Peter Navarro SLAMS Fox For Trying To Destroy Tucker Carlson | PBD Podcast | Ep. 265
PBD Podcast Episode 265. In this episode, Patrick Bet-David is joined by Peter Navarro, Adam Sosnick and Vincent Oshana.
0:00 - Start
4:25 - Peter Navarro Tells The Truth About MAGA
9:28 - Are We Close To a War With China?
36:52 - Did Biden Bring U.S Biggest Enemies Together?
41:25 - Peter Navarro Tells Untold Story About Fauci
53:04 - Why Trump Couldn't Drain The Swamp
58:01 - Peter Navarro On Why Trump Lost In 2020
1:12:04 - Should Trump change his cabinet?
1:28:31 - Abby Grosberg Slams Tucker Carlson
1:33:47 - Peter Navarro SLAMS Fox For Trying To Destroy Tucker Carlson
1:45:22 - Fed Is Raising Rates Again
1:55:05 - Homebuyers With Good-Credit Will Pay More For Mortgages
FaceTime or Ask Patrick any questions on https://minnect.com/
Subscribe to Peter Navarro's Substack: https://bit.ly/44nIsU1
Download Peter's podcast "Taking Back Trump's America": https://bit.ly/3LSFrno
Follow Peter on Twitter: https://bit.ly/3AZrQnO
Get Peter's book "Taking Back Trump's America": https://bit.ly/3pd6O2M (edited)
Want to get clear on your next 5 business moves? https://valuetainment.com/academy/
Join the channel to get exclusive access to perks: https://bit.ly/3Q9rSQL
Download the podcasts on all your favorite platforms https://bit.ly/3sFAW4N
Text: PODCAST to 310.340.1132 to get added to the distribution list
Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
Why would you pat on Goliath when we got pet tape?
Value payment, giving values contagious.
This world of entrepreneurs, we can't no value to hated.
I run, homie, look what I become.
I'm the one.
For many reasons, a lot of people want to talk to our guests today.
Okay.
Tom, your thing keeps hitting the table.
I don't know what you got, your cufflinks or whatever that is.
Yeah.
So Tom's been in trouble all morning today, folks.
I don't know why.
Tom is just doing a lot of stuff today.
But today's guest, Dr. Peter Navarro.
If you don't know who he is, you probably haven't turned on the television.
You don't follow politics.
Because if you do turn it on, you're going to see him.
Some people love him.
Some are indifferent.
Some don't like him.
But his background is absolutely insane with his expertise and a few topics that we definitely want to get into.
And we've been following up for a minute to get him here.
Finally, our buddy here, Malik a.k.a. Rob, was able to make this work.
Let me properly introduce with the background.
He served in the Trump administration as assistant to president, director of trade and manufacturing policy and the National Defense Production Act Policy Coordinator.
He was previously deputy assistant to the president and director of the White House National Trade Council.
Wrote a book.
He's written a few books.
One of the books was Death by China, which we'll cover.
There's another one that just came out a few months ago.
We'll talk about that as well.
He's a strong advocate for reducing U.S. trade deficit and has been critical of Germany and China, accusing both nations of currency manipulation.
He supports increasing the size of the American manufacturing sector, setting high tariffs, which is something that you kind of got to bully some of these guys, and that's one of the ways of doing it.
He went to Tuft University on academic scholarship.
By the way, just so you know, the alumni of that school is a pretty heavy-duty one.
Tufts?
Tufts?
Yeah, that's where he's going to be.
Jamie Diamond went.
Did he really?
My best friend, yeah.
Jamie Dimon went there.
You got Peter Gallagher.
You got Meredith.
I think Meredith, she went there as well, right?
Meredith Vieira went there.
It's a very well-known school.
Served in a U.S. Peace Corps in Thailand for three years.
Earned a Master's of Public Administration from Harvard, University John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1979, and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard under the supervision of Richard E. Caves in 86.
Few things.
Has run for office multiple times, lived in San Diego.
You were a Democrat while going to Harvard.
Then you became a registered Republican in 1989.
Then you went registered as an independent in 1991 when you ran for mayor of San Diego as an independent.
Then you rejoined the Democratic Party in 1994, remained a Democrat during his subsequent political campaigns.
He was endorsed by then First Lady Hillary Clinton.
Holy moly during his 1996 campaign for Congress and positioned himself as a progressive on social issues such as choice, gay rights, and religious freedom.
Then Navarro supported Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign and then Barack Obama's environmental policies.
And then during the 2016 presidential campaign, Navarro identified as a Reagan Democrat and a Trump Democrat, abandoned by my party and obviously a supporter of President Trump.
