the course.
DEVINE: And is manufacturing being brought home significantly? You mentioned iPhone. I think Tim Cook’s opened some sort of a factory here. Is that happening across the board?
DR. NAVARRO: Not with Apple. I mean, they’re going to India and to me that’s not a whole lot better than being in China. But that’s the exception, I think, that proves the rule. I mean, we have, Miranda, I mean, this is like mindboggling: We had 18 trillion dollars of new investment pledged since the tariffs and because of the tariffs. I mean, as President Trump has said, it’s like, you don’t pay the tariffs if you produce here.
DEVINE: But what’s the timeline on that? Because I know, you know, the EU promised I think a trillion dollars worth of investment but, you know, has any of that happened, and what’s the timeline? Are they just going to wait out President Trump?
DR. NAVARRO: Yeah, we’ve had a lot of investment that’s come in. I mean, Japan’s really probably at the head of that pack right now. There’s all sorts of projects going on. EU is problematic because people think about it as the European Union. It’s not really a union. It’s a collection of countries that have different interests economically with respect to trade. And it’s very hard for them to make decisions. I mean, you talk about China, Miranda, it’s like, if you look behind the curtain in the EU, it’s like Germany’s highly export-dependent on China. So it doesn’t want to crack down on them. Greece, I mean China owns their ports. Spain gets a lot of money. I mean, the UK, which is not in the European Union per se but, I mean, it’s like a float. It’s just awash in foreign money. And you’re seeing, as a result of that, the Brits do kind of things that we’re kind of looking at, like, what’s going on here?
DEVINE: Yeah.
DR. NAVARRO: But at the end of the day, that’s why tariffs are important. Because if we don’t get cooperation in deals, they get tariffs. Let me say that again. If we don’t get cooperation and great deals from the other people, they get tariffs. And that’s why this decision was important, not because it struck down one tariff power, but because it strengthened all the other ones. So, this is a work in progress, but I think what we’ve clearly learned from President Trump, his courageous decision to basically impose tariffs as he has, is that they actually work. And the manufacturing thing, like another one of the talking points, the spins, is that the manufacturing’s not coming. We said it would come, it’s not coming Well, but the data now doesn’t reflect that either. What we’re seeing in the data is the green shoots of manufacturing. I mean I’ve described all along the adjustment process. You put the tariffs in, but Rome wasn’t built in a day and a factory wasn’t built in a month.
DEVINE: So, have you got examples of factories that are being built? Like, are there car manufacturers or what sort of things are being brought home?
DR. NAVARRO: I mean, there’s the first new aluminum foundry built. We lost two foundries in the last term. We’ve got steel mills popping all over the place. We’ve got chip production that’s getting towards the construction stage. I mean, it’s just a myriad of things, and it’s showing up. It’s showing up in the Federal Reserve industrial production data. It’s showing up in the durable goods data, and it’s finally showing up in one of my favorite economic indicators, Miranda. It’s called the ISM Manufacturing Index, the Institute of Supply Management Manufacturing Index. And it’s a zero to 100 index, or what they call a diffusion index. And when it’s below 50, then manufacturing is in decline. When it’s above 50, manufacturing is expanding. And it’s been, I think since August of 2022, during the Biden regime, that that index fell below 50. I mean, Biden was just killing our manufacturing—
DEVINE: Yeah.
DR. NAVARRO: —and when we got in, that thing, like, was stubbornly lagging below 50 for many, many months, even as some of these other manufacturing indicators said, no, things are good. Finally, in the last time around, it jumped five points well into above-50 territory.
DEVINE: That is fantastic. So Made in the USA is back. And I wanted to explore that a little more because I think that’s how your interest in tariffs started. You were a professor in California, and tell us about how you started noticing the effect of China coming into the WTO, the World Trade Organization, thanks to Joe Biden, in large part, in 2001. Tell me how you experienced that with your students.
DR. NAVARRO: So we’ll go back in the time capsule, mid-nineties, I’m a macroeconomics professor at a business school in the University of California system. And I’m writing books about these economic indicators. We’re talking, and my whole thing was forecasting the economy and the stock market because, if you can do one, you can do the other, basically. And so, that was it. Just looking at the big picture every day around the world, ‘it’s going to be a recession,’ ‘what’s the inflation rate going to be?’ All that stuff. And about 2003, two years after China joined the World Trade Organization, I noticed that more and more of my students, my masters MBA students in the fully-employed program, were losing their jobs. And I’m thinking, this is weird. I mean, I’m in Orange County, which is one of the most robust counties and places in the country for employment, and it’s like boggling my mind.
But it turns out that a lot of the jobs in Orange County were Pac Rim-facing, Pacific Rim-facing-and-dependent. And as China started invading our markets and drawing more and more of our corporations offshore, not just manufacturing but supply chains, it was affecting the employment prospects. I didn’t know that until I looked into it, so—but I started a research project called the China Price Project. I had all my students for, like, a year working on this stuff. What came out of that was I think the first major economic study of how China was using a mercantilist model to exploit the world, including the United States. And the insight of that China Price Project, in the articles and eventually books I would write about it, was it cut down the myth that China was succeeding simply because of cheap labor. It was much more complex than that.
