President Trump said this week that tariffs on Mexico and Canada will proceed when a 30-day suspension period ends next week.
He plans to impose 25% tariffs on North American partners and has already levied a new 10% tariff on Chinese imports.
What does this mean for jobs, trade and retaliation, and consumer prices? We asked Peter Navarro, Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing.
4 questions with Peter Navarro
The Financial Times is reporting you are pushing for an intelligence alliance with the Five Eyes network of the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to kick out Canada. What’s the thinking there?
“That is fake news. I would never advocate jeopardizing American and international security, and it’s tiresome for reports in the mainstream press that come from anonymous sources. It’s fake news.”
You’ve made the case for tariffs. You’ve said our trading partners are fleecing America with their tariffs, so the U.S. needs to reciprocate. This idea of, ‘You hit me, I’ll hit you back,’ is that a good way to manage the world?
“Well, we’ve had since, I guess the 1950s, when we were the richest nation in the world and had the wealth to do so, it’s been basically the piggy bank for the rest of the world to recover from World War II and then to expand the global trade environment. But what we’ve had clearly is a system in which the United States of America faces systematically higher tariffs and importantly, systematically higher non-tariff barriers. The result of that unfair trade is now a $1-trillion-a-year trade deficit, which results in a number of bad things that happen. Number one, our debt goes up. But we also have a situation where that money is used to sell off the assets to the American people, whether it’s real estate, apartment buildings, houses, whether it’s commercial office buildings, whether it’s our financial assets.
“This is an American issue. It’s not really a left-right issue. The question is, whenever you hear the word tariffs, ask yourself why President Trump wants to do this, and it’s simply to level the playing field for American businesses, for American workers. And what we’re seeking is no less than a fundamental restructuring of an international trade order going back to NAFTA, aka SHAFTA, China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, which is written eloquently about. And just the broader unfair trade practices that have resulted in millions of jobs being exported abroad and tens of thousands of factories closed. That’s going to stop.”
What is the digital service tax?
“The digital service tax is a tax that foreign countries are going to levy on things like online platforms, digital advertising, cloud computing. And France was the pioneer, as it were, in this in 2019, and the way they set their thresholds for coverage is highly discriminatory. They only go after large companies in a practical matter — that’s Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Netflix — and companies like that and Meta, right? So what we have is a situation where they plunder America. It’s a zero-sum game for both shareholders of the companies, and also importantly American taxpayers.”
The University of Chicago found the price of washing machines went up after Trump imposed tariffs on them during his first term. Is this just a signal to American manufacturers that they can charge more?
“If you go to Clyde, Ohio, and the pride of Clyde, I think every American would be pleased to see washing machines come out at the rate of one every four seconds right here in America, and those tariffs were put in place on washing machines because the South Koreans and the Chinese were simply cheating us. They were dumping product here and what that has done for America is to create higher wages and prosperity, and that’s the issue. And sir, I would say to you, everybody who warned, clutched their pearls about inflation and recession with respect to the Trump tariffs in the first term, it didn’t happen. All we got was price stability and prosperity, and that’s what we’re after — a level playing field for American workers and businesses and taxpayers.”
Samantha Raphelson produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Micaela Rodriguez. Allison Hagan adapted it for the web.
This segment aired on February 25, 2025.
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Publish date : 2025-02-25 07:48:00
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