What a wild background you have.
Thank you so much for being a guest on the podcast.
It's great to be here.
The one thing you left out of my Vita was I actually grew up in this area.
My father was a professional musician and he played, he had his own band and he played like the Fountain Blue and Eden Rock.
Oh, nice.
The good days.
Yeah, yeah, when they were just brand new, right?
And then we'd go up the pike to Palm Beach and play the Palm Beach Towers there.
And I spent the better part of my childhood riding my bike past what was in the post-estate.
Now, do you know what the post-estate is now?
Is that the Mars Light?
Mar-a-Lago.
Mar-Lago.
Mar-a-Lago.
Yeah, yeah.
So, Pat, it's great to have me back here.
I think, you know, the political discussion that you said about my party switching and all of that, I think it's a good place to just put down a marker here on what MAGA is, what the Make America Great movement is.
And the other part of my Vita I think that's interesting is that I was one of only three senior White House officials who served with President Trump from the campaign in 2016 all the way to the end.
Only one of three.
You think about that.
You're going in, the odds on me lasting the whole time, given all the politics that was in there.
But MAGA, to me, and this is why I'm a Trump Republican, a Reagan Democrat, Trump Republican.
It's gotten such a bad rap lately from the progressive wing of the Democrats.
But while MAGA is, Make America Great Again, it's three things.
It's a triangle.
I call it the Iron Triangle of populism.
It's at the top of the pyramid there.
It's a strong American manufacturing base and resilient supply chains, which gives us the employment opportunities, the rising wages, and by the way, the national security we need when we have pandemics or wars.
And you get that through things like you mentioned, tariffs, but also buy American hire American, which I was the point guy in the White House on.
The second leg of the triangle is the secure borders issue, where as we speak, we are having the biggest invasion of illegal aliens across our southern border, which brings a whole host of issues.
I'm all for immigration, but we have to have a way to ensure that that's going to benefit the people in this country.
And right now, that's not the case.
And then the third part of that triangle is an end to the endless wars, the Afghanistans and the Iraqs that sending people to the Hindu Kush to get blown up by IEDs.
We're going to cover all that stuff.
I got a lot of questions.
But that's MAGA.
That's good for you to share that.
I want to start with that.
But we want to talk about China with you on how to manage that.
My concern is also what did we learn from China on the way Nixon and Kissinger set it up for us to make sure, you know, with India, India just passing up China, they have the youngest population comparing the two, you know, they're going to slowly but surely become a powerhouse.
And how do you manage that relationship long term?
And how different is the India relationship versus the China relationship?
We'll get into that as well.
Some things came out with a recording with you and the lady that is also trying to talk about that.
I want to get your thoughts on that.
Obviously, I'll get your thoughts on Tucker.
We'll get your thoughts on Dominion with the $787 million with Fox, what is happening there, and a few other things.
But I think probably the most important question to ask you before we get into it, are you more of a butt light guy or a Coorslight guy?
I think that's a butt.
That's the number one question.
I think that's what everybody wants to know.
Everyone listen to you right now.
It's a tough answer.
Yeah.
But water, Pepsi.
At my age, okay, I'm the boringest guy in the world because I cook everything I eat and I don't imbibe anything.
I got a problem.
You know, this is like when I get sick, there's nothing I can give up to make me better.
I'm more of a water guy.
I respect it.
The question is.
You've got a moral choice.
It's just never worked for me.
If you're the one cooking, your wife's not cooking.
Are you only cooking and buying and eating American food?
Oh, no, that's interesting.
I can't think of a single thing that's important in what I have.
Yes, it's Adam's right now at a phase of his life that he's trying to figure out.
He's trying to find his Eve, and can she cook American food?
So he's mentally and emotionally struggling right now.
Be patient with him.
Be patient with that.
Everything's going to be going through.
Although, you know, you guys, I don't see any coffee here, so that's cool.
Not allowed.
Not allowed.
Coffee and onions.
My coffee is dark, dark, dark, dark chocolate, which invariably has to come from abroad.
There you go.
Panamanian extra darkness.
Hey, you know, I need you to stick to that iron triangle and make sure it's made in America by America.
Okay, hi.
Thank you for policing me.
So let's talk about a few different things.
You've been criticizing China for a long time.
And whether it's the books you've written about them, whether it's the tariffs, whether the criticism you got, if we do punish them, they're not going to come back.
They're not going to do anything to us.
We've all seen and read the same stories and watched the exchanges that you've had.
What's your biggest concern with China on where they were before, where they are now?
Are they becoming more powerful?
Are they getting weaker?
Because there's a community of people that are saying behind closed doors, China's not doing as good as people think.