And in that original study, I had many of the things that we would subsequently identify and talk about in the Trump Administration. The intellectual property theft is a big deal. The government subsidies. The lacks [of] environmental and labor regulations, which would give them an advantage. The currency manipulation. I had this whole model. I did a production cost analysis. And, because of that, then I went and did some more research and out of that came what would be eventually a trilogy of China books, The Coming China Wars in 2006. That’s the one that caught President Trump’s eye back before he was President. And he said it was one of his top 10 books. I found that out, and that’s when we began communicating. I followed that up with the 2011 Death by China book and movie. The movie’s on YouTube free by the way, Death by China. And then, in 2015, I did the third book, Crouching Tiger, which went from the economics to showing how the American people basically are funding the entire military budget of the Chinese through our trade deficit. The numbers are, like, they’re almost identical. Weird. So—
DEVINE: Can I interrupt for one second? Just—
DR. NAVARRO: Yeah, absolutely.
DEVINE: Could you explain, just, with China and their predatory practices, what is ‘mercantilist’? What does that mean, and why did China’s entry into the World Trade Organization create a problem for America and hollow out our manufacturing?
DR. NAVARRO: Well, it created a problem not just for America. It created a problem for the world. Prior to China joining the WTO, it didn’t have what they call PNTR [Permanent Normal Trade Relations]. It wasn’t allowed to have access to our markets in an unfettered way or markets around the world under the World Trade Organization system. And curiously enough, it would be Bill Clinton, a Democrat, who would push for China’s entry into the World Trade [Organization]. It was a total, total betrayal of the Democrat base because that base at the time, which President Trump would subsequently capture, was like blue-collar working folks, union and non-union in factories. And Clinton, if you go to my Death By China movie, there’s some beautiful quotes of Clinton about, ‘It’s going to be a one-way street. We’re just going to sell to them, and everything’s going to be great.’ And it was just the opposite. They cheat. Mercantilism is cheating. It goes back to the doctrine in the 1500s, 1600s, where the whole goal of trade from a country level was to collect as much of the gold around the world as you possibly could, which meant selling stuff but not buying anything from people and doing it in a way where you cheat. So, it’s all about cheating. Mercantilism is a model based on running large trade surpluses with the rest of the world, thinking you’re going to get wealthy.
DEVINE: Joe Biden was very much involved in pushing his Senate colleagues, many of whom were reluctant to, you know, allow China into the World Trade Organization. I understand he was very influential with Bill Clinton as well, and he used to say things like, ‘China won’t eat our lunch.’ In your travels, did you find any evidence or, even circumstantially, or is it your opinion that Joe Biden was somehow compromised by China? Because we saw, you know, during his vice presidency, his family received tens of millions of dollars from Chinese state-owned organizations, and he, himself, as president, went soft on China and unwound some of the measures that you and the Trump Administration first time around brought against China, most particularly about the sort of anti-spying program in universities. It was inexplicable. He unwound that.
DR. NAVARRO: Well, Miranda, your work on this is kind of the gold standard. I mean, you’ve looked at all of this. What I can tell you, and what I wrote about, back in Death by China back in 2011, is that China, one of their strategies, basically, is to identify elites early in countries, not just America, but in countries around the world. They want to identify academic elites, they want to identify the emerging political possible stars, and they want to identify the corporate types. And what they do with the academics is they give you, like, a professorship and an honorary position at one of their universities, shower you in a bunch of money, and you essentially become a ‘friend’ of them. I saw that a lot in the UC [University of California] system. With politicians, trips, speaking opportunities, money, investment opportunities. And that’s what happened with Biden. But it happens to way too many politicians around the world. And—
DEVINE: Eric Swalwell. And Fang Fang.
DR. NAVARRO: Well, Swalwell, Swalwell—look, it’s amazing, A, that he’s still in politics and, B, that he’s gotten to where he is. But he was a typical honeypot victim, right, where some Chinese woman bats her eyelashes at him and seduces him. Next thing you know, it’s pillow talk. He’s spilling his guts and beans about things that are consequential with respect to American national security. And the guy was on one of the most important committees with respect to confidential information on Capitol Hill. I mean, I don’t know how these people don’t get prosecuted and booted out of their positions, but—
DEVINE: Were you concerned about Joe Biden as president that he was going soft on President Xi?
DR. NAVARRO: Well, if you look at my various writings and speeches and press interviews leading into the 2020 election, I frequently raised that topic. I mean, Biden bragged about having more trips and personal visits with Xi of any politician ever that had been in the White House. He was vice president at the time. And look, you put a dumb guy in with a cunning dictator—
DEVINE: Yeah.
DR. NAVARRO: And, I mean, Joe Biden, one of his Shakespearean flaws as it were—hubris—he just—he thought he was more clever and powerful than he was. I mean, he got to the pinnacle, but he never understood—hey Joe, you never understood this, Joe. That these people were just using you as their puppet. And when you got in, you virtually didn’t make any decisions at all. All those decisions got made for you. And they either got signed by the autopen or you signed them yourself. But look, we can agree that the Biden presidency was a disaster on just about every front. I mean, economically, that was arguably the worst presidency in modern history. I mean, he ran the fiscal stimulus on wasteful stuff. He got Jay Powell at the Fed to go along for the ride because he could dangle that reappointment and Powell bit that. From a national security point of view, he did keep the China tariffs. He didn’t dare get rid of those, but he weakened everything else. So, we can agree that he was a terrible president and glad he’s in our rearview mirror. I do wish he and his brother and his son, which you’ve written eloquently about, would be held accountable. But this is what we got.
