Team,
In this interview with Bloomberg, I talk tariffs, fair trade, and the Trumpnomics engines driving economic growth.
And I call out JPMorgan head Jamie Dimon for charging Americans unconscionably high credit card interest rates.
Looking forward to your comments, and please share this with a friend.
Peter
TRANSCRIPT
DR. NAVARRO: McKinley, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln, Alexander Hamilton, these are like the four people on the Mount Rushmore of American tariffs. And we are not in any pivot away from that. We are fully embracing a structural shift engineered by Donald Trump in the entire international global trading system in a way which will make that system better and more prosperous. The problem we’ve had, Tom, is under the rules, the very rules, of the World Trade Organization, specifically the Most Favored Nation Rule, every other nation in the world has had a license to cheat us through higher tariffs, higher non-tariff barriers, and the cost, particularly after NAFTA and China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 —
TOM KEENE: Right.
DR. NAVARRO: — has been in the hundred thousands of factories and millions of jobs —
KEENE: Well — right.
DR. NAVARRO: — and we are reversing that. And you can see, 50,000 on the Dow, which I predicted in April, is a verification of Trumpnomics.
KEENE: Okay, I’m going to give you – either you or Kevin Hassett, I’m going to give credit for that. Peter Navarro, we’re going to with you on this sequence here. You mentioned the follow-on from NAFTA. I spoke to our Josh Wingrove this morning, and he made really clear, what we need to know, is the President actually thinking about moving away from our trade agreements with Mexico and Canada. Have you heard the President say ‘I want out of NAFTA and everything that followed it’?
DR. NAVARRO: Tom, I’m one of three people — Stephen Miller, Dan Scavino being the other two — who was with the President from the 2016 campaign through all four years of the first term, and the reason why that happened, among other things, is I never get ahead of the President. I can tell you this, that USMCA has some significant flaws in it and it’s going to be reevaluated in July. The great Jamieson Greer, our U.S. Trade Representative, will be taking the lead on that. But nothing ever happens in the White House without the Commander-in-Chief, particularly on trade. So, as the Boss says, let’s see what happens. But we’re in a situation — one of the things, you know, I’m the Senior Counselor for Trade and Manufacturing, and one of the things that’s really troubling right now and should be troubling to the American people is that Mexico and to an extent Canada are basically being used as staging areas for countries like China, some of the European countries, some of the Asian countries, Japan, Korea.
KEENE: Right.
DR. NAVARRO: They come into Mexico —
KEENE: Right.
DR. NAVARRO: — and they leverage NAFTA and now USMCA to get into our markets in a way which essentially is tariff avoidance at best and tariff evasion at worst. So, we’re going to have to deal with that, Tom.
KEENE: Across the nation and worldwide, Peter Navarro with us with the Trump Administration. Our Paul Sweeney with Dr. Navarro.
PAUL SWEENEY: Mr. Navarro, I guess last night we saw in the House of Representatives, they voted to end some of the President’s tariff agenda against Canada. Did they overstep their bounds? What is the response of the administration?
DR. NAVARRO: Well, I think it’s highly ironic, Paul, that the Democrat party is opposing tariffs on behalf of working-class Americans, when it was the Democrat party which is supposed to be the party of the working class. Simply because they hate Donald Trump, now they’re anti-tariff. I think the bigger story is the shame on the three Republicans who defected, although Thomas Massie, I don’t consider him of the party anymore.
KEENE: Be nice.
DR. NAVARRO: I’m being nice. I’m just telling it like it is. It’s like Nancy Pelosi — hang on, let me give a compliment to the Democrats here.
KEENE: Please.
DR. NAVARRO: The Democrats hold ranks and we don’t. And we’ve got to stop not holding ranks, sir. Because —
KEENE: Right. Okay, Peter —
DR. NAVARRO: — it’s very harmful to the party and to this country when we have that kind of thing going on.
KEENE: Okay, Peter, well said, but let’s give two examples right now. Tom Barrett, who’s the congressman from Lansing, Michigan, he’s got two GM factories up here, his Republican working-class constituents who President Trump stole from the Democrats, Tom Barrett is going to fight for his life in that congressional district in Lansing, Michigan. What do you need to do to get Tom Barrett reelected?
