Team,
This is Part 2 of my interview with Miranda Devine on the Pod Force One podcast.
In this portion of the podcast, I discuss affordability, deportations, and why the Republicans will win the upcoming midterm elections.
If the Democrats want to fight a battle on their “affordability” scam, many Americans already understand—and many more will understand before November—that the Democrats caused inflation, and that President Trump is solving it.
Trumpnomics has produced a sharp manufacturing recovery, the inflation rate has steadily fallen toward the Fed target of two percent, and mortgage rates have dropped below the six-percent threshold.
A major contributor to inflation during the Biden years was the Biden regime’s policy of open borders flooding the country with millions of illegal immigrants. Illegal immigration was a big issue during the 2024 campaign, but the perception now among Americans is that the Trump Administration has solved that problem, with deportations ongoing as we continue to defend our borders.
In the podcast, I also answer questions about my childhood, my parents, and my experience in the Peace Corps.
A story that came up during the interview is that a childhood best friend, Pete Broberg, went on to pitch in the major leagues for the Rangers, Brewers, Cubs, and Athletics. Pete’s father, Gus Broberg, was an All-American basketball player at Dartmouth who signed with the New York Yankees to play baseball. But Gus graduated into World War II, served as a Marine fighter pilot, and lost his right arm in the Pacific Theater before going on to become a partner at a law firm in Palm Beach. Pete and Gus are stories in and of themselves.
And in Thailand, during my service in the Peace Corps, I played rhythm guitar in a rock band at Sakon Nakhon Teachers’ College that toured the province. That was when I wasn’t teaching at the college and building tilapia fish ponds the size of football fields to feed the locals. I didn’t fully inherit my father’s musical talent (my father was the leader of Al Navarro and His Society Orchestra, and he released multiple albums, including with Kapp Records), but writing is a creative gift.
I always enjoy reading your comments, and please be sure to share with family and friends.
Peter
TRANSCRIPT:
MIRANDA DEVINE [IMMEDIATELY PRIOR TO VIDEO CLIP BEGINNING]: 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?
[CLIP BEGINS]
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.