DEVINE: [PODCAST ADVERTISEMENT]
DEVINE: Talking about being held accountable, you were, you know, patient zero, really, let’s say, on lawfare, or after General Flynn probably. You went to jail. You wrote a book about it. [I Went to Prison So You Won’t Have To.] And that was because of your important work, importance in the White House in the first Trump Administration. And I want to talk about that. But before we do, now there is sort of, you know, a little bit of talk and we are seeing a little bit of movement on grand juries opening up into the likes of John Brennan and James Clapper, Jim Comey. But do you hold any hope that any of them will be held accountable or treated in any way that’s measurable to the way you were treated?
DR. NAVARRO: It’s been disappointing that we have not moved with all due speed to hold these people accountable. I mean, Brennan, Clapper, Page, Strzok, Rubenstein, Comey, all of these people weaponized our justice system. Chris Wray. I mean, that guy is—I mean, the stuff he did is unconscionable. It’s disappointing. I think that the best hope we have now to keep things moving is Chuck Grassley in the Senate. He’s been very good at getting more and more information released. I’ll give you just—Walter Giardina. He was the FBI agent who basically ran that circus arrest out of Reagan Airport that I document in I Went to Prison So You Won’t Have To. He was the guy responsible for me going to prison in many ways. But what we’ve learned subsequent to that is he was involved in virtually every attempt to put not just me behind bars, but Donald Trump as well. And he was the guy that said the Steele Dossier was true, therefore, we can run that whole investigation, and that kind of set things in motion. He’s—go all the way to the other end at Arctic Frost. There’s Crimson River. These people, Miranda, within the FBI, within the Department of Justice, we know who they are.
I just, look—here’s the thing, it’s like, if we don’t hold these people accountable, we know they’re going to do it again. Let me say that again. If we don’t hold them accountable, we know they’re going to do it again. And—
DEVINE: Well, look at Susan Rice. Susan Rice has just warned everybody what will happen to them once Democrats get back into power. Anybody who’s cooperated, any executive, any company who’s cooperated with the Trump Administration, it’s to the gulag.
DR. NAVARRO: That’s the world we live in. And so, you know, the last chapter, even though I published I Went to Prison So You Won’t Have To, the last chapter has not yet been written. I say that because my appeal is ongoing. I served my prison term. There’s no reason for me to do the appeal other than to, what they say in the law, settle good law on the key issues related to my case. My case is a case about whether Congress can subpoena the President or a senior White House official without damaging the Constitution and executive privilege. And for 50 years prior to me being charged, it was the policy of the White House, the Department of Justice, that if a senior White House official got a subpoena, it was our duty to say no because that compromises executive privilege. The Supreme Court has said that executive privilege is absolutely critical to preserving the candor and confidentiality in presidential decisionmaking and therefore keeping presidential decision-making effective and sound. So, my battle is yet to be won. It’s working its way through the appeals court and eventually, most likely, the Supreme Court because the district appeals court in DC is such a cesspool—
DEVINE: Yeah.
DR. NAVARRO: —just to put a fine point on it. But if I lose that case and the Democrats take over in the midterms the House [of Representatives] in 2026, we’re going to run the movie all over again that started in 2018 with the impeachment, impeachment, impeachment, subpoena, subpoena, subpoenas. It’s not good for America.
DEVINE: And jail. Because it wasn’t just you, it was Steve Bannon, as well, who was sent to jail. And this was for contempt of Congress because you refused to testify before Nancy Pelosi’s star chamber, citing executive privilege. But—and that’s what you’re testing. But let’s go to what happened to you at Reagan Airport in Washington, DC. You were there, I think, jetting off to Nashville with your fiancée, Bonnie. Tell us what happened.
DR. NAVARRO: Well, I was on the way simply to go out and do an interview with Mike Huckabee in Nashville, Tennessee. And to set the stage, just by a curious twist of fate, the apartment I was living in in DC at the time is literally 50 yards away from the FBI. 50 yards away. So, what we’ve learned because of Chuck Grassley getting documents that had to be released is that, on the day of my arrest, they had 20 FBI agents monitoring my movements. You know, it’s like, ‘Navarro has just left his apartment with his fiancée. Navarro is now getting in an Uber. Navarro is now approaching.’ Anyway, I got to the airport, Miranda, I was like—I was like looking around, because I always do. And it was like I’m seeing these people. It’s like, ‘Hmm…it looks—it’s supposed to be a janitor. I’m not sure it is.’ So, they were, like, heavily surveilling me, and they waited until Bonnie and I got inside the gangway. That’s where you kind of get between where they take your ticket and that space where you walk into the door of the aircraft. It’s a very narrow, confined space. So I’m—Bonnie and I walk in after giving our tickets. We got three armed agents coming behind me. There’s another three coming at me from the plane itself.
And, it’s like, I looked at her, she—I said, ‘Honey, just relax here.’ Okay? And it’s just, like—and I looked at these guys, you’ve got to be kidding. It’s like, what is—what are they—it was a circus arrest. And I asked to make a phone call and they wouldn’t let me make a phone call. They wouldn’t make let me a phone call. I asked them twice. They took my phone, they’re supposed to allow me things. And I wind up going back, essentially, past my apartment, and I wind up [in] leg irons in the same cell that, according to the guards who took great glee in telling me this, that John Hinckley sat in after he shot Reagan. I don’t know what the moral equivalence was with my case or whatever—
DEVINE: Peter, did they handcuff you at the airport and put you in shackles and perp walk you?
DR. NAVARRO: Yeah, they put handcuffs, put ’em behind your back, and they cram you into this little car so your shoulders hurt.
DEVINE: And walked you through the airport like that?
