White House trade adviser Peter Navarro on Thursday made light of the dire economic situation that President Donald Trump’s tariffs – and his sudden reversal – unleashed as the stock market continued to tumble.
Navarro on Thursday seized the opportunity during a CNN interview to challenge the network’s coverage of the fallout that followed Trump’s Rose Garden “Liberation Day” announcement on tariffs, which resulted in the markets reaching historic lows.
“CNBC is going to sue CNN for intruding on their financial analysis and what I just heard in terms of the market analysis,” Navarro said with a laugh after host Kasie Hunt asked if the market response to Trump’s tariffs “fundamentally altered for the worse the foundation of our global financial system.”
“That to me is pure spin!” Navarro insisted. He then launched into a fierce defense of the Trump administration’s tariff policy, which he helped craft as the president’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing.
ALSO READ: Violent J6er who broke into Capitol announces run for Congress in East Texas
“You had the highest rise in stock market history yesterday; of course there’s going to be a little pullback,” he said. “The question is, what spin are you going to put on it? It’s just a normal retracement after a big day. It’s no big deal.”
He added that the current financial climate that Trump created is “good news for the American people.”
“If you simply look where we are now, we’ve got a 10% global tariff in place, and we’re taking in about probably $4 billion a day, where we we’re losing $4 billion. We’re taking in about $2 or $3 billion now, so that’s all to the good.”
But while Navarro insisted that the country is “in a beautiful place,” he still continued to take aim at journalists, who he claimed “keep trying to stir people up, panic people, when yesterday we had the perfect result from the kind of negotiation Donald Trump does.”