Peter Navarro Exposes The Biggest Liar in Big Tech & The Politicians Bought By China

Summary

Pod Force One
“Peter Navarro Exposes The Biggest Liar in Big Tech & The Politicians Bought By China”
Host: Miranda Devine (New York Post)
Guest: Peter Navarro (President Trump’s Senior Counselor for Trade and Manufacturing)
Date: February 25, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode features an in-depth, unfiltered conversation between Miranda Devine and Peter Navarro. They dissect the fallout from the Supreme Court’s rejection of Trump-era tariffs, the program’s alternatives, the influence of China on American politics, lobbying from Big Tech (with direct accusations against Apple’s Tim Cook), the return of U.S. manufacturing, and the weaponization of the justice system against Trump affiliates. Navarro also tells personal stories from his own life, his recent arrest, and outlines the Trump administration’s renewed focus as the U.S. approaches the 2026 midterms.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Supreme Court Tariff Ruling and Trump Administration’s Plan B

[00:23–05:41]

• Navarro Downplays Court’s Blow: The Supreme Court “did one thing and one thing only. It struck down the use of tariffs under the International Economic Emergency Powers act (IEEPA).” The administration anticipated this and has fallback authorities (Sections 301, 232, 122, etc.).
  • Navarro explains that Section 301 tariffs (used since 2018) remain intact, are being extended, and empower the U.S. Trade Representative to add countries “to the 301 investigations” ([01:36]).
• Congressional Authority over Tariffs: Navarro criticizes the Court’s logic seeing tariffs as taxes and credits Justice Kavanaugh’s dissent.
  • Quote: “Justice Kavanaugh, which I think is the smartest one in the room on this, wrote a very eloquent dissent…” ([02:50])
• Future of Tariff Policy: The Supreme Court’s ruling, says Navarro, “actually significantly strengthened virtually every other power that the President has.”

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2. Do Tariffs Cause Consumer Pain?

[05:41–09:38]

• On Refunds & Litigation: Trump’s view: “The court… don’t give us any guidance or say anything at all about refunds. And what that is going to entail is years, years of litigation.” ([05:48])
• Economic Data Debunk Tariff Myths: According to Navarro, foreigners—not American consumers—bear the cost of tariffs. He disputes studies suggesting the contrary: “There’s no evidence in the inflation data of that.”
• Real-World Results: Navarro claims that after implementing tariffs in 2018, “all we get is low inflation, robust growth, and a beautiful Trump economy” ([07:25]). He insists repeated predictions of economic doom have proven false.

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3. Foreign Influence and the Boardroom Pushback

[09:38–10:48]

• Trump’s View of Foreign Influence: Navarro describes a “diaspora of globalism” that puts “political pressures in many ways on our institutions” (Congress, Courts, White House).
• Lobbying by Corporate Giants: Companies like Apple (Tim Cook), Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg) lobby for exemptions—“Tim Cook… is the king of evading tariffs… he lied through his teeth and he’s doing it again.”—([10:48], direct quote)

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4. Is Manufacturing Coming Back?

[11:14–16:07]

• Mixed Successes: Navarro concedes Apple is moving manufacturing to India, “not a whole lot better than being in China,” but points to $18 trillion in new investment, notably from Japan.
• Data Indicators: The “green shoots” of manufacturing are showing in the ISM Manufacturing Index, which recently “jumped five points, well into above 50 territory.” Navarro says, “Biden was just killing our manufacturing,” but the turnaround is visible now with new steel mills, chip factories, and the first new aluminum foundry ([14:37]).
• Quote: “Rome wasn’t built in a day and a factory wasn’t built in a month.” ([13:48])

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5. The China Threat — Origins and Biden’s Compromise

[16:07–28:31]

• Navarro’s Academic Research: Navarro describes how China’s WTO entry led to American job losses and a series of influential books (“Death by China,” “Crouching Tiger”).
  • “China was using a mercantilist model to exploit the world—including the United States.” ([17:45])
• Definition of Mercantilism: “It’s all about cheating. Mercantilism is a model based on running large trade surpluses with the rest of the world…” ([21:09])
• Biden’s Role: Navarro and Devine both accuse Joe Biden of influencing China’s WTO entry and benefitting financially: “China identifies elites early… politicians, trips, speaking opportunities, money… that’s what happened with Biden.” ([23:39])
• National Security Risks: Navarro points to influence strategies targeting academia and politics (e.g., Eric Swalwell’s “honeypot” scandal).

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6. Weaponization of the Justice System, Navarro’s Arrest

[29:36–42:15]

• No Accountability for Political Adversaries: Devine & Navarro lament the lack of prosecution for figures like Brennan, Clapper, and Comey, compared to the aggressive criminalization of Trump officials.
  • Quote: “If we don’t hold these people accountable, we know they’re going to do it again.” ([32:21])
• Personal Story—Navarro’s ‘Circus Arrest’: Navarro recounts his airport arrest (“three armed agents coming behind me, another three coming at me from the plane”—36:00–38:00). His fiancée was perp-walked: “That was a bridge too far.” ([38:54])
• Legal Battle over Executive Privilege: Navarro sees his prosecution for defying a Congressional subpoena as a threat to executive privilege, and is determined to take his appeal to SCOTUS.

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7. Navarro’s Personal Background and Worldview

[42:15–48:00]

• Formative Years: Navarro grew up poor; parents divorced young. He credits hardship for his resilience, echoing the backgrounds of other Trump administration figures.
• Peace Corps & Early Lessons on China: His time in Thailand exposed him to regional skepticism of Chinese economic influence.
• Trump Administration Team: Navarro contrasts the current (second-term) team’s cohesion and loyalty—“Everything’s infinitely better from a personnel point of view” ([47:03]).