DR. NAVARRO: No. The perp walk was more for Bonnie. I felt so bad for her. I mean, imagine going with your fiancé on what was going to be one of the funnest trips you’re going to have and winding up seeing your fiancé dragged away in handcuffs and you escorted out through the terminal surrounded by FBI agents with everybody looking at you. I mean—
DEVINE: So she was perp walked. How outrageous. How dare they?
DR. NAVARRO: She was perp walked. Yeah.
DEVINE: How outrageous. How dare they?
DR. NAVARRO: That’s the thing. It’s like, you know, like, I view what we do here as essentially similar to soldiering. Well, it’s not quite as dangerous by a long shot. But—so it comes with the territory. But when they did that to her, that was like—that was a bridge too far. And this is why, going back to your original question, why not holding these people accountable is very disappointing. I mean, Giardina should have been subpoenaed by now and he should have been indicted. There’s a whole bunch of people we know. I still want to know, and I’m working on this, how high the approval went up the chain to take me down at the airport instead of— Look, it’s a misdemeanor. I’m a nonviolent guy. No guns in my wall. And what normally happens in these kind of white-collar misdemeanor things is they call you up and say, ‘Hey, we got a warrant for your arrest. Go report down to the court.’
DEVINE: Well, like they did with Jim Comey. Jim Comey was allowed to do that.
DR. NAVARRO: Yeah, I know. I know. Yeah. How dare they? I mean, yeah. And that was us. We let Comey—come on. It’s like, no, I’m not happy with that. The Boss is not happy with that, and we should be moving faster and stronger on that. But on the other hand, the Department of Justice has got a lot on its plate. But this is important. I mean, if we allow them to weaponize the justice system. It drives me batties. When you hear the Democrats use the talking point that we are weaponizing the justice system. Hey, wait a minute, they put me in prison. They tried to put Donald Trump in prison for 700 years.
DEVINE: They raided Mar-a-Lago, they rifled through his wife’s underwear drawer. They locked up all those January 6 people without trial for years on end, they raided Roger Stone’s house at dawn, they raided all those pro-abortion—sorry, anti-abortion activists, you know, Christians who just prayed outside abortion clinics. What will they do next time?
DR. NAVARRO: And don’t forget, Jeff Clark and John Eastman.
DEVINE: Yeah.
DR. NAVARRO: I mean, Jeff Clark, they went to his house and held him outside his house with his young daughters while they rifled his house. They’re trying to take the bar cards of Clark and Eastman. I mean, look, Miranda, everybody I served with— everybody I served with in the first Trump term—was attacked in some way. And it cost them some things, whether it was simply, I don’t know, 20, 30,000-worth of legal bills in the least case to losing their bar card or worse, or going bankrupt like Rudy.
DEVINE: Rudy Giuliani. Yeah.
DR. NAVARRO: It’s what they do. And, you know—I’m disappointed we’re letting them get away with it. And it’s kind of not the way I would roll, but it is what it is.
DEVINE: It is what it is. So, Peter, can we just go back to your origin story? So, you grew up poor, I think you’ve said, and your father was a musician, and your mother was a secretary, and they split up when you were young. Tell us about how that impacted you and what your family was like.
DR. NAVARRO: I think there’s—I mean, moving from childhood to adulthood is perilous. I think it’s even more perilous today with all of the social media and iPhones and this, that, and the other thing. And I grew up, curiously enough, not far from Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. When my parents got divorced, we had to come down there because my father was playing—he had a band—for the rich of Palm Beach, and he’d go down to Miami and play at the Fountain Blue in Eden Rock, if you know those classic places, and stuff like that.
DEVINE: And what did he play?
DR. NAVARRO: He played clarinet and saxophone. He was the leader of the band. He had a drummer, a bass, sometimes a piano, sometimes a singer. He played the big band, kind of Glenn Miller style. And it was a vagabond existence until my parents got divorced. We’d go, for example, up north to New Hampshire, play at—you know, this is kind of funny. The Mount Washington Hotel where the Bretton Woods Accord was negotiated. I spent a whole summer there with my family. My mom ran the gift shop and my dad had the band, played every night. My brother was a caddy. So—but, I think, to your question, I think it can go one of two ways when you’re young and poor and you’re living with a single-family mom who—single-parent mom—who has to work very hard just to put bread on the table. It can go either very wrong or okay. And I think, in my case, I was blessed to have the experience strengthen me. I had a little help along the way for a couple of years. There was a guy, Gus Broberg, who was a father of my best friend here in Palm Beach where it was, and he kind of took me under his wing and stuff like that. But, you know, I was on my own essentially from about the age of 13 or 14, cooked a lot of my meals, learned how to take care of myself, and it seemed to work out okay. Although the people who love to criticize me would argue to the contrary.
DEVINE: Peter, it’s so interesting you say that because I’ve now interviewed lots of members of the Administration, and what struck me after about the seventh interview, with similar experiences that you are just recounting of a traumatic incident that happened when they 12, 13, quite young. You know, whether it’s a father dying or, in Mike Johnson’s case, a father getting burned and becoming an invalid who was a firefighter. Doug Burgum’s father was killed, Kristi Noem’s, you name it. They’ve had a traumatic experience at that age. And, like Scott Bessent’s family went completely bust from being very wealthy, and the parents split up. And so that experience, as you say, seems to have strengthened all of you and made you uniquely equipped to work for Donald Trump, also a very resilient character, and taking in all kinds of incoming. Do you see that with your fellow soldiers in the Trump administration Mark 2 [version 2]?