This whole concept of the one-child family that they did, they backfired on them because they're getting older.
People are leaving.
They're not even sticking around anymore.
Billionaires are leaving.
Job creators are leaving.
That thing's about to collapse.
Is it a real threat as it was before?
Are they getting weaker?
What are your thoughts on China?
It's the greatest existential threat this country in the world faces.
That is clear.
Let me let your folks know.
It's like I started writing about this back in 2006.
I wrote a trilogy of books, The Coming China Wars in 2006, Death by China, which was both a book and a film in 2011.
And just before I went in the Trump administration, Crouching Tiger, the first two books were about the economic threat.
The last book was about the military threat.
Now, the punchline here is that as bad as I said it was in those three books, as much crap I took from the legacy media and all kind of like, oh, no, no.
I'm the guy who had a top level, unlike Hunter Biden.
I got a top level security clearance.
I get to see the highest level stuff.
Without giving any secrets away, I can tell you that whatever I said about China in my books is far worse.
Far worse.
And if you just, here's the thing.
It's like I was with President Trump by his side when he went face to face with the dictator Xi Jinping, right?
And one of the advantages they have is that they don't have elections, right?
So their team, right?
Their team is the same team when we faced them as it would with Biden, right?
I sat face to face with these guys.
And what Trump tried to do, and I think it was the right thing to do given the political climate at the time.
I wanted to come in hard.
It's like, you know, these people, you can't trust them.
Just put the tariffs on them and make them stop doing what I call the seven devily sins.
All the crap they do to steal our jobs and factories.
And then he said, no, no, no, no.
We're going to sadly put on some tariffs, but we're going to try to cut a deal with them.
And, you know, in Buenos Aires, we sat face to face.
You know, Osaka, Japan, we sat face to face at the G20.
And all we learned, my friend, is all we learned is that they're just stringing us along.
That whenever you sit to negotiate with them, they'll agree pretty much to anything.
And then at the end of the day, they just wait you out and they break every agreement you set.
So you can't.
So the policy needs to be, and I think President Trump was clearly going to adopt this as soon as that second term began, is what we call decoupling, decoupling the U.S. economy.
I don't know if you know this, but the trade deficit we have with communist China, never call it China, it's communist China.
Let's be clear about what it is, is about roughly equal to their defense budget.
So in effect, every time we go into Walmart, Target, and buy that crap, which usually is stolen designs from American designers, we're funding what is an incredible arsenal pointed at our Navy in particular in the South and East China Sea.
And they, look, the threats are many and varied, but you just start with asymmetric warfare.
What is that?
That's being able to sink a $5 billion aircraft carrier with a $1 million missile.
They've got, there's a chapter in my Crouching Tiger book, you know, Missiles Are Us.
I mean, they got more missiles than any country in the world.
It's like, as Stalin said, quantity has a quality of its own.
They can hit the palace in Taiwan in seven minutes from the mainland.
And you know what they call aircraft carriers, American aircraft carriers in China?
Communist China?
Targets.
It's just, it's like a stupid way.
It's a stupid way to conduct warfare with communist China.
You don't put big aircraft carriers in the Taiwan Straits and not expect those things not to get shot down.
I mean, we should be putting all our money into sea mines ringed around Taiwan if we want to take that democracy seriously.
And submarines, just quiet submarines.
So let me ask you.
So you said a lot of different things.
You said it's a lot worse than you think it is.
When we went and negotiated with them, I was in those rooms and we're sitting with these guys and we're talking to them.
They would make all the promises.
They would come back.
They would literally break every single one of the promises in the negotiation.
Outside of that, they got more missiles than anybody else.
They can sink a $5 billion with a $1 million auto missile and they can, within seven minutes, attack the Taiwan palace.
All of that stuff is public stuff that we know.
Okay, what I want to know is if you're saying it's worse than what you know, right?
Yeah.
What do we not know that is worse than what we know?
Well, the broad strokes have to do with the elements of, for example, China 2025, which the Made in China 2025.
Yes.
And the idea was that strategically they want to take over the key strategic tech sectors that are going to determine the future.
So AI is certainly one of them.
Blockchain, let's talk about blockchain technology.
Okay.
What we need to know, okay, and There's certain things I can and cannot say, but the question is, blockchain technology is a technology which is used to encrypt things like Bitcoin and all our banking system.
And if you have the key to unlock that blockchain technology, as a weapon of warfare, when the time comes, you can bring down the entire financial system of the United States in nanosecond.
When the time comes.
When the time comes.
And when would that time come?