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8. 2026 Midterm Outlook: Affordability, Immigration, and Crime

[51:16–62:00]

• Key Voter Issues: Navarro welcomes a debate over “affordability,” blaming Democrats for inflation through fiscal recklessness and green policies (“war on beef,” war on oil/gas) that drive up food and energy prices ([53:22]).
• Border and Deportation: Navarro details the economic and criminal costs of illegal immigration: “800 Americans will likely be murdered if we don’t deport those 20 million,” plus thousands more crimes. ([57:50])
  • He insists “the American people by a significant majority still support the mass deportations, full stop.” ([63:22])
• Corporate Interests in Immigration: Republicans and business lobby for cheap labor “but the taxpayer is subsidizing those companies… paying these slaves slave wages.” ([60:09])

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9. U.S. Policy Toward China—Looking Ahead

[76:09–80:56]

• Meeting President Xi: Navarro says Trump’s meetings with world leaders are about “keeping the peace” and “solving complex global challenges.” Trump is “tough on China” with tariffs nearing “close to 50%” ([77:53]).
• Rare Earth Independence: Navarro predicts the U.S. will break free from Chinese rare earths “in months rather than years.”—“American innovation is moving literally at the speed of light to take away that advantage.” ([77:55])
• Tech & Pharma: The U.S. is closing gaps in critical minerals, pharmaceuticals, and semiconductors, with Navarro attributing this agility to Trump’s leadership and vision.

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10. Final Thoughts & Personal Reflections

[81:12–82:15]

• Success Secret: “Stay on mission… If you know where you need to go, you can’t let yourself be detoured from that.” ([81:25])
• **Devine compliments Navarro and the Trump team’s “true grit” and resilience in the face of unprecedented political and legal obstacles.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Tim Cook: “He’s the king of evading tariffs. And we let him get away with it in the first term… he lied through his teeth and he’s doing it again.” ([10:48], Peter Navarro)
• On Biden & China: “Joe Biden… got to the pinnacle, but he never understood… these people were just using you as their puppet.” ([26:07], Peter Navarro)
• On Manufacturing’s Return: “We had $18 trillion of new investment pledged since the tariffs and because of the tariffs.” ([11:28], Peter Navarro)
• On Weaponization of Justice: “The Democrats said the same crap the last time and it was BS then that they’re saying now and it’s BS now.” ([08:53], Navarro)
• On His Arrest: “It was like a circus arrest… 20 FBI agents monitoring my movements… took my phone… I was leg chained in the same cell as John Hinckley.” ([35:25–38:14], Navarro)
• On Resilience: “I view what we do here is essentially similar to soldiering… But when they did that to her [fiancée], that was a bridge too far.” ([38:54], Navarro)
• On U.S. Innovation Overcoming China: “Whenever they put that kind of pressure on American people and entrepreneurs… we are able to respond very, very quickly in innovative ways.” ([77:55], Navarro)
• On Staying Focused: “Stay on mission… let all the stuff flying around you just fly around you without it bothering you.” ([81:25], Navarro)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Tariff Ruling & Plan B – [00:23–05:41]
• Do Tariffs Harm Consumers? – [05:41–09:38]
• Big Tech Lobbying & Tim Cook – [09:38–10:48]
• Manufacturing’s Return – [11:14–16:07]
• China & WTO Entry – [16:07–28:31]
• Weaponized Justice, Navarro’s Arrest – [29:36–42:15]
• Personal Background & Worldview – [42:15–48:00]
• Midterm Outlook: Economy, Immigration – [51:16–62:00]
• Navarro on Trump’s China Policy – [76:09–80:56]
• Success Secret – [81:25]

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Overall Tone

Direct, confrontational, unapologetically partisan and combative. Navarro mixes legal, economic, and personal narrative with frequent, unguarded criticisms of political opponents and perceived “deep state” actors, while Devine brings journalistic background and pointed questions. The discussion is urgent, with a tone of vindication and readiness for upcoming political battles.

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This summary captures all substantive aspects of the conversation and serves as a comprehensive guide for listeners wishing to understand the episode’s content and arguments without the need to listen.

Transcript

[Miranda Devine]

Hello and welcome back to PodForceOne. I'm Miranda Devine and joining me today is economist Peter Navarro, President Trump's Senior counselor for Trade and Manufacturing. Peter Navarro, thank you so much for joining podforce One.

[Peter Navarro]

My pleasure. Always a pleasure to be with the great Miranda Devine. Love your stuff and you know this.

[Miranda Devine]

Thank you. Likewise. And we're very lucky to be talking to you now. Just a few days after the Supreme Court str struck a blow to your tariffs, really, that you and Donald Trump designed and that were up until now doing so well. And I know you have a plan B. What is it?

[Peter Navarro]

We don't see this as having struck a heavy blow and we believe that this will actually be a very good thing for the Trump team tariff policy, because if you analyze the decision, Miranda, it was very narrow in scope. It did one thing and one thing only. It struck down the use of tariffs under the International Economic Emergency Powers act iipa. So it struck down the IPA tariffs in a very narrow way. It didn't resolve any major questions. And in the process of striking it down, it actually significantly strengthened virtually every other power that the President has been using and can use for tariffs in the future. So let me just unpack that a little bit. Right now, President Trump is using section 301 for country specific tariffs. Those are the ones that we imposed, for example, on China back in 2018. And what the US Trade Representative, Jameson Greer, is going to be doing and has been doing is steadily adding countries to the 301 investigations. So that will give us great power to address the problems on a country by country basis. So that will not allow any country to use the striking down of the IPA tariffs as a reason to back off from the negotiating table.

[Miranda Devine]

Just one question, though. Why did you not use those 301 or whatever number tariffs that you're talking about? Why did you not use them first? Why use the emergency powers?

[Peter Navarro]

We believe that the law is on our side, was on our side when we used the IAEAPA terrorists. It's a very flexible tool and we believe that the Supreme Court there was a good chance of its supporting. It was. Look, President thinks, as do I and everybody else on the trade team, that this decision was a bad one. It basically came to the conclusion that these tariffs are taxes. And because of that, they struck it down because Congress has the authority to tax. But we don't see it that way. We didn't argue it that way. Justice Kavanaugh, which I think is the smartest one in the room on this, wrote a Very eloquent dissent describing how the Court was wrong based on the law and based on 200 years of history. So I think the strategy was perfectly fine. We knew going in that there was a possibility that they would be struck down. In the meantime, we developed plan B. But as part of our thinking, I mean, look again, I want to get back to this point. It's what the Supreme Court did and did not do. It did strike down the IPA terrorists, the emergency terrorists. It did not strike down 232, 301, 122, 338. All the different powers that the President has been delegated by Congress and can use and we will be using. And the decision itself, because those powers were referenced repeatedly by a number of justices have been strengthened. So when we go to court the next time, they always drag us into court. We have the Supreme Court on our side. So there's 301 for the countries, 232 for specific commodities. They're run through the Commerce Department, 301s through the Trade Rep. 232s. We already have them on steel and aluminum, critical minerals, pharmaceuticals. We're having other investigations on a wide variety of other things. So we're going to have that covered. And in the meantime, as we move forward with those powers, the president has put 122, section 122, which is a 150 day global tariff of 15%.