DR. NAVARRO: Well, okay, so that’s a bigger conversation. I can tell you this: the stakes have never been higher in a midterm Congressional election. If we lose the House in [2026], we will see a repeat of the impeachment circus craziness that we saw beginning in 2018 that really was tremendously harmful. The Democrats, they hate Trump more than they love this country as Corey Lewandowski once said. And our strategy now, look — they’re coming at us on affordability, number one. We are turning that around as we speak. We’re taking our micro approach to the macro problem, inflation. We’re taking it cow by cow, fish by fish, gallon by gallon, and nothing is more important to the President than strong growth in a deflationary environment. Following of the four pillars of Trumpnomics: tax cuts, we’ve got strategic energy dominance, we’ve got deregulation and, of course, fair trade. So, we’re going to, first of all, address the affordability crisis. We’re making great progress on that. The border issue remains troublesome. I’ve got a piece out in a rival network —
SWEENEY: Yep.
DR. NAVARRO: — thing today that does the body count when you let millions of illegal aliens into this country. I mean, we lost two Americans in Minneapolis because of what was going on there. But by my calculations, tens of thousands of Americans are going to be either murdered, burgled, raped, or assaulted —
KEENE: Right.
DR. NAVARRO: — by the illegal aliens unless we deport them. So that’s going to be an important issue.
SWEENEY: So Peter, I guess on that bounce here, one of the things we saw, we saw a very strong jobs report yesterday, but a lot of economists will say this is an economy that is kind of slow hiring or no hiring, but slow or no cuts in jobs, it’s just kind of hanging out there. If you want this economy to grow, many economists would argue you need a larger workforce.
DR. NAVARRO: Hang on.
SWEENEY: Does that suggest the Trump Administration should maybe rethink their immigration policy?
DR. NAVARRO: Hang on. We had 170,000 private sector jobs created last month. 170,000. And, by the way, Paul, the best answer to your question is increase the labor force participation.
KEENE: Right. Well —
DR. NAVARRO: Oh, it went up yesterday in the report, even as the unemployment rate went down.
KEENE: Okay—
DR. NAVARRO: How many times do you see that?
KEENE: Right.
DR. NAVARRO: We’re looking at five-percent GDP growth, and we’re looking at earnings which are off the charts, and back in April —
KEENE: Right.
DR. NAVARRO: April 7th, to be exact —
KEENE: Right.
DR. NAVARRO: — when the futures for the Dow were at 38,000, my friend. 38,000 on a reciprocal tariff panic, I said 50,000 on the Dow.
KEENE: You’re trying to outdo Hassett. That’s all. Look, Peter Navarro with us —
DR. NAVARRO: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Kevin wrote a book like years ago. He never said 50,000 on the Dow this year, just to be clear.
KEENE: Peter Navarro with us here nationwide and, of course, [garbled] Irvine, California, as well. Peter, you mentioned the midterm elections. Here’s the reality for the President right now. You go out, I-80 across Illinois, you run into the big river, and there’s Davenport, Iowa. The Republican in the first Congressional district won that district by six votes last time around. They didn’t cross the aisle yesterday to vote with the Democrats, but they’ve had it with the Navarro-Trump trade. What do you need to amend to get Republicans reelected in November?
DR. NAVARRO: I just so disagree with that. We — Iowa loves Donald Trump and, by the way, farmers love Donald Trump. Farmers, above all, understand the necessity for tariffs, and every time there’s been retaliation by China —
KEENE: Right.
DR. NAVARRO: — or the Europeans or by the Canadians, guess who’s had the farmers’ back?
KEENE: Right.
DR. NAVARRO: I’ve personally been involved with the great Brooke Rollins over at the Department of Agriculture in making sure that farmers are made whole and can’t be used as bargaining chips and pawns —
KEENE: Right.
DR. NAVARRO: — in a bigger game. So, I, you know, Iowa is Trump country.
KEENE: Okay.
DR. NAVARRO: And I just, it’s like you’re making assertions that I just, I mean –
KEENE: Right.
DR. NAVARRO: —if you start with an assertion that’s wrong —
KEENE: Right.
DR. NAVARRO: — then everything else that follows is not, you know, it’s not worth talking about.
KEENE: Okay, Peter, I want to get this in. This is too important —
DR. NAVARRO: Sure.
KEENE: — and Paul wants to talk to you about the legal background as well. Peter Navarro, we had a two-to-three-percent tariff regime for whatever reasons, and you were providing leadership on this. We had Liberation Day in the Rose Garden, and we went up, up, and away, and [unclear] at the FT has brilliantly shown that we’ve pulled back our blended tariff rate right now, I’m guessing, to 10 to 11 percent. Where is Peter Navarro’s optimum blended tariff rate if it’s not the two to three percent that President Biden and others had before you?