DR. NAVARRO: I think there’s a difference between some of the cabinet folks and some of the folks in the White House. I mean, I’ll be honest with you, Miranda, most of the people that I’ve been with in the White House have been very wealthy people. They’re there because they’re really smart people, and the measure of their smartness is often like their net worth and stuff like that.
DEVINE: But Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick are very wealthy, but they both suffered great adversity in childhood like you did.
DR. NAVARRO: Yeah, I wasn’t aware of that. And it’s really—I ought to have that talk with Scotty and Howard at some point, just—I mean with Howard, too, I mean the tragedy 9/11 really has shaped his public interest and worldview as well. But, I mean, look, I’ve been there. I was there in the first term, Miranda. Now in the second term, I could tell you that everything’s infinitely better from a personnel point of view. We had just so many rocky roads in the first term. I mean, Tillerson at State, Mattis at Defense, four really bad chiefs-of-staff. Susie Wiles is amazing, but it’s like fifth time’s the charm, I guess. But, you know, the trade team really works well together and leverages each of their comparative advantages. I mean, Jamieson at USTR, I mean, he really, really knows his stuff and learned his craft out in the private sector coming in, so he knows how to do that, and then he learned at the knee of Lighthizer as his top deputy for four years. Howard, I’ve really come to love that guy. He listens well and learns at the speed of light, and he was willing to hear about my experiences in the first time to help shape things better. I know Scott, and Scott published my first Trump book, In Trump Time. I got to know him well and, I mean, he’s really good. He’s really good with the media. He sees the big picture. And Hassett is the National Economic Council Director. He doesn’t get involved a lot in trade, but there’s a lot of issues tangential to trade and manufacturing, which is kind of what I do. And then the cabinet, I mean, it’s a great cabinet. It wasn’t the last time. The Boss had to fire half the cabinet before he got it right. And it wasn’t, I mean, look, of course it was the buck stops with his decisions, but he was just getting really bad advice when he first got elected in the transition because of who was on the side of that. But the Boss learned who to trust and who not to trust, and it really shows now.
DEVINE: And does he have a no-scalps rule now where he’s not going to be bullied or threatened by the media, et cetera, into firing people that they don’t like?
DR. NAVARRO: I think it’s the Rhett Butler thing when it comes to the Fake News, ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.’ Right? He couldn’t care less what the Fake News says. And so no, nobody’s going to force him to fire somebody that he wants to stand by. And by the way, Miranda, I mean, it’s just a fact, the first time you lose somebody because [of] political pressure, that just opens the door to a lot more.
DEVINE: Yeah.
DR. NAVARRO: I mean, Pam’s doing a great job, but I do think we could have and should have held on for [Matt] Gaetz just to see how that played out a little bit more. But I think that kind of steeled our resolve that, 'Okay, they did that once, they’re not doing that’ They’re not doing that to Hegseth, I mean, they really threw everything—
DEVINE: Yeah.
DR. NAVARRO: —they had at Pete, and he’s turned out to be great. Gave Bobby [Kennedy] a hard time. You know, but no, the Boss is going to stick by his choices, and he’s not going to let the media—
DEVINE: And how do you see things going into the midterms? It seems that the Democrats have coined this new meme ‘affordability,’ even though it was them that created the inaffordability. But do you think that’s going to be the reigning theme or is it going to be the border, immigration? What’s going to be the driving force that will allow Trump to prevail again, the Republicans to win the midterms?
DR. NAVARRO: Affordability—I’ve said this many times, I’ll say it again to you here. If the Democrats want to fight the battle on the affordability grounds, bring it on. And I say that for a couple of reasons. First of all, many American people understand now, and many more will before the midterms happen, that the Democrats caused the affordability crisis. Full stop. If you just go and look at, for example, their fiscal irresponsibility and then the Fed accommodating that, that alone was responsible for a lot of the demand-side inflation that we observed. Now, at the same time, they created a lot of supply-side inflation, meaning that, for example, with beef right now, beef is very expensive, hamburger steak, very expensive. And the Biden regime did stuff like sharply restrict grazing for cattle. What does that do? That restricts the amount of heifers that they’ll breed. And it led to, in some cases, early slaughter of the heifers. And that’s—
DEVINE: Sorry, was that—excuse me, was that because they limited grazing for greeny reasons. They didn’t—they thought cattle hurt the—they wanted just wilderness or something?
DR. NAVARRO: Yes, it might be a little fraternity-brother ‘gross,’ as the cow fart thing.
DEVINE: Oh, right.
DR. NAVARRO: It’s like a whole green thing. It’s like—it was like the war on beef. I mean the Democrats—
DEVINE: Yeah.
DR. NAVARRO: They want people to eat soy to save the planet. That was kind of the thing. And policies followed from that. And that gets to the point of, who was signing those executive orders? I mean, how does that do? But like, they took, I think it’s something like 25,000 acres of grazing land out. Right? And then, let’s think about this, Miranda. Their whole war on oil and natural gas, right? They’re running 75-, 80-dollar-a-barrel oil during the year. It doesn’t just drive up the price of gasoline. It doesn’t just drive up the price of heating oil for your home. It drives up the price of food. Why? Because natural gas is one of the most important inputs you have for what? Fertilizer. And then you’re trying to transport food, you know, from slaughterhouse to supermarket, right? And it’s like gas prices are going up. So, my point is back to the affordability battle. Democrats caused the affordability crisis. Full stop.