[Miranda Devine]

So does that mean that there are going to be refunds that America's going to have to pay?

[Peter Navarro]

I can't do better than the boss on this one. I mean, he was just, he was just like, unbelievable. It's like the court, they take so long, so long to make this decision and they don't give us any guidance or say anything at all about refunds. And what that is going to entail is years, years of litigation. But I think the important point granted to understand is that what we saw is how much money tariffs can actually collect. And the importance is how that helps our fiscal situation in the United States. And we learned through that process that the foreigners pay the tariffs, not American consumers. That seems to be a point of dispute with various studies that have been put out. But the data doesn't reflect the studies. It's like absurd. So we're no strangers to bad studies trying to undermine the tariffs insane consumers pay for them. There's no evidence in the inflation data of that.

[Miranda Devine]

And was that, I mean, you're a student of tariffs. You've been as Donald Trump. I mean, Donald Trump, I think has been hot on tariffs since the 1980s. And was that something that you anticipated that there would be? Contrary to all the experts, there would be no inflation effect.

[Peter Navarro]

Of course, if you just go back in a time machine when I was in the first administration, I was there all four years. One of only three people who actually was in the Trump administration. From the campaign to the end. We said going into 2018, when we started putting the tariffs in the 301s and the 232s on steel and aluminum, that foreigners would bear the largest portion of the burden of the tariffs. For the simple reason is that countries like China or Germany are highly dependent on our economy. They're export driven so they can't afford to lose our business. So what do they do? They lower their prices, they change things around. It's a complex adjustment process but in the end they eat the tariffs, we don't. And actually good economic theory on this that people ignore in the international trade legislature verify this. So what happens in 2018? We put tariffs on and for the next couple of years there's everybody's saying there's going to be a recession, inflation, stagflation, this then the other thing and all we get is low inflation, robust growth and a beautiful Trump economy. So fast forward to this administration. When we put the tariffs in, we got the same identical people, the same think tanks, the heritages, the Cato's, the same newspapers, the same trade associations, the Goldman Sachs of this world. It's like, oh, it's going to cause inflation and all we have to do is go back and say, hey, you were wrong the first time. Why are you going to be right this time? And guess what? You haven't been right. So this is the debate, this is why having a podcast like yours is good. Because I just wanna remind people that they said the same crap the last time and it was was BS then that they're saying now and it's BS now.

[Miranda Devine]

So have you ever seen the President waver? He seemed pretty angry the other day after the Supreme Court brought down that decision. He talked about foreign influence on the Court. Do you know what he was talking about? Was he talking about China?

[Peter Navarro]

Miranda? There's a whole diaspora of globalism out there that puts political pressures in many, many ways on our institutions. Whether it's the Supreme Court, Congress or the White House itself. We know they're there. China's a big deal. But there's also the corporate types who offshore want to sell in that have tremendous political power, that lobby and everything like That, I mean, being in the White House, you see these people come by like every day. They say, don't do the tariffs. And when you do the tariffs, they say, well, do them on everybody else. Give us an exclusion or exemption. This and the other thing. So, like, who?

[Miranda Devine]

Like Apple, Like Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, who?

[Peter Navarro]

Individuals, certainly. Yeah. But they've got the institution behind him. I mean, Tim Cook, I mean, he's the king of evading tariffs. And we let him get away with it in the first term because he promised he would basically bring his iPhone production here or out of China, and he lied through his teeth and he's doing it again. That's quite par for the course.

[Miranda Devine]

And is manufacturing being brought home significantly? You mentioned iPhone. I think Tim Cook's opened some sort of a factory here. Is that happening across the board?

[Peter Navarro]

Not with Apple. I mean, they're going to India and to me that's not a whole lot better than being in China. But that's the exception. I think that proves the rule. I mean, we have. Miranda, I mean, this is like, mind boggling. We had $18 trillion of new investment pledged since the tariffs and because of the tariffs, I mean, as President Trump has said, it's like you don't pay the tariffs if you produce here.

[Miranda Devine]

But what's the timeline on that? Because I know the EU promised, I think, a trillion dollars worth of investment, but, you know, has any of that happened? And what's the timeline? Are they just going to wait out President Trump?

[Peter Navarro]

Yeah, we had a lot of investment that's come in. I mean, Japan's really, really probably at the head of that pack right now. There's, there's all sorts of projects going on. The EU is problematic because people think about as the European Union, it's not really a union, it's a collection of countries that have different interests economically with respect to trade, and it's very hard for them to make decisions. I mean, you talk about China, Miranda, it's like if you look behind the curtain in the eu, it's like Germany's highly export dependent on China, so it doesn't want to crack down on them. Greece, I mean, China owns their ports. Spain gets a lot of money. I mean, the uk, which is not in the European Union per se, but I mean, it's, it, it's like a float, it's just a wash in foreign money, which. And you're seeing as a result of that, the Brits do kind of things that we're kind of looking at, like what's going on here. But at the end of the day, that's why tariffs are important, because if we don't get cooperation in deals, they get tariffs. Let me say that again. If we don't get cooperation and great deals from American people, they get tariffs. And that's why this decision was important, not because it struck down one tariff power, but because it strengthened all the other ones. So this is a work in progress. But I think what we've clearly learned from President Trump, his courageous decision to basically impose tariffs, as he has, is that they actually work. And the manufacturing thing, another one of the talking points, the spins, is that the manufacturing's not coming. We said it would come, it's not coming well, but the data now doesn't reflect that either. What we're seeing is, and the data is the green shoots manufacturing. I mean, I've described all along the adjustment process. You put the terrace in, but Rome wasn't built in a day and a factory wasn't building them up.

[Miranda Devine]

So have you got examples of factories that are being built? Like, are there car manufacturers or what sort of things are being brought home?

