Musk is right about tariff moron Navarro

New European

09-04-2025

Elon Musk called Peter Navarro, who is the man Trump has turned to for advice on his tariff trade policy, 'truly a moron'. This came after his colleague in the dysfunctional and dangerous MAGA administration justified putting tariffs on the imported parts that Musk puts in his Tesla cars on the grounds that 'he's not a car manufacturer. He's a car assembler.'
It is hard to work out who the bigger moron is in America at the moment.
Musk is, of course, furious, although perhaps not just because the tariffs on those car parts are going to cost him billions. In whatever passes for his heart, he knows that he has spent a good deal of time and money getting Trump elected while knowing full well what the implications of policies meant for Tesla. Who's the moron now?
What matters more is that Navarro now is the man with Trump's ear. He is the one who has taken the president's long-held and utterly mistaken belief in tariffs and turned them into policy
This is more important than a spat within the administration ('boys will be boys, and we will let their public sparring continue,' smiled Trump's press secretary Karoline Leavitt) not least because Navarro is demonstrably a fraud and an idiot.
He served in Trump's first administration, where he fought measures to control Covid and recommended hydroxychloroquine as a treatment (it is an anti-malarial and didn't work). He also spread the baseless conspiracy theory that the scapegoated former presidential chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci was the 'father' of Covid and had even paid a Chinese lab taxpayers' money to develop the virus.
Navarro then sought to overturn the 2020 election result and went to prison as a result. It is no wonder Trump loves him.
But it is his 'economics' that is doing even more harm than his other mad conspiracy theories.
Like many extremists, Navarro started up just pointing out some home truths: the Chinese currency is kept weak to encourage exports, China's environmental standards are awful, the Chinese state bullies foreign firms, working conditions are worse there than in America and therefore their products are cheaper.
But his conclusions have become ever more radical. Navarro thinks the best response is to put such large tariffs on China (and others) that American companies will reshore their factories to the US.
But just like in the UK finding people who want to work in glorified sweatshops is difficult, if not impossible, especially if you are deporting immigrants at the same time.
It also ignores the obvious – that the US is a tech and services giant and benefits hugely from having other, cheaper countries make things for it. This is how world trade works.
Navarro wants a return to mercantilism, the belief that only those who have trade surpluses are truly great nations. This was disproven 200 years ago by Adam Smith and Ricardo, normally pin-up boys of the far right.
Which is perhaps why in his books including The Coming China Wars and Death By China, he quotes a mysterious expert called Ron Vara, which is obviously an anagram of his own name.
Perhaps he just couldn't find anyone who agreed with him, which is quite possible. The list of world-renowned economists queuing up to denounce his plans runs into the hundreds.
Or maybe he just values his own work above all others? Which is almost certainly true; self-doubt is not a Navarro trait.
The fact is that Trump has been persuaded to commit economic suicide by a conspiracy loving, incompetent idiot. Someone even Elon Musk thinks is 'dumber than a sack of bricks'.
Which means the real moron is not Musk or Navarro – it is Trump.