And then, secondly, I think the polls reflect this. People understand that Donald Trump, even if you criticize him, even if you think he’s not doing a good job, you still think the Democrats will do a worse job. That’s a really important point. Okay? I mean it just—let’s say Donald Trump has a lower rating on the economy or inflation than he had when he took office. Right? That doesn’t mean that he’s going to lose on that issue if the Democrats have a substantially lower approval rating, which they do. And here’s the best thing. It’s like, by the time we get to November, things are going to be really, really good in this country unless we have some kind of geopolitical shock. Okay? Why do I say that? Well, if you look at, you know, I told you earlier manufacturing is recovering sharply. We are seeing the inflation rate steadily fall down towards the Fed target at two percent. We’re seeing the mortgage rates come down and may soon break the six-percent threshold, which would open up those markets in April. We’re going to see the biggest tax rebates in American history. People are going to be really, really happy about that. So, if they want to argue on affordability and the economy, that might’ve looked pretty good two months ago, but I think by September or October it’s not even going to be close. The border’s interesting. It’s like, it was a big issue during the campaign, but the perception now among people is that we solved that problem. So, it’s not kind of high up on their priorities. What we have to do from a message point of view is make the case that if we don’t continue strongly with our deportations, then that will be tremendously harmful to the American people in terms of the kind of crime that they’ll be victims of.
I did an op-ed the other day which calculated the cost of not deporting the 20 million illegals that came in, and it was a 50,000 body count, essentially. 50,000 Americans victimized.
DEVINE: From what?
DR. NAVARRO: And the way you analyze that as an economist is you ask yourself the question, what is likely to happen with 20 million illegal aliens in the country when you add those to the population? You’re adding them to the population. We all agree that that happened. Okay? So, what you can do is you can go look at the studies that have been done that calculate the percentage of that 20 million which will commit a murder, commit a rape, burglarize your home, get involved in some kind of drug trafficking. And so that’s what I did. I did that analysis. And I came up on the order of 800 Americans will likely be murdered if we don’t deport those 20 million, 2,000—2,000 women will be sexually assaulted if we don’t deport. 8,000 homes will be burgled. And something like 20,000—it’s just astonishing amount of drug-related, cartel-related crimes will be committed if we don’t do that. And—
DEVINE: That’s a great metric. Did you count welfare fraud?
DR. NAVARRO: Well, that’s—look, that’s just the crime. Okay? We can go and do all, you know, the economics of that. Like, the Democrats always argue that the illegals contribute more than they take economically, but the statistics don’t really bear that out. I mean, sure, the males come in, mostly, and they work and they pay taxes and things like that, but you’ve got them drawing on our hospital systems, our food stamps, or this or that. And it’s—when you bring in poorly educated illegal immigrants, it’s unlikely that they’re going to be a net positive economically.
DEVINE: Republicans are also behind the pressure on Donald Trump to—and corporate interests—to throttle back his deportations. And that’s because I think they see illegal migrants as cheap labor. But can you explain that it’s not really cheap labor because the taxpayer is subsidizing those companies that are paying these slave wages?
DR. NAVARRO: Yeah. Well, let’s start with the redistributional aspect of illegal immigration, because the people who get hurt the most in this country economically, Americans, are the lower-income blue-collar workers who will lose their jobs to illegal aliens and see downward pressure on their wages. Okay? The wages might not go down in absolute terms, but they certainly won’t go up. So, there’s that impact in and of itself. And when you—we saw in the incredible statistics from the government during the Biden years, you saw American citizens having a net job loss in the final year of the Biden administration. Think about that. Even as the foreigners had a net increase of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of jobs. I mean, that’s insanity. So, then you’ve got the whole problem of the chain migration. People come in, the children, the mothers, the grandmothers, this, that, and the other thing. And it’s like food stamp city. It’s like rent subsidy city. It’s like going to the emergency room instead of the hospitals because you don’t have insurance. And who pays for that? The federal government. So, look, we’re a nation of immigrants, but if you’re going to have an immigration policy, like countries around the world do, you certainly should have that policy, make sure that immigration is a net positive. And not just by a little bit, Miranda. By a lot. But we haven’t been doing that, and that’s changed with Donald Trump.
DEVINE: Do you think that he will continue despite all the protests—anti-ICE protests and the sinking of his poll numbers and pressure from people to tell him to take it down a notch and withdrawing from Minnesota?
DR. NAVARRO: Interestingly enough, Miranda, the polls that I’ve seen say that the American people by a significant majority still support the mass deportations, full stop. Full stop. The issue now is how those deportations are being handled by ICE. And you know, you have the individual faces problem. You had two people tragically die in Minneapolis. One was a woman who weaponized a vehicle against an ICE agent, okay, and paid the consequences. I mean, it was tragic, but let’s not portray her as an innocent victim. She was engaged in activity designed to provoke. And the other guy, Prettiman I think was his name—Pretti—
DEVINE: Alex Pretti.
DR. NAVARRO: That guy, you looked at his behavior. I mean, that guy was a borderline lunatic. I mean, he was kicking doors and lights and things like that. And he’s walking around with a gun and stuff happens. Okay, it’s tragic. But for every one of those, and there’s two of them that they’re throwing in our face, you’ve got the Laken Riley examples—
DEVINE: Yeah.
DR. NAVARRO: —and there’s just a bunch of them. And that op-ed I did the other day—names. Names. So, they got their victims, but we’ve got a lot more than they do. So, it’s just a question of getting the messaging right in politics. And as the Boss says, let’s see what happens. But there’s no way we’re going to stop deporting illegals, and the way the policy’s been going, we’re targeting the violent criminals first. And who can argue with that?