For example, Xi Jinping, okay, you mentioned, okay, some people are saying China's not that doing that great and they got trouble and this, that, and the other thing.
Well, that's dangerous because if Xi Jinping gets into domestic trouble, the first thing he's going to do is what?
You know the expression?
Wag the dog.
Wag the dog is going to mean a run on Taiwan.
We're going to have to have some kind of reaction.
And, you know, what do you do?
Do you send carriers into the South China Sea?
As soon as one of those sinks, it's game on, or do you blockade the routes that China, that oil comes from the Persian Gulf to China?
I mean, 70% of their oil comes from the Persian.
I mean, as soon as that kind of stuff happens, then the asymmetric warfare, what they call the unrestricted warfare kicks in.
That's like knocking, I mean, they have the capability right now.
They can knock our satellites out of the sky.
They can use viruses probably to take out our electric power grid.
And all these balloons that you're seeing floating over the United States, that's part of their information gathering process to execute their unrestricted warfare techniques.
I mean, it's just, the only thing holding them back is the fact that we're their cash cow.
We're the tit they suck on, right?
We're it.
We're uncle's sucker.
And the way they lifted 250 million peasants, at least up into status of sweatshops, was by running big trade surpluses with the United States.
So this is like, it goes on and on and on.
I wrote this in 2006.
It reads like a Pentagon report today.
And all we get is rhetoric and BS from the corporate media and the Congress.
So let's stay on that.
So these double Ds that China keeps sucking our nipples off of, right?
They've been doing it for a while.
And they've flattened a little bit, okay, the last couple of years, because now, especially when Trump was there and you were there, you tariff after tariff after tariff after tariff.
Hey, Huawei CFO was in Canada doing a deal with Iran and we found out, guess what, Huawei, you're out.
Boom, Huawei loses a third of their valuation.
Hey, that person's doing what they're doing.
Boom.
I was in Monaco and I'm sitting there talking to a pretty connected guy in politics from Lebanon who was doing a lot of the things for the countries there.
And he says, you don't even understand the tariffs Trump put on Iran, how much he's hurting Iran's economy right now, how much they're being affected.
I'm in this on a daily basis.
I'm having these types of conversations to see what's going on.
So let's look at both sides.
So the only reason why they haven't yet, they can, they can, they can, they can attack Taiwan, they can do this to the financial system, they can do a cyber attack, they can do all these different sorts of things, right?
And hey, the fact that they are going through the bad thing, we've got to be careful because the whole wag the dog concept, you know what's going to happen next.
Okay, cool.
So why don't they?
Well, because they're sucking on our nipples.
So if we do put the tariffs and we keep it there and we make them drown to the point of catastrophe happening there, then it's definite that they're going to do something.
No?
Yeah, and that's not, look, that's not the goal.
The goal, the gold is a strong America.
And the way you get to that is simply wean yourself from the factory floor of communist China and their supply chains.
If we've learned anything from the pandemic, we will be a stronger, more resilient country if we have our manufacturing base and our supply chains here or at least much closer to here.
And China, look, if we totally decoupled from communist China, they'd still grow.
I mean, that genie's out of the bottle.
They're in Africa.
They're in all of South America.
The Europeans welcome them with open arms.
But this is not about that.
This is about defending ourselves peace through strength.
And it's peace through economic strength.
It's peace through national security.
And this whole thing, look, these folks you talk to, oh, they're hurting Iran, this, that, and the other thing.
The problem is, since we've gone at it with half measures, it's actually strengthening communist China's hand in places like Iran.
Why?
Because they are using the American sanctions, right?
What are financial sanctions?
Sanctions are like you can't trade in U.S. dollars if you do X, right?
So if Iran gives weapons or whatever to the Russians and Ukraine, it's sanctioned, whatever.
But the problem is that if you are able to create a Yuan ruble-based currency system, then you don't have to worry about sanctions.
And so every time we've imposed sanctions in a half-measured way, it's given Russia, Iran, and communist China the incentive to create this alternative currency world.
And right now, they're going hard at it.
I mean, Brazil and Lula, that's like Brazil under Lula is like a colony of the communist Chinese.
Peru is very much at risk as well.
And the reason is what they call the debt trap diplomacy.
That's where China will come in and they'll just shower these countries with money in order to get infrastructure in there.
And there's so much grift associated with it that the leaders will skim off the top and put their Swiss banks accounts.
And you turn around, and next thing you know, China forecloses on the port in Sri Lanka and now they own it.
And that's like a strategic naval hub.
So, I mean, this is a big three-dimensional chess game, and we're playing checkers.
I want to ask you one more question, and then, Tom, I want you, if you, I think you've got some thoughts you want to share.