[Peter Navarro]

I mean, there's the first new aluminum foundry built. We lost two foundries in the last term. We got steel mills popping all over the place. We got chip production that's getting towards the construction stage. I mean, it's just a myriad of things. And it's showing up. It's showing up in the Federal Reserve industrial production data. It's showing up in the durable goods data. It's finally showing up in one of my favorite economic indicators, Marin. It's called the ISM Manufacturing Index, the Institute of Supply Management Manufacturing index. And it's a 0 to 100 index, what they call a diffusion index. And when it's below 50, then manufacturer is in decline. When it's above 50, manufacturing is expanding. And it's been, I think since August of 2022 during the Biden regime, that that index fell below 50. I mean, Biden was just killing our manufacturing. And when we got in, that thing like was stubbornly lagging below 50 for many, many months, even as some of these other manufacturing indicators said, no, things are good. Finally, in the last time around, it jumped five points, well into above 50 territory.

[Miranda Devine]

That is fantastic. So Made in the USA is back. And I wanted to explore that a little more because I think that's how your interest in tariffs started. You were a professor in California and tell us about how you started noticing the effect of China coming into the wto, the World Trade Organization, thanks to Joe Biden, in large part in 2001. Tell me how you experienced that with your students.

[Peter Navarro]

So we'll go back in the time capsule. Mid 90s. I'm a macroeconomics professor at a business school in the University of California system, and I'm writing books about these economic indicators. We're talking. And my whole thing was forecasting the economy and the stock market, because if you can do one, you can do the other, basically. And so that was it. I'm just looking at the big picture every day around the world. It's going to be a recession, what's the inflation rate going to be, all that stuff. And about 2003, two years after China joined the World Trade Organization, I noticed that more and more of my students, my master's MBA students in the fully employed program, were losing their jobs. And I'm thinking, this is weird. I mean, I'm in Orange county, which is one of the most robust counties and places in the country for employment, and it's, like, boggling my mind. But it turns out that a lot of the jobs in Orange county were Pac Rim facing, Pacific Rim facing, and dependent. And as China started invading our markets and drawing more and more of our corporations offshore, not just manufacturing, but supply chains, it was affecting the employment prospect. I didn't know that until I looked into it, but I started a research project called the China Price Project. I had all my students for like a year working on this stuff. What came out of that was, I think, the first major economic study of how China was using a mercantilist model to exploit the world, including the United States. And the insight of that China Price Project in the articles and eventually books I would write about it was it cut down the myth that China was succeeding simply because of cheap labor. It was much more complex than that. And in that original study, I had many of the things that we would subsequently identify and talk about in the Trump administration. The intellectual property theft is a big deal. The government subsidies, the lax environmental and labor regulations which would give them an advantage, the currency manipulation. I had this whole model. I did a production cost analysis, and because of that, then I went and did some more research, and out of that came what would be eventually a trilogy of China books, the Coming China wars in 2006. That's the one that caught President Trump's eye back before he was president, and he said it was one of his top 10 books. I found that out, and that's when we began communicating. I followed that up with the 2011 Death by China book. And movie movies on YouTube. Free, by the way, Death by China. And then in 2015, I did what the third book, Crouching Tiger, which, which went from the economics to showing how the American people basically are funding the entire military budget of the Chinese through our trade deficit. It's, the numbers are like, they're almost identical. Weird.

[Miranda Devine]

So can I interrupt for one second? Just, could you explain just with China and their predatory practices, what is mercantilist? What does that mean? And, and why did China's entry into the World Trade Organization create a problem for America and hollow out our manufacturing?

[Peter Navarro]

Well, it created a problem not just for America, it created a problem for the world. Prior to China joining the wto, it didn't have what they call pntr. It wasn't allowed to have access to our markets in an unfettered way or markets around the world under the World Trade Organization system. And curiously enough, it would be Bill Clinton, a Democrat, who would push for China's entry into the World Trade. It's a total betrayal of the Democrat base because that base at the time, which President Trump would subsequently capture, was like blue collar working folks, union and non union in factories. And Clinton, if you go to my Death by China movie, there's some beautiful quotes of Clinton about it's going to be a one way street, we're just going to sell to them and everything's going to be great. And it was just the opposite. They cheat. Mercantilism is cheating. It goes back to the doctrine in the 1500s, 1600s, where the whole goal of trade from a country level was to collect as much of the gold around the world as you possibly could, which meant selling stuff but not buying anything from people and doing it in a way where you choose. So it's all about cheating. Mercantilism is a model based on running large trade surpluses with the rest of the world thinking you're going to get wealthy.

[Miranda Devine]

Joe Biden was very much involved in pushing his Senate colleagues, many of whom were reluctant to allow China into the World Trade Organization. I understand he was very influential with Bill Clinton as well. And he, he used to say things like, China won't eat our lunch. In your travels, did you find any evidence or even circumstantially, or is it your opinion that Joe Biden was somehow compromised by China? Because we saw during his vice presidency, his family received tens of millions of dollars from Chinese state, state owned organizations and he himself as president went soft on China and unwound some of the measures that you and the Trump administration First time around, brought against China, most particularly about the sort of anti spying program in universities. It was inexplicable. He unwound that.

[Peter Navarro]

Well, Berena, your work on this, he's kind of the gold standard. I mean, you've looked at all of this. What I can tell you and what I wrote about back in Death by China back in 2011, is that China, one of their strategies basically is to identify elites early in countries, not just America, but in countries around the world. They want to identify academic elites, they want to identify the emerging political possible stars, and they want to identify the corporate types. And what they do with the academics is they give you like a professorship and an honorary position at one of their universities, shower you in a bunch of money, and you essentially become a friend of them. I saw that a lot in the UC system with politicians, trips, speaking opportunities, money, investment opportunities. And that's what happened with Biden. But it happens to way too many politicians around, around the world. And Eric Swalwell, well, Swalwell, look, it's amazing, A, that he's still in politics and B, that he's gotten to where he is. I mean, it's just. I mean, but he was a typical honeypot victim, right? Where some Chinese woman bats her eyelashes at him and seduces him. Next thing you know, it's pillow talk. He's spilling his guts and beings about things that are consequential with respect to American national security. And the guy was on one of the most important committees with respect to confidential information on Capitol Hill. I mean, I don't know how these people don't get prosecuted and booted out of their positions.