DEVINE: We’re coming close to time, but I didn’t want to let you go without just delving a little bit more into your background, your childhood. Are you musical like your dad? Did you take after him in any way?
DR. NAVARRO: I’m so pissed off, like, I didn’t really get much of his musical talent. It really— I did play, I was in the Peace Corps, a little more personal stuff. I was in the Peace Corps out in—literally in the far reaches boondocks of Thailand, and the teacher training college where I was had a band. It was like a 26-piece band, traveling band. We were like the entertainment for the whole province. We’d go place to place to place and play. And there was, like, the traditional Thai music that they’d have. Then they’d have the modern-time music, which was an offshoot of, like, American kind of fifties-kind-of-style music. And then they had a little rock combo band, which I was in. Right? And I played rhythm guitar—
DEVINE: Oh really?
DR. NAVARRO: I just wasn’t very good. But they relied on me to, like, translate the lyrics, to teach them the lyrics and stuff like that. But—
DEVINE: Did your dad teach you how to play?
DR. NAVARRO: No, my dad ruined my musical career. Like, one day he comes home and I’m like eight years old, and he hands me this book that would probably be like the first year of graduate school at Berklee School of Music. Right? And I’m looking at it, and it just totally defeated me. So, no, I—the only creative thing I got, and I don’t know if I got it from—was writing. Stuff like that.
DEVINE: And have you talked to Donald Trump, who’s a great music aficionado? Do you talk to him about music at all?
DR. NAVARRO: Never. No.
DEVINE: Never.
DR. NAVARRO: I listened to his playlist. We’ve never had that conversation.
DEVINE: He played the flute when he was a child.
DR. NAVARRO: I did not know that.
DEVINE: Yeah.
DR. NAVARRO: Brilliant. That’s genius. I’ll have to mention that to him.
MIRANDA DEVINE: Yeah.
DR. NAVARRO: That’s interesting. The flute.
DEVINE: And apparently he’s a musical genius. He was tested when he was a child. And your mother must have been quite remarkable. As you said, she was working, she was a single mom, and yet you obviously were not goofing off. You were studying hard because you ended up at Harvard doing a PhD. What kind of a child were you? Were you a swot [a British and Australian slang term meaning “nerd”]? Were you sporty?
DR. NAVARRO: So, when my parents got divorced, it was like in elementary school in Palm Beach. You know, they had the private school with the rich kids and the public school for us peons who service the rich and stuff like that. But I think I spent a lot of time at the library reading. And when I wasn’t doing that, I was on the ballfield. So, you know, I played them all. Football, baseball, basketball. But, you know, look, the guy I mentioned earlier, Gus Broberg, he’s a story in and of himself. He was All-American at Dartmouth in basketball and baseball. He signed with the New York Yankees coming out of Dartmouth. But this little pesky thing called World War II got in the way, and he wound up flying fighter jets in the Japanese theater. And on one of those nameless islands out there, he crashed and lost his arm. And that was the end of his baseball career. Goes to law school, becomes a partner in a law firm down on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach. And his son, Peter, his name was Peter too, was my best friend for that brief period of time while I was still in Palm Beach. He actually became a Major League pitcher, pitched in the majors for about 10 years. Pete Broberg, you can look that up. But, you know, it’s like sports and reading, and I was always pretty quick in the classroom. I never had to do homework at night becauseI did it all while I was in class, kind of stuff like that. It’s kind of a stupid thing to do when I think about it. But—
DEVINE: And why did you join the Peace Corps?
DR. NAVARRO: It was a difficult time in this country. It’s the Vietnam era. I got a high lottery number, so I wasn’t draft-eligible. My brother was in the Navy. I wanted to do two things. I wanted to just do something in the public interest and get out of the country at the time to just get a different worldview of kind of what the world was all about. And, you know, I think they say this often, that the Peace Corps does more for the volunteer than the people that you serve. My big accomplishments there, by the way, was, you know, I taught, kind of that was my day job, but my real passion there was building these big fish ponds. Like, I’m not talking about little ponds, I’m talking about big ponds to feed people. Right? And so did a little bit of that there and kind of learned about the world from a different point of view. Came back with a world view to this country rather than just a parochial view. I think Americans sometimes have too parochial a view of things. And it’s served me well in the White House.
DEVINE: And when you were there in Thailand, I think that was when you first noticed the sort of malign influence of China.
DR. NAVARRO: Yeah, it’s interesting. Thailand has like a holiday every other day. I mean, so I had a lot of chance to travel to some other countries, and there’s a gigantic Chinese diaspora around Southeast Asia where China folks left the Mao starvation, this, that, and the other thing. But a lot of these countries, they’re very, very resentful of the Chinese, because the Chinese are able through their ways—hardworking and other whatever, to gain control of the business apparatus of countries. And they were actually thrown out of Burma, completely in Thailand. They were restricted heavily in terms of what kind of occupations they do. So, it’s like you saw both sides—both sides of the fence. But it gives you kind of a sense of how Asia has all these crosscurrents and things like that.
DEVINE: Imagine if the enterprise and energy of the Chinese people was able to be fully utilized in their country rather than being under the yoke of the dictatorship.