So, here's a question on this.
So, in a competitive environment, which we are right now, it's a competitive climate that we have, but it's from ideology, competitive environments.
It's different than capitalism.
Capitalism, you're trying to get a market share here, a market share there, region, you know, all this other stuff.
Politics is the way you think, as well as some resources, right?
And they're doing a very good job with getting the right resources.
You know, Iran, Africa, they're doing the right things from the competitive standpoint.
If we go back and look at the case study of tariffs, because I am for tariffs in many cases, the part that was for me a bit strange is China not letting any of our media companies be in China, Facebook, YouTube, all this stuff.
Well, we have to use your stuff here.
That to me is a dumb negotiation tactic.
I'll lift the tariffs if you allow all our social media companies in your country because we got to know what you got going on.
And I'm not lifting these tariffs until you do that.
Because my concern is we need to know what the hell your people are happy about, not happy about.
You can find out about our people.
You can go on Facebook and see all these videos with George Floyd, the video.
Oh, my God, look what's going on in the U.S. Hey, look what's going on in the streets.
Look what's going on with Antifa.
Look what's going on.
Great.
You have that access to all that data.
We don't have access to all that data.
So I do think we have to use tariffs in a way for us to get more citizen journalism in China for us to say, that's how you treat people, we're not for it.
That's how you do this, we're not for it.
And then we can get more common sense, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of ideal, freedom of all this stuff being injected in China.
And then the Chinese people are going to say, look, we don't like the way you're doing this.
We got a kind of chance.
So I think the social media pushing and our media being in China will be my number one thing.
That's me.
Then the other part is we're giving you all this money.
We're not getting it in return.
You're winning from us.
Now you got 80% of chips.
All our ACs are pretty much being made in your country.
When COVID happened, you shut down your manufacturing.
We couldn't do anything with cars.
Car prices went up 45%, 60%.
You know, the average car payment today in the U.S. went from four years ago being $550 to $9.17 a month when the income hasn't really increased dramatically.
That's a massive increase on what's going on.
So Americans are now feeling it.
But this is the question.
How does one, based on the years that you were with President Trump, what did you learn for the next people that are going to come in?
And maybe if Trump goes in or maybe another person is in the White House and it's not Biden's camp, because you say you have security clearance.
Hunter Biden has the kind of clearance you don't even have.
And it's a different kind of clearance.
It's called a daddy clearance.
And you don't have that kind of clearance.
I know you're very excited about your clearance, but his clearance is more effective than yours because he's able to make money off that clearance and you cannot.
Although, if you look nice, I'd buy a painting from you.
Yeah, you look like an artist.
That's a good point.
But going back to it, so imagine.
I paint left-handed, by the way, just to exercise the other part of my brain.
Powerful.
So much the better.
So whoever the next administration is going to be, so whoever the next Peter Navarro of Trump's administration is going to be, or a DeSantis administration is going to be, whoever the next person is going to be, how would you use tariffs and learn from mistakes and things that we did right?
So if we had another shot at negotiating with these guys, what would we be asking for?
And where's the pain point with them?
Well, they'll move.
Yeah.
Well, first of all, I think the best ticket is Trump DeSantis, where DeSantis does VP for four years and then gets eight more years.
And I wish that they can come to some kind of agreement on that.
And I wrote about that in my Taking Back Trump's America book and have urged that publicly.
Okay, so to your question, let's first of all be careful about using tariffs as a bargaining chip.
For example, China loves that, right?
They're very transactional.
So you can imagine a discussion now with Xi Jinping and Joe Biden.
Hey, she says to Biden, you get rid of the tariffs on us and we won't sell weapons to Russia.
Okay, wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
That leaves us no better off in terms of the economy than when we started.
Let's understand the function of tariffs.
What we have in this world, writ large, and it's just not, you mentioned Germany, but it's Europe, it's Brazil, it's India, it's Vietnam.
We have a world in which virtually all of the major trading partners charge systematically higher tariffs on the United States than we charge on them.
So I just had a chapter come out in a book that the Heritage Foundation did, which is what are the policies for 2024 for the presidential candidates.
And in that, I dusted off from the President's State of the Union speech, I think it was in 2019, the Reciprocal Trade Act.
The Reciprocal Trade Act simply says that, hey, we'll lower our tariffs to yours, but if you have higher tariffs than ours and you won't lower yours, then we'll raise those to yours.
You think that's effective?
It would be damn effective.
You know who has the highest tariffs in the world relative to us?
India.
Call it the Maharaja of tariffs.
But having said that, the function of tariffs is basically to offset unfair trade advantage.
