President Donald Trump’s former White House chief of staff argued Tuesday that current senior White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, a key architect of the controversial tariff policies currently roiling global markets, should have been fired a “long time” ago.
Speaking to anchor Brian Sullivan on CNBC, Mick Mulvaney—who had assumed several roles during Trump’s first administration—shared that Navarro’s divisive tenure goes beyond the typical “squabble inside the White House” and that he’s instead just “really tough to work with.”
“Peter is really tough to work with. There’s no question about that. One of the things that makes him so difficult to work is that he pretends to speak for the president when he does not, alright?,” Mulvaney said.
“Peter was notorious back in Trump 1.0 to walk out of a meeting when everybody would sort of assume we’ve got sort of a consensus about something, and he would go on TV and say the exact opposite. That has a tremendous demoralizing effect on the White House, and it does tend to mislead markets.”
Mulvaney went on to claim that it’s “important for people to realize” that Navarro’s comments about White House affairs are “not the White House speaking” but himself.
“I would have fired him a long time-, I would’ve fired him when he got caught making up his academic sources for his papers with his Ron Vara imaginary friend,” Mulvaney continued, referring to a 2019 scandal in which Navarro was busted for repeatedly citing a Harvard-educated economist that did not exist. Ron Vara instead turned out to be an anagram of his surname.
“But I mean that was Donald Trump’s call then, it’s Donald Trump’s call now,” the former U.S. representative added. “I think folks watching this show are caring more about what is the policy of the White House, what is the policy on tariffs, what does the future hold on this, and Peter Navarro is not a reliable source for information about that.”
While global trade relations continue to tense up and the U.S. stock market falls, Navarro has insisted that “no recession” will take place due to the fallout from Trump’s sweeping tariffs, and urged investors to not panic or sell their stocks in an interview with Laura Ingraham Monday.
He has also been part of a stunning inter-MAGA civil war with Elon Musk, who has rapidly become one of Trump’s closest advisers.
He took a shot at the billionaire Tuesday during the same interview, calling the Tesla billionaire a “car assembler” who wanted cheap parts from foreign developers.
“Tesla has the most American-made cars. Navarro is dumber than a sack of bricks,” Musk quipped back on X. “Navarro is truly a moron. What he says here is demonstrably false,” he said in another post.
The president, for his part, is trying to stay out of the fight and let them resolve it themselves.
“Look, these are obviously two individuals who have very different views on trade and on tariffs,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said at her press briefing on Tuesday. “Boys will be boys, and we will let their public sparring continue, and you guys should all be very grateful that we have the most transparent administration in history.”
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