DR. NAVARRO: Yeah, I’ve always had this belief that the worst thing that can happen to totalitarian countries is to have the smartest and most oppressed people leave. Because then there’s nobody to fight back. And I think that that was—that’s been part of the problem in China. The ones who were able, who have been able to get out historically have often been the ones who would’ve been better to have on the inside doing free market stuff. I mean, the whole thing, Miranda, on a very serious note, the whole idea of getting China into the World Trade Organization was this now-quaint belief that from economic prosperity would naturally come democracy. And there’s a whole theory on that. That was like the theory of the case for letting China into the WTO. And by the way it worked with Korea. It worked with Japan. The idea is, like, as you get a prosperous middle class, then they’ll clamor for expression in the political system and democracy will follow. But with China, just the opposite happened. What they did was establish, like, this devil’s bargain between the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese people that, like, if you keep your mouth shut and are good boys and girls, we’ll make you rich. And because of that, we’ve got a very, very small handful of inhumane humanity running a country of 1.4 billion people in a godless way, which creates all sorts of problems with morality and ethics.
I mean, a lot of the stuff they do, these businesspeople, you know, they send melamine animal feed here, wind up killing, like, tens of thousands of American pets to make a buck. I mean, how do you do that? How do you as a human being do that? They do it. I mean, there’s stuff—what scares me—
DEVINE: Organ harvesting.
DR. NAVARRO: —and I’m cracking down on this. It’s very serious. Working again with Customs and Border [Protection]. There’s just a highly disproportionate percentage of products that come in from China that can hurt, kill or cheat you. And that’s one of the things that at some point I hope we can stop.
DEVINE: Just last—second-to-last question, President Trump is going to visit President Xi shortly in China. What do you hope will come out of that meeting? And, you know, President Trump always says he has a very good relationship with President Xi, calls him a brilliant man. How do you think that relationship is going to go, and can America really fully decouple itself from Chinese control over such things as rare earth and antibiotics, et cetera?
DR. NAVARRO: If we know anything about President Trump, he thinks it’s better to meet with world leaders than not. Full stop. And it’s better to meet with the world leaders, particularly who are the most powerful in the world, just to keep the peace. And he’s trying to—he’s got a lot of balls in the air. He’s trying to solve the war in Ukraine with Russia, and China has a lot to do with that as they do with Iran and Gaza, this, that, and the like. So, as the Boss says, let’s see what happens. Let’s remember that we are tough on China and we have high tariffs on China.
DEVINE: What the tariffs now on China?
DR. NAVARRO: Well, we have the 301 tariffs, we have the 232s on steel and aluminum. We’re working on 232s that have to do with pharmaceuticals and critical minerals, which is the rare earth stuff.
DEVINE: So is it like, what, 45 percent?
DR. NAVARRO: Yeah. Well, the last count, it was close to 50 percent.
DEVINE: 50 percent, right. That’s big.
DR. NAVARRO: I want to give you some good news, and maybe we’ll end with this. I think that communist China, which is what it is, made a huge strategic error in holding not just the United States, but the world hostage to rare earths under the assumption that not only did it have a quasi-monopoly in rare earths, but that it could hold onto it. And I can tell you from the front lines that American innovation is moving literally at the speed of light to take away that advantage. And what we’re learning and what the Chinese will learn from this is that whenever they put that kind of pressure on the American people and American entrepreneurs, and in rare earth’s case, the peoples of the world, we are able to respond very, very quickly in innovative ways, which I think in the case of rare earths and critical minerals will prevent them from doing what they’ve been doing in that space, which is dumping materials into our markets to make sure that no producers come up. That’s not going to happen. So—
DEVINE: How long before we are free of their monopoly?
DR. NAVARRO: Well, we’re moving really fast now, and I would say you can measure that in months rather than years. But as I say, let’s see what happens. I think the point I’m trying to make here, Miranda, is that when China acts like a bully in that fashion, it basically unleashes our innovation and potential. And in today’s tech world, we’re able to move far faster than, say, 10 or 20 years ago. So we’ve got to make progress on pharmaceuticals. That’s one of our vulnerabilities. They know it. We know it. We’re moving on that. On all, not just rare earth, but all critical minerals and so on. Chips. Chips—this is a complex world. I could just tell the American people, they’re blessed to have Donald Trump running the show now because this—the challenges we’re facing at this point in time are more complex than perhaps any other point in time, given the emergence of AI and the way the international financial system is, the trading system, and you’re going to have to have visionaries like Donald Trump at the wheel rather than a guy like Biden asleep at the wheel.
DEVINE: True grit. Peter, from people like you. I see you guys at the Trump administration as being like the USA hockey team. Just, you know, grit and fortitude and your teeth broken and bloodied, but you’re still smiling. So fantastic. One last question. You’ve seen a lot of successful people. You are successful. What do you think is the one thing that is the secret of success?
DR. NAVARRO: I think it’s to stay on mission. I have this conversation with people not infrequently in the White House. It’s very easy to get distracted by the news of the day or some of the perks of office and this, that, and the other thing. But I just—if you know where you need to go, then you can’t let yourself be detoured from that. You have to get there in order to achieve the mission. So, just stay focused on the mission, but let all the stuff flying around you just fly around you without it bothering you.
DEVINE: Terrific. Thanks so much Peter. Navarro, great talking to you.
DR. NAVARRO: I just love what you do. You’re a true voice in the wilderness of the Fake News out there, and Bonnie loves reading the [New York] Post, by the way. Your column and Page Six.
DEVINE: Terrific. Thanks so much.
DR. NAVARRO: All right, you take care. Bye bye.