Countries in the world, they engage in export subsidies, the VAT tax versus the income tax.
The VAT tax is like a form of an export subsidy that makes it very difficult.
China has massive government subsidies.
They steal our intellectual property.
They force our technology transfer.
The whole function of the tariff is to level the playing field for the American worker.
The American worker is the most productive in the world and can compete on a level playing field, but not when other countries cheat.
Having said all of that, with Communist China, it's got to be decoupling.
There's no modus vivendi with communist China.
They want to kill us.
They want this country.
And they are in every which way till Sunday, they inundate our universities with sons and daughters of the Chinese Communist Party.
They push our kids out, and while they're there, they're wrangled by these Chinese secret police so they don't go off the reservation.
And what are they there for?
To steal our intellectual property.
So it's just, it's just, we are so naive.
I remember back when I got started on all of this, I used to go out and do a lot of public speaking to corporate audience before I got canceled.
That's all another issue.
And I'd go talk to these trade groups, and these guys would come up and grown men in tears saying, hey, I went over with this great design to have it produced in China.
And by the time I got home, it was in the Walmart under their brand.
Oh, it's like, yeah, well, how stupid is that, right?
It's like, you just, they're playing a different game.
I mean, there's no morals.
There's no ethics.
There's no rules of capitalism.
It's just crush us any way they can.
So why would you trade with these people?
Why would you do that?
There's no reason right now to trade with China.
I mean, we need, they've got us, you know, penicillin.
We need that.
There's certain things we're going to need for a while, but that tells you in and of itself you need to get off that.
Can I ask a quick question on this whole concept of decoupling, right?
So when Pat kind of edified you at the beginning, you were a Democrat or Reagan Democrat, Trump, Republican.
It seems like your allegiance is straight up to America.
Marriott, that's it.
America Prime.
America, baby.
Boom, I'm with you on this.
Got it.
You know, one of the probably the biggest things that I've learned since being at Value Taint, my three-year anniversary is coming up, by the way.
Respects.
Thank you.
General Spalding, everything that we've learned from that is really the serious threat that China is posing to America.
Right.
So in this upcoming election, you know, it's the economy stupid.
It's healthcare.
It's immigration.
It's guns.
It's abortion.
It's gun control.
There's so many different lists of things that are going on.
Obviously, China should be at the top of most people's lists.
Two-part question.
Where should China be in this list of things that people should be considering in the election?
And then part two, if you could, who's against decoupling at this point?
Who are the most vocal advocates of basically saying, no, let's continue our relationship with China?
Could you explain?
Well, yeah.
So first of all, the Democrats are going to want to run this issue on abortion full stop.
That's it.
That's it.
They arguably won the 2022.
They cut their losses dramatically in the 2022 race by making MAGA a four-letter word and by running on Roe v. Wade.
And yeah, I've written about this where it's like, look, the Supreme Court's not supposed to be political, but that's a conservative majority.
How stupid are they dropping that decision basically in the middle of that election?
The Dobbs decision.
I mean, it was just, come on, yeah, it's just, you know, I mean, come on.
And so they're going to try to run that playbook again.
That's what they're going to do.
And they're not going to talk about communist China.
They're just not.
And they're going to talk about Russia, Russia, Russia.
And it's just a whole nother question: what the hell are we doing over there?
We're moving up the escalatory ladder.
But for me, what President Trump needs to run on is MAGA, the iron triangle I talked about.
End of endless wars, which has implications for Ukraine.
We got an invasion on our southern border, and we're a long way from having a strong manufacturing base.
Will that happen?
I don't think so, but that's what's going to make the American people safe and prosperous.
And right now, we're not.
And our political system, man, it's just broken.
I mean, look at my situation.
I'm sure you'll talk about it.
I got put in leg irons by the FBI after being taken down at the friggin Reagan National Airport on my way to do an interview with Mike Ockabee.
I wasn't on my way to Brazil to flee anything.
It was like they're charging me with a misdemeanor.
One phone call they could have called me up.
They've been putting Bannon, trying to put Bannon in prison.
They're raiding Mar-a-Lago.
They got hundreds of people locked in DC prison cells from the Jan 6 thing, which more and more looks like an FBI informant kind of motivated kind of event, kind of an entrapment scheme.
Meanwhile, Hunter Biden is going free, and everybody who was involved in the Russia hoax dating back to 2016 on the Democrat side goes free, and everybody in between.
That is a broken, partisan, weaponized system, but they got their playbook down.
They're going to go in and do what they did in 2020.
They're going to, I call it the grand stuff the ballot box strategy.
I mean, to still do its essence, it's you stuff that ballot box with absentee ballots.