[Miranda Devine]

But were you concerned about Joe Biden as president? That he was going soft on President Xi?

[Peter Navarro]

Well, if you look at my various writings and speeches and press interviews leading into the 2020 election, I frequently raised that topic. I mean, Biden bragged about having more trips and personal visits with Xi of any politician ever that had been in the White House. He was vice president at the time. And look, and you put a dumb guy in with a cunning dictator, and I mean, Joe Biden, one of his Shakespearean flaws, as it were. Hubris. He just. He thought he was more clever and powerful than he was. I mean, he got to the pinnacle, but he never understood. Hey, Joe. You never understood this, Joe, that these people were just using you as their puppet. And when you got in, you virtually didn't make any decisions at all. All those decisions God made for you, and they either got signed by the auto pen or you signed them yourself. But look, we can agree that the Biden presidency was a disaster on just about every front. I mean, economically, that was arguably the worst presidency in modern history. I mean, he ran the fiscal stimulus on wasteful stuff. He got Jay Powell at the Fed to go along for the ride because he could dangle that a reappointment. And Powell bit that from a national security point of view. He did keep the China tariffs. He didn't dare get rid of those, but he weakened everything else. So, yeah, we can agree that he was a terrible president and glad he's in our rearview mirror. I do wish he and his brother and his son, which you've written eloquently about, would be held accountable, but this is what we got.

[Miranda Devine]

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[Peter Navarro]

So good, so good, so good.

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[Miranda Devine]

talking about being held accountable. You were, you know, patient zero. Really. Let's say on Lawfare or after General Flynn, probably. You went to jail. You wrote a book about it. I went to prison, so you don't have to. And that was because of your important work importance in the White House in the first Trump administration. And I want to talk about that, but before we do now, there is sort of, you know, a little bit of talk and we're seeing a little bit of movement on grand juries opening up into the likes of John Brennan and James Clapper, Jim Comey. But do you hold any hope that any of them will be held accountable or treated in any way that's measurable to the way you were treated?

[Peter Navarro]

It's been disappointing that we have not moved with all due speed to hold these people account. I mean, Brenner, Clapper, Page Strzok, Rubenstein Comey, all of these people weaponized our justice system. Chris Wray, that guy is. I mean, the stuff he did is unconscionable. It's disappointing. I think that the best hope we have now to keep things moving is Chuck Grassley in the Senate. He's been very good at getting more and more information released. I give you just Walter Giadina. He was the FBI agent who basically ran that circus arrest out of Reagan Airport that I document. And I went to prison, so you won't have to. He was the guy responsible for me going to prison in many ways. But what we've learned subsequent to that is he was involved in virtually every attempt to put not just me behind bars, but Donald Trump as well. He was the guy that said the Steele dossier was true. Therefore, we can run that whole investigation. That's kind of set things motion. He's go all the way to the other end at Arctic Frost. There's Crimson river, these people, Miranda within the FBI, within the Department of Justice. We know who they are. I just. Look, here's the thing. It's like if we don't hold these people accountable, we know they're going to do it again. Let me say it again. If we don't hold them accountable, we know they're going to do it again.

[Miranda Devine]

Well, look at Susan Rice. Susan Rice has just warned everybody what will happen to them once Democrats get back into power. Anybody who's cooperated, any executive, any company who's cooperated with the Trump administration, it's to the gulag.

[Peter Navarro]

Yeah, that's the world we live in. And so you know, the last chapter, even though I published, I went to prison, so you won't have to. The last chapter has not yet been written. I say that because my appeal is ongoing. I serve my prison, sir. There's no reason for me to do the appeal other than to what they say in the law, settle good law on the key issues related to my case. My case is a case about whether Congress can subpoena the president or a senior White House official without damaging the Constitution and executive privilege. And for 50 years prior to me being charged, it was the policy of the White House, the Department of justice, that if a senior White House official got a subpoena, it was our duty to say no, because that compromises executive privilege. The Supreme Court has said that executive privilege is absolutely critical to preserving the candor and confidentiality in presidential decision making and therefore keeping presidential decision making effective and sound. So my battle is yet to be won. It's working its way through the appeals court and eventually, most likely, the Supreme Court, because the district Appeals court in D.C. is such a cesspool, just to put a fine point on it. But if I lose that case and the Democrats take over in the midterms, the house in 2026, we're gonna run the movie all over again. That started in 2018 with the impeachment. Impeachment, impeachment, Subpoenas, Subpoenas, subpoenas. It's not good for America.

[Miranda Devine]

And jail, because it wasn't just you. It was Steve Bannon as well, who was sent to jail. And this was for contempt of Congress because you refused to testify before Nancy Pelosi's star chamber, citing executive privilege. And that's what you're testing. But let's go to what happened to you at Reagan airport in Washington, D.C. you were there, I think, jetting off to Nashville with your fiance. Bonnie, tell us what happened.

[Peter Navarro]

Well, I was on a ways simply to go out and do a. An interview with Mike Huckabee in Nashville, Tennessee. And to set the stage, just by a curious twist of fate, the apartment I was living in in D.C. at the time is literally 50 yards away from the FBI. 50 yards away. So what we've learned because of Chuck Grassley getting documents that had to be released is that on the day of my arrest, they had 20 FBI agents monitoring my movements. You know, it's like Navarro has just left his apartment with his fiance. Navarro is now getting in an Uber. You know, Navarro is now approaching. You know, when I got to the airport, Miranda, I was like. I was, like, looking around, because I always do, and it was like, I'm seeing. Seeing these people. It's like it looks. Supposed to be a janitor. I'm not sure it is. So they were, like, heavily surveilling me, and they waited until Bonnie and I got inside the gangway. That's where you kind of get between where they take your ticket and that space where you walk into the door of the aircraft. It's a very narrow, confined space. So Bonnie and I walk in after giving our tickets. We got three. Three armed agents coming behind me. There's another three coming at me from the plane itself. And it's like I looked at her. She. I said, honey, just relax here, okay? And it's just like. And I look at these guys. You got to be kidding. It's like, what is. What is. It was a circus arrest. And I asked to make a phone call, and they wouldn't let me make a Phone call. They wouldn't make me a phone call. I asked them twice. They took my phone. They're supposed to allow me things. And I wind up going back, essentially past my apartment, and I wind up leg IRS in the same cell that according to the guards who took great glee in telling this, that John Hinckley sat in after he shot Reagan. I don't know what the moral equivalence was with my case or whatever.

