Late last week, simmering tensions between Peter Navarro, Donald Trump’s top adviser on trade policy, and Elon Musk started to boil over. It led a Fox News host to ask Navarro on Sunday, “Peter, is there a rift internally?” Navarro replied, “No. … It’s fine. There’s no rift here.”
He might want to revise that answer. NBC News reported:
Elon Musk on Tuesday blasted President Donald Trump’s top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, as a “moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks” in a spat that underscores the discord among the president’s top allies over his sweeping tariffs set to go into effect this week.
Let’s take a moment to review how we arrived at this point.
After considerable behind-the-scenes scuttlebutt about White House tensions over the president’s policy on tariffs, the fissures started to reach the public late last week, when Musk took a veiled rhetorical shot at Navarro via social media — though Trump’s top campaign donor did not mention Navarro by name.
A day later, Musk delivered public remarks in which he made clear that he disagreed with Trump’s trade tariffs, though he again made no specific references to Navarro, who’s helping steer the White House’s tariffs policy.
The day after that, Navarro appeared on Fox News and said that Musk “didn’t understand” what he was talking about on tariffs. He added, “Look, Elon, when he’s in his DOGE lane is great, but we understand what’s going on here? Do we just have to understand? Elon sells cars, and he’s in Texas assembling cars that have big parts of that car from Mexico, China, batteries come from Japan, or China, electronics come from Taiwan, and he’s simply protecting his own interests, as any business person would do.”
Navarro concluded, “We don’t mind him saying whatever he wants, but just the American people need to understand that we understand what that’s all about.”
The following morning, Navarro made another on-air appearance, this time on CNBC. “When it comes to tariffs and trade, we all understand in the White House, and the American people understand that Elon’s a car manufacturer, but he’s not a car manufacturer, he’s a car assembler, in many cases,” the trade adviser said, adding, “He’s a car person, that’s what he does. And he wants the cheap foreign parts, and we understand that, but we want them home.”
Given that Navarro and Musk are ostensibly White House colleagues, it wasn’t altogether clear who Navarro was referring to when he used the word “we.”
This cleared the way for Musk to use his social media platform to write, “Navarro is truly a moron” and “Navarro is dumber than a sack of bricks.”
The billionaire soon after added, “Navarro should ask the fake expert he invented, Ron Vara” — a reference to the unfortunate fact that Navarro invented a fictional expert whom he quoted in his books in support of his ideas. (“Ron Vara” in an anagram for “Navarro.”) Asked about the dispute, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters, “Boys will be boys.” The problem with the assessment, however, is that Musk and Navarro are grown men with incredibly powerful and influential jobs, helping steer a radical policy agenda that is shaping global events. Their dispute, in other words, is not the stuff of playgrounds. I won’t pretend to know how this will shake out in the West Wing, though it’s worth noting that the last time Musk clashed with colleagues at the White House, Trump reportedly allowed the back-and-forth to continue, “as if he were watching a tennis match.” In a normal administration, a president would intervene and prevent this feud from continuing, if no other reason than to signal to the public that the White House is united behind a single vision — and not a White House divided against itself. There’s no reason, however, to expect Team Trump to act like a normal administration.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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