The same time, you take away things like signature match, so you don't know whether those ballots are valid or not, and you just overwhelm a Republican party which is too friggin' stupid to understand that if you rely on game day voting, you're gonna have a lower turnout, because things happen.
You know, parents have sick kids or they have to go to work or whatever.
So This system, this political system, which should be focused on China, but is going to focus instead on things like Russia and abortion, is going to, you know, my greatest fear is that we're going to lose the one last opportunity we have to save this country.
And that's not dramatic.
That's not hyperbole.
It's just, I mean, I've seen it.
I mean, I've lived this thing.
We're in a stagflationary 1970s environment threatened by communist China.
And, you know, it's like nobody's paying any attention to that.
Except the show.
Let me ask, and I appreciate it.
Kudos to that.
Yes.
Thank you for that.
And Peter, question for you.
That was a good question you asked there, Adam, to go into that direction.
I want to wrap up the conversation about tariffs.
I really want to understand this tariff and what it does.
Do you think, how long do we put those strong sanctions and tariffs on Iran?
What was the timeline of that?
Well, they're still on.
Okay.
Yeah.
And is it still as— The tariffs are irrelevant to Iran.
It's more just the financial sanctions on oil, right?
And the thing you have to understand about financial sanctions and oil is oil is priced in U.S. dollars.
And as long as oil is priced in U.S. dollars, Iran can be hurt by that.
But the problem now is we've got the Saudis flirting with the communist Chinese and agreeing to trade in Yuan, which is the Chinese currency.
And that provides an opening for Iran and the Middle East to, you know, if we stop trading worldwide oil in dollars, that has its own implications.
Do you think the sanctions and the tariffs that we had on China, on Russia, on Iran, all these that we had, do you think that unified them?
Because they all have to do that.
So Russia, China, Iran, Saudi, and even maybe Brazil, they're all looking at saying, oh, let me give you an example because you just, I thought you were going in a slightly different direction.
It's like when Rocketman in North Korea was giving us such a friggin hard time and the boss wanted to bring Rocketman under control, we slapped sanctions on them and told the communist Chinese, you know, like, don't be giving them oil and anything like that.
Otherwise, we're sanctioning you.
We didn't enforce that stuff.
And we could see it.
You talk about, I mean, I can tell you something from the top secret briefings because it wound up in the New York Times eventually.
You could see like these ships that would go out.
The Chinese would send it to Vietnam.
The tankers would go out in the middle of the ocean and then they'd switch them and then off that oil would find its way to North Korea to heat the palace of Kim Jong-un.
Well, people in North Korea starve and freeze.
But the point is that unless those sanctions are hard and tight, like a Nolan Ryan fastball, all you've done is create this alternative currency monster, which is where we're heading now, sir.
Okay.
So we can skip that part because in my own mind, I just kind of wanted to know that some of those tariffs maybe unified our enemies and now they got stronger and they're realizing, you know what, here's how we're going to deal with.
The tariffs, the sanctions, sanctions.
It's a separate matter.
It's a totally separate matter.
Tariffs.
What's more painful?
Well, it depends on the country.
For Iran, clearly, financial sanctions.
Because they don't trade a lot in other goods, right?
When did they remove?
They're still on.
They're still on.
Yeah, there's some form of sanctions still on Iran.
Because, look, if Iran gets the bomb, Israel is maniacally and rightly focused on making sure that Iran doesn't get the capability of dropping the big one because damn well they'll use it.
But Iran, I mean, look, communist China is at the top, right?
I think Iran is more dangerous than Russia, far more dangerous.
Because they basically, we went in with a stupid endless war in Iraq, and now Iran basically controls Iraq.
Dangerous in what regard to the world, to the U.S.
Yes, absolutely.
Because they want to kill the great Satan.
I mean, there's no question about Iran wanting to take down the United States.
I mean, go back to Komey's statements about the Great Satan America, right?
And they're basically a breeding ground for, and what I fear from China is not nuclear weapons, right?
No, that's not the way they're going to do it.
They're going to do it through this unrestricted warfare techniques, blockchain technology to disrupt our financial system, viruses to take out our electric grid and other types of capacity.
We haven't even talked about the Wuhan virus.
Yeah, I was going to say actual viruses.
Yeah, I mean, look, they learned, boy, the dangerous lesson from what Communist China spawned in that lab, and it came from that lab, is that the American democracy seems extremely more vulnerable to disruption by viruses than other countries.
We just, at the end of the day, you look into, you could quarterback this.
We just did not handle that properly.
And we were lied to.