DR. NAVARRO: Great question. And the way I like to think about it is the trade deficit. The trade deficit, when it’s chronic like it has been, and large like it has been, is toxic to the future of this country. First of all, a big trade deficit that’s chronic as opposed to occasional is a proxy for all the factories and jobs and supply chains that go offshore. When that happens that not only hurts us economically, it hurts us from a national security point of view as the pandemic —
KEENE: Right.
DR. NAVARRO: — underscored. So, there is that. Secondly, when you run a chronic trade deficit, you’re basically shipping your wealth offshore.
KEENE: Right.
DR. NAVARRO: We’ve done that, by the last calculation I made, something like 15 trillion dollars of our property has been exported.
KEENE: Okay. Okay, Peter, I don’t mean to interrupt, but I don’t want to interrupt you, but, Peter, you – okay.
DR. NAVARRO: So, bottom line, Tom, is when the trade deficit gets to zero, then you’ve got the right thing.
KEENE: Yeah. Good luck with that. Okay —
DR. NAVARRO: Well, but, by the way — by the way, the goal here is simply fair trade.
KEENE: Right.
DR. NAVARRO: And what we’re doing, what the President is doing, what Jamieson Greer, Scott Bessent, Howard Lutnick are doing is working with our allies and countries around the world to get them to lower their tariffs and trade barriers that, who in Bloomberg-land could disagree with that as a principle and disagree with the results, Tom.
KEENE: Okay. But Peter, I’ve got to get this in, because Sweeney’s like all Supreme Court right now. Peter Navarro, you didn’t answer my question. We came up, we had Liberation Day, we had a —
DR. NAVARRO: I think I did.
KEENE: No! You did not. We had an explosion —
DR. NAVARRO: Your question was ‘what will satisfy Peter Navarro,’ and I said when the trade deficit is zero.
KEENE: No, but what is the optimum — what is the optimum blended tariff rate. James Dimon wants to know that. Brian Moynihan wants to know that. Solomon over at Goldman Sachs wants to know that. And the people in the first Congressional district of Iowa, where are we heading as these exemptions come in? Do you see a seven-percent optimal tariff rate? Four percent? Do we capitulate and go right back to two to three percent?
DR. NAVARRO: So, here’s a Kevin Spacey aside here. Jamie Dimon, lower your friggin’ credit card interest rates. You are a criminal the way you charge the American people at 22, 25, and 30 percent, and the President wants you to lower that. So, until, Jamie, until you do that, please refrain from commenting on other public policies. Okay? Got that off my chest. Now, with respect to your question —
KEENE: Please.
DR. NAVARRO: The way we think about it, Tom — and this is important — is that every country that we trade with is like fingerprints. Right? They’re unique, which is to say they cheat us in their own way. It’s like, some countries like India have had the highest tariffs, some countries like Japan have had the highest non-tariff barriers, some countries like China have all of that stuff going on. So, when you ask me what the appropriate tariff would be, it’s bespoke. It’s like what President Trump does: he goes country by country by country and he sets the tariffs —
KEENE: Right.
DR. NAVARRO: — according to how badly they’re cheating us. So, there’s no blended tariff concept here, it’s like a country-specific tariff.
KEENE: Thank you for that. Let’s get Paul Sweeney in here.
SWEENEY: Peter, just real quickly, there’s some of President Trump’s tariff policies in front of the Supreme Court. To the extent the Supreme Court rules against the Administration, what will be its response?
DR. NAVARRO: Well, first of all, let’s talk about the law and the use of IEEPA [the International Emergency Economic Powers Act]. If the Supreme Court wants to rule in favor of President Trump, the law is clearly on the Supreme Court’s side. I mean, you have — is a tariff a tax? No, it’s a tariff on foreigners. And is a tariff a form of restriction on imports? Of course it is, just like quotas and other things and embargoes. So, those are the two points of law which this case is about. And if the Supreme Court wants to rule in the President’s favor, clearly the law is on their side. With respect to Plan B, of course we have a Plan B, but this is not the place for me to talk about it. If the decision comes out next Friday [February 20], which would be the next time the Supreme Court is going to be releasing decisions, then the President will speak first on what’s going to happen, and then folks like me will come in behind him and explain the details.