[Miranda Devine]

Peter, did they handcuff you at the airport and put you in shackles and perp walk you?

[Peter Navarro]

Yeah, they put handcuffs, put them behind your back, and they cram you into this little car so your shoulders hurt

[Miranda Devine]

and walked you through the airport like that?

[Peter Navarro]

No, the perp walk was more for Bonnie. I felt so bad for her. I mean, imagine going with your fiance on what was going to be one of the funnest trips you're going to have, and winding up seeing your fiance dragged away in handcuffs and you escorted out through the terminal surrounded by FBI agents with everybody looking at you.

[Miranda Devine]

I mean, so she was perp walked. How outrageous. How dare they?

[Peter Navarro]

That's the thing. It's like I'm a. You know, I. It's like I view what we do here is essentially similar to soldiering. Well, it's. It's not quite as dangerous by a long shot, but. So it comes with the territory. But when they did that to her, that was a bridge too far. And this is why. Going back to your original question, why not holding these people accountable is very disappointing. I mean, Giordina should have been subpoenaed by now, and he should have been indicted. There's a whole bunch of people we know. I still want to know, and I'm working on this, how high the approval went up the chain to take me down at the airport instead of, look, it's a misdemeanor. I'm a non violent guy, no guns in my wall. And what normally happens in these kind of white collar misdemeanor things is they call you up and say, hey, we got a warrant for your arrest. Go report down to the core.

[Miranda Devine]

Well, like they did with Jim Comey. Jim Comey was allowed to do that.

[Peter Navarro]

I know. Yeah. How dare they? I mean, yeah, and that was us. We let Comey come on. It's like, no, I'm not, I'm not. I'm not happy with that. The boss is not happy with that. And we should be moving faster and stronger on that. But on the other hand, the Department of Justice has got a lot on its plate, but this is important. I mean, if we allow them to weaponize the justice system, it drives me baddies. When you hear the Democrats use the talking point that we're weaponizing the justice system. Hey, wait a minute. They put me in prison. They tried to put Donald Trump in prison for 700 years.

[Miranda Devine]

They raided Mar A Lago, they rifled through his wife's underwear drawer. They locked up all those January 6th place people without trial for years on end. They raided Roger Stone's house at dawn. They raided all those, you know, pro abortion, sorry, anti abortion activists, you know, Christians who just prayed outside abortion clinics. What will they do next time?

[Peter Navarro]

And don't forget Jeff Clark and John Eastman. I mean, Jeff Clark, they went to his house and, and held him outside his house with his young daughters while they rifled his house trying to take the bar cards at Clark and Eastman. I mean, look, Brandon, everybody I served with, everybody I served with in the first Trump term was attacked in some way and it cost them some things, whether it was simply, I don't know, 20, $30,000 worth of legal bills in the least case to losing their bar card or worse, or going bankrupt like Rudy, Rudy Giuliani. That's what they do. And we, you know, I'm dis. We're letting them get away with it. And it's kind of not the way I would roll, but it is what it is.

[Miranda Devine]

It is what it is. So, Peter, can we just go back to your origin story? So you grew up poor, I think you've said, and your father was a musician and your mother was a secretary and they split up when you were young. Tell us about how that impacted you and what your family was like.

[Peter Navarro]

I think there's moving from childhood to adulthood is perilous. I think it's even more perilous today with all the social media and iPhones and illicit and the other thing. And I grew up, curiously enough, not far from Mar a Lago in Palm Beach. When my parents got divorced, we had come down there because my father was playing band for the rich of Palm beach. And he'd go down to Miami and play at the Fontainebleau and Eden Rock, if you know those classic places and stuff like that.

[Miranda Devine]

And what did he play?

[Peter Navarro]

He played clarinet and saxophone. He was the leader of the band. He had drummer, a bass, sometimes a piano, sometimes a singer. He played the big band kind of Glenn Miller style. And it was a vagabond existence till my parents got divorced. You would go, for example, up north to New Hampshire, play at, you know, it's Kind of funny. The Mount Washington Hotel where the Bretton Woods Accord was negotiated. I spent a whole summer there with my family. My mom ran the gift shop, and my dad had the band played every night. My brother was a caddy. But I think, to your question, I think it can go one of two ways. When you're young and poor and you're living with a single family, mom who single parent, mom who has to work very hard just to put bread on the table, it can go either very wrong or okay. And I think in my case, I was blessed to have the experience strengthen me. I had a little help along the way for a couple of years. There was a guy, Gus Broberg, who was a father of my best friend here in Palm beach, where it was, and he kind of took me under his wing and stuff like that. But, you know, I was on my own essentially from about the age of 13 or 14, cooked a lot of my meals, learned how to take care of myself, and it seemed to work out okay, although the people who love to criticize me would argue to the contrary.

[Miranda Devine]

PETER it's so interesting you say that, because I've now interviewed, you know, lots of members of the administration, and what struck me after about the seventh interview with similar experiences that you're just recounting of a sort of a traumatic incident that happened when they're 12, 13, quite young, whether it's a father dying or, in Mike Johnson's case, a father getting burned and becoming an invalid, who was a firefighter. Doug Burgum's father was killed in crime, Kristi Noemes, you name it, they've had a traumatic experience at that age. And like Scott Besant's family went completely bust from being very wealthy and the parents split up. And so that experience, as you say, seems to have strengthened all of you and made you uniquely equipped to work for Donald Trump. Also a very resilient character and taking in all kinds of incoming. Do you see that with your fellow soldiers in the Trump administration, Mark Tuke?

[Peter Navarro]

I think there's a difference between some of the Cabinet folks and some of the folks in the White House. I mean, I'll be honest with you, Random, most of the people that I've been with in the White House have been very wealthy people, haven't heard of this. They're there because they, they, they're, they're really smart people. And, and the measure of their smartness is often, like, their net worth and stuff like that.

[Miranda Devine]

But Scott Bessant and, and Howard Lutnick are very wealthy but they both suffered great adversity in childhood like you did.

[Peter Navarro]

Yeah, I wasn't aware of that. And, and it's, it's really odd to have that talk with Scotty and, and, and Howard at some point. Just, I mean, with Howard too. I mean the tragedy 911 really has shaped his public interest and worldview as well. But I mean, look, I've been there. I was there in the first term, Miranda. Now in the second term, I could tell you that everything's infinitely better from a personnel point of view. We had just so many rocky roads in the first term. I mean, Tillerson at State, Mattis at defense, four really bad chiefs of staff. Susie Wiles is amazing. It's like fifth time's the charm, I guess. But the trade team really works well together and leverages each of their comparative advantages. I mean, Jameson at ustr, he really, really knows his stuff and learned his craft out in the private sector coming in. So he knows how to do that. And then he learned at the knee. It's. Lighthizer is his top deputy for four years. Howard, I've really come to love that guy. He listens well and learns at the speed of lights. And he, he was willing to hear about my experiences in the first time to help shape things better. I know Scott, Scott published my first Trump book in Trump time. I got to know him well. And I mean he's really good, he's really good with the media. He sees the big picture. And Hassett, as a National Economic Council director, he doesn't get involved a lot in trade, but there's a lot of issues tangential to trade, manufacturing, which is kind of what I do. And then the cabinet, it's a great cabinet. It wasn't the last time boss had to fire half the cabinet before he got it right. And it wasn't, I mean, look, of course it was the buck stops with his decisions. But he was just getting really bad advice when he first got elected in the transition because of who was on the side of that. But the boss learned who to trust and who not to trust and it really shows now.

[Miranda Devine]

And does he have a no scalps rule now where he's not going to be bullied or threatened by the media, etc into firing people that they don't like?

[Peter Navarro]

I think it's the, the Rhett Butler thing when it comes to the fake news. Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. I mean he could care less what the fake news says. And so no, nobody's going to, nobody's going to Force him to fire somebody that he, he wants to stand by. And by the way, Miranda, I mean, it's just a fact, the first time you, you lose somebody because of political pressure, that just opens the door. Yeah. To, to a lot more. I mean, Pam's doing a great job, but I, I, I, I do think we, we could have and, and should have held on for Gates just to see how that played out a little bit more. But I think, I think the, that kind of steeled our resolve that okay, they did have ones. They're not doing that. They're not doing it after. Hey, Seth. I mean he really threw everything. Yeah. They had at, at Pete and he's turned out to be great. Gave Bobby a hard time, you know, but no, the boss is going to stick by his choices and he's not going to let the media.

[Miranda Devine]

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?

[Peter Navarro]

Affordability. I've said this many times, I'll say the end 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. And 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 observe 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, and that's, that's, Sorry, was that, excuse me.

[Miranda Devine]

Was that because they, they limited grazing for, for greeny reasons. They didn't, they thought cattle hurt the, they wanted just white wilderness or something.

[Peter Navarro]

Yes. They might not be a little, little fraternity brother. Gross. Yes. The cow fart thing, it's like the whole rain thing, it's like it was like the war on beef. I mean, let's. The Democrats. Yes. They want people to eat soy to save the planet. That was kind of thing. And, 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, they, they took, I think it's something like 25,000 acres of grazing land out. And then let's think about this, Miranda. Their whole war on oil and natural gas, right? They're running 75, $80 a barrel of 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, and then you're trying to transport food 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's just, what, saying 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 it? 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 2%. We're seeing the mortgage rates come down and may soon break the 6% 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 have looked pretty good two months ago, but I think by September or October, it's not even going to be close. The border is interesting. It's like it was a big issue during the campaign, but the perception now among people is that we solve 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 a 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 50,000Americans victimized from what? 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 800Americans will likely be murdered if we don't deport those 20 million. 2,000, 2,000 women would 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.

[Miranda Devine]

That's a great metric. Did you count welfare fraud?

[Peter 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, the, the, 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 when you bring in poorly educated illegal immigrants, it's unlikely that they're going to be a net positive economically.

[Miranda Devine]

Republicans are also behind the pressure on Donald Trump 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 slaves slave wages.

[Peter Navarro]

Well, yeah, well, let's start, let's, let's start with the redistributional aspect of illegal immigration. Because the people who get the hurt the most in this country economically, the 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, so there's that impact in and of itself. And when you, when you, I mean we saw in the incredible statistics from the government during Biden years, you saw American citizens having a net job loss in the final year of 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.

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[Miranda Devine]

Do you think that he will continue despite all the 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.

[Peter Navarro]

Interestingly enough, the polls 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, 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 and paid the consequences. I mean, it was tragic, but let's not predict. Portray her as an innocent victim. She was engaged in an activity designed to provoke. And the other guy, Pretty, Pretty man, I think was his name pretty. 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, 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 got the Lake and Riley examples, 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 got a lot more than they do. So it's just a question of, of getting the messaging right in politics. And 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?

[Miranda 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?

[Peter Navarro]

I'm so pissed off at him. And 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 the, 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 and 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 like an offshoot of like American kind of 50s kind of style music. And then they had a little, little rock combo band which I was in. Right. And I played rhythm guitar.

[Miranda Devine]

Oh, really?

[Peter Navarro]

I just wasn't very good. But, but they relied on me to like translate the lyrics, teach them the lyrics and stuff like that. But that.

[Miranda Devine]

And did your dad teach you how to play?

[Peter Navarro]

No, my dad ruined my musical career. Like one day he comes home and I'm like 8 years old and he hands me this book that would probably be like the first year of graduate school at Berkeley School of Music. And I'm looking at it, and it's just totally defeated me. So, no, the only creative thing I got, and I don't know who I got it from, was like, writing stuff like that.

[Miranda Devine]

And have you talked to Donald Trump, who's a great music aficionado? Do you talk to him about music at all?

[Peter Navarro]

Never, Never. I've listened to his playlist.

[Miranda Devine]

He played the flute when he was a child.

[Peter Navarro]

I did not know that. I've seen it, so I'll have to mention that, too.

[Miranda Devine]

Yeah, apparently he's a musical genius. He was tested when he was a child, but so. 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 swat? Were you sporty?

[Peter Navarro]

So when the parents got divorced, it was like in elementary school in Palm beach, they had the private school with rich kids and then a public school for us peon to 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 ball field, so. Played them all, football, baseball, basketball. 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 4th Avenue in Palm Beach. And his son, who was. I said 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 Broger, you look that up. But yeah, psych, sports and. And reading. And I was always pretty quick in the classroom. I never had to do homework at night because I 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.

[Miranda Devine]

And why did you join the Peace Corps?

[Peter 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. Was in the Navy. I wanted to do two things. I wanted to, to just do something in the public interest and, and, and get out of the country at the, at the time. To just get a different worldview of kind of what the, 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 I taught kind of, that was my day job. But my real passion there was building these big fish ponds. I'm not talking about little ponds, I'm talking about big ponds to feed people. Did a little bit of that there and kind of learned about the world from a different point of view. Came back with a worldview to this country rather than just a parochial view. I think Americans sometime have too parochial a view of things and it's certainly, well in the White House.

[Miranda Devine]

And when you were there in Thailand, I think that was when you first noticed the sort of malign influence of China.

[Peter 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 mile of starvation, this and the other thing. But a lot of these countries are very, very resentful of the Chinese because the Chinese are able through their ways, hard working 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 it's all both sides of the fence. But it gives you kind of a sense of how Asia has all these cross currents and things like that.

[Miranda 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.

[Peter Navarro]

Yeah, I've always had this, this, this belief that, 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 was part of, that's been part of the problem in China. You know, the ones who were able, who have been able to get out historically have often been the ones who would have been better to have on the inside doing free market stuff. And 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 leading 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 and 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, will 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. I mean, a lot of the stuff they do, these busiest people, like, they, you know, they send melamine animal feed here, wind up killing, like tens of thousands of American pets to make a buck. How do you do that? How do you as a human being do that? They do it. I mean, there's stuff. What's the thing? I'm cracking down on this. She's very serious. Working again with Customs and Border. There's just a highly disproportionate percentage of products that come in from China that can hurt, kill or cheat you. And that's one of the things that at some point, I hope we could stop.

[Miranda Devine]

Just last second, last question. President Trump is going to visit President Xi shortly in China. What do you hope will come out of that meeting? And President Trump always says he has a very good relationship with President Xi, calls him a brilliant man. How do you think that relationship is going to go? And can America really fully decouple itself from Chinese control over such things as rare earth and antibiotics, et cetera?

[Peter Navarro]

If we know anything about President Trump, he thinks it's better to meet with world leaders than not full stop. And it's better to meet with the world leaders, particularly who are the most powerful in the world, just to keep the peace. And he's got a lot of balls in the air. He's trying to solve the war in Ukraine with Russia and China has a lot to do with that, as they do with Iran and Gaza and this and the like. So, as the boss says, let's see what happens. Let's remember that we are tough on China and we have high tariffs on China.

[Miranda Devine]

What are the tariffs now on China?

[Peter Navarro]

Well, we have the 301 tariffs. We have the two 32s on steel and aluminum. We're working on two 32s that have to do with pharmaceuticals and critical minerals. Which is the rare earth stuff.

[Miranda Devine]

So is it like, what, 45%?

[Peter Navarro]

Yeah, last count, it was like, close to 50%.

[Miranda Devine]

50%, right.

[Peter Navarro]

Let me give you some good news, and maybe we end with this. I think that Communist China, which is what it is, made a huge strategic error in holding not just the United States, but the world hostage to rare earths under the assumption that not only did it have a quasi monopoly in rare earths, but that it could hold on onto it. And I can tell you from the front lines that American innovation is moving literally at the speed of light to take away that advantage. And what we're learning, and what the Chinese will learn from this is that whenever they put that kind of pressure on the American people and American entrepreneurs, and in rare earth's case, the peoples of the world, we are able to respond very, very quickly in innovative ways, which I think in the case of rare earths and critical minerals, will prevent them from doing what they've been doing in that space, which is dumping materials into our markets to make sure that no producers come up. That's not going to happen.

[Miranda Devine]

So how long before we're free of the monopoly?

[Peter Navarro]

Well, we're moving really fast now, and I would say you can measure that in months rather than years. But as I say, let's see what happens. I think the point I'm trying to make here, Miranda, is that when China acts like a bully in that fashion, it basically unleashes our innovation and potential. And in today's tech world, we're able to move far faster than, say, 10 or 20 years ago. So we've got to make progress on pharmaceuticals. That's one of our vulnerabilities. They know it, we know it. We're moving on that. On all. Not just rare earths, but all critical minerals and so on. Chips. Chips. I guess this is a complex world. I could just tell the American people they're blessed to have Donald Trump running the show now, because the challenges we're facing at this point in time are more complex than perhaps any other point in time, given the emergence of AI and the. The way the international financial system is the trading system. And you're going to have to have visionaries like Donald Trump at the wheel rather than a guy like Biden sleep at the wheel.

[Miranda Devine]

True grit. Peter, from people like you, I see the. You guys in the Trump administration as being like the USA hockey team, just, you know, grit and fortitude and your teeth broken and bloodied, but you're still smiling. So.

[Peter Navarro]

Yeah.

[Miranda Devine]

So fantastic. One last question. You've seen a lot of successful people. You're successful. What do you think is the one thing that is the secret of success?

[Peter Navarro]

I think it's to stay on mission. I have this conversation the people not infrequently in the White House. It's very easy to get distracted by the news of the day or some of the perks of office and this, that and the other thing. But I just, if you, if you know where you need to go, then you can't let yourself be detoured from that. You have to get there in order to achieve the mission. So just stay focused on the mission and let all the stuff flying around you just fly around you without it bothering you.

[Miranda Devine]

Terrific. Thanks so much. Peter Navarro, great talking to you.

[Peter Navarro]

I just love what you do. You're a true voice in the wilderness of the fake news out there. And Bonnie loves reading the Post. By the way, your column and Page Six. Terrific.

[Miranda Devine]

Thanks so much.

[Peter Navarro]

All right. You take care. Bye bye.

[Miranda Devine]

Thanks so much for tuning in to Pod Force One. Let us know what you thought of this week's show in the comments below. And don't forget to like and subscribe so you don't miss future episodes.