I mean, I go off on Fauci for, I mean, I don't know if you read my last book, The Taking Back Trump's America, but there's a scene in the situation room where I first meet Tony Fauci on January 28th, 2020.
Now, let's frame that, right?
January 28th, 2020.
Six weeks before all the shutdowns, seven weeks before.
Biden just took office was sworn in eight days prior.
No, This is a year prior to that.
January 20th.
2020.
2020.
This is January of the election year.
Yeah, gotcha.
10 months before the election itself.
Exactly.
Two months.
The year before Biden came in.
Two months before the virus that would take down Trump.
So I'm there.
I wrote, check this out.
2006, in the coming China wars, I write that China is likely to create a virus that will kill millions.
2006.
So when that stuff started coming in over the cable traffic, I'm looking at that in December, and it's like my antenna are up, right?
And the boss sends me to the sit room on the 28th, and he says, get me the travel ban on China.
We got to do that.
And those people in that room are against it.
You know, it was Mulvaney running the room.
He was the acting chief of staff.
Mick Mulvaney at the time.
Mick Mulvaney.
The Republican chief of staff.
Yeah, DC's chairing that meeting.
I walk in there.
I don't know any of these people from outside the White House, right?
So who's there?
Redfield from CDC and Fauci from NIH, right?
Those were the two big players.
I go in there and within six minutes, I'm in a shouting match with that son of a bitch.
And all he keeps saying is with Fauci.
I don't know who he is.
I literally don't even know who Fauci is.
Didn't know who he was.
Didn't know he walked on water.
Wow.
Didn't know he killed tens of thousands of people during the AIDS epidemic and got away with it.
That's another story.
Don't know who he is.
But, you know, it's like somebody walks in here and sits down here.
You don't know who he is and you start interviewing.
What do you do?
You take their measure, right?
And my measure, Fauci, was this dude thinks he's a whole lot smarter than he is, and he's an arrogant son of a bitch.
This is within the first six minutes.
Six minutes.
Sounds like an Antonio Brown interview.
And one of the things I'm good at is taking the measure of people pretty quick.
Boss is good at that too, Trump.
And I'm thinking, what?
And so I fight with this guy.
Mulvaney, I'm fighting with him.
Redfield comes in and supports Fauci, and we leave that meeting with Mulvaney tries to say, all right, we have a consensus.
We're against the travel ban.
I said, no, Mick.
There's no friggin' consent.
I just like that.
No, no, no, no, Mick.
There's no consensus in this room.
And Pottinger finally says something.
He's a National Security Council.
And what I do that night is I go home and I write a memo that I'm going to plaster to the entire task force and broad chain that says that if we don't do this, if we don't do this, this virus is capable of killing half a million Americans and costing us trillions of dollars.
January 28, 2020.
And that's about the best memo I've probably ever written because it was spot on.
And here's the punchline.
Fauci, when he was sitting there, that SOB knew for a fact that that virus came from the Wuhan lab.
He knew that because he had funded the gain of function research in that lab and he had already begun to design a cover-up.
And we know that from the emails he sent to a group of researchers, academics, trying to get their support to push that come from nature theory.
And that's the biggest lie of omission in American history.
Because if he had simply owned up to the fact that that thing came from the lab, we could have pressured the Chinese to give us the genome sequence, which would have allowed us to design an effective vaccine rather than the crap we wound up getting.
And again, Trump got lied to about that, not just by Fauci, but by Pfizer, the drug company.
In what way?
They didn't disclose the side effects of that.
And they weren't clear with him.
They made him think that it was a true vaccine when it's not.
It's mRNA technology.
And, you know, I worked with a guy named Dr. Robert Malone.
You have him on the show sometimes.
Yeah, yeah.
It's like the way I, I mean, Malone was out there beforehand, but I had him on Steve Bannon's war room when I was guest hosting.
He sat kind of like you and me are sitting, Patrick.
And we talked about all this and wound up writing a three-part series in the Washington Times about how the universal vax policy would basically spawn mutations that would be more lethal.
Oh, you don't have to get too much in that.
But my point is that, is that that day, that January 28th day, was a very significant one, overlooked in the history of the pandemic and in American history, because Fauci was there.
He opposed the president's travel ban.
He lied to the American people by not disclosing right then what should have been his, even if he didn't know that it came from the lab, he should have told us it might have come from the lab.
And because he didn't do that, we didn't get the genome.
We didn't get a thing.
And Fauci goes on and sticks a knife in the back of the president throughout that election cycle.
I told the boss to fire that SOB twice.
And what did Trump say when you told him?
Well, the problem was I was the lone voice.
And I don't blame him for not taking my advice in that.
I'm like, what I'm like the