Elon Musk Says Peter Navarro Is 'Dumber Than a Sack of Bricks'
Musk is right. Navarro is a socialist with foolish economic views who should never have been put in charge of anything.
Imagine an alternate reality where President Donald Trump's top trade adviser was a bulging Hefty trash bag stuffed with discarded bricks.
No, really. Picture it. When Trump gathers his cabinet together for an important meeting, inexplicably, there is a large bag sitting in the corner of the room. Its black polyethylene sides stretch at awkward angles as it tries to contain the sharp edges of what appear to be dozens of bricks piled within. Some red clay dust that has escaped from the drawstring top lingers on the floor. A White House intern struggles to move it from place to place. The bag doesn't speak or communicate in any way. It has no thoughts. It does not opine on the meaning of trade deficits or invent false data to tell misleading stories about the state of America's economy.
And then ask yourself: Would the country be better off if Trump was seeking counsel from that literal sack of bricks rather than from Peter Navarro?
Elon Musk seems to believe so. In a series of tweets over the past few days, Musk has taken aim at Navarro, the White House's top trade policy adviser. In one diatribe, Musk accused Navarro of being a "moron" and pointed out that Navarro "ain't built shit."
On Tuesday morning, Musk put a finer point on it: "Navarro is dumber than a sack of bricks."
Having never spent time with either man, I'm probably not qualified to comment directly on either's intelligence. However, when it comes to the more important version of this question—would the country be better off with Navarro or a literal sack of bricks guiding the president's trade policy—the answer seems clear.
Sack Navarro. Hire the bricks.
"Navarro is both the dumbest economist in America, and the most influential," Noah Smith wrote on X last month, in response to Navarro's claim on Fox News that "tariffs are tax cuts." (The opposite is true: These tariffs are a major tax hike.)
Since then, Navarro has only made his shortcomings more apparent. When he's not spouting more nonsense during cable news interviews, he's reportedly blocking attempts by foreign countries to strike deals with Trump that could lower tariffs. Yesterday, after the European Union and Vietnam indicated their willingness to negotiate lower tariffs if America would do the same, Navarro immediately crapped all over the idea. "When they come to us and say, we'll go to zero tariffs, that means nothing to us," he said.
But the roots of Navarro's economic illiteracy run deep.
As I detailed in a 2020 feature for Reason, Navarro became one of the most powerful people in the first Trump administration after a failed left-wing political career—longtime California political pundit Joe Matthews has called him "San Diego's Bernie Sanders."
That analogy helps explain a lot about the current moment, I think. If Sanders—a longtime advocate for tariffs and opponent of free trade who thinks consumers don't need variety or choice in the marketplace—was appointed to run U.S. trade policy, would anything be different?
When Navarro wasn't losing elections or inventing fake economists to support his positions, Navarro also founded an anti-growth community organization and helped entrench some of the regulatory hurdles to building housing that are still harming California today.
Sure, why wouldn't you want that guy in charge of a huge swath of the economy?
We likely have Jared Kushner to blame for Navarro's place in the Trump administration. Trump's son-in-law reportedly brought Navarro into the fold "when Trump wanted to speak more substantively about China" on the campaign trail. Vanity Fair's Sarah Ellison reported in 2017 that Trump "gave Kushner a summary of his views and then asked him to do some research." Kushner did some Googling and stumbled upon one of Navarro's books.
Navarro might be part of the MAGA tribe now, but he's still a socialist at heart. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he waxed poetic about how "beautiful" it was to see "the power of the federal government merging with the power of private enterprise." His vision for America's trade policy is the sort of autarky that would make Vladimir Lenin proud.
If those views aren't disqualifying enough, then Trump should fire Navarro for his track record in the White House. As director of the White House National Trade Council during Trump's first term, Navarro played a key role in killing the White House's attempt at reforming the Jones Act, a terrible piece of protectionism that makes it more expensive to ship anything around the United States by boat. He was the driving force behind the Trump administration's harebrained idea to give a $765 million contract to the Eastman-Kodak Company, a struggling camera company, to produce pharmaceuticals (the contract, thankfully, was canceled after the Securities and Exchange Commission began investigating it).
I feel compelled to point out that a literal sack of bricks would not have done either of those things.
Now, Navarro is championing a tariff policy that has vaporized trillions of dollars from the stock market and threatens to tip the country into a serious recession—one that would obviously have dire consequences for the rest of Trump's agenda and his legacy. It's one thing to give a guy a second chance, but Navarro should have long ago worn out his welcome with Trump.
The spat between Musk and Navarro is a telling one, and its resolution might go a long way toward determining the future of the second Trump administration.
While he's not without faults, Musk clearly grasps the value of trade and understands that it is a huge mistake for Trump to deliberately tank the economy with these tariffs. He's built successful businesses and knows that economic growth depends on letting the market work (even if he's been happy to collect government contracts too).
Navarro has built nothing. He's a failed politician and a fabulist. His foolish economic ideas are bringing about predictable outcomes. Trump should not let a socialist set America's trade policies. We would be better off with the sack of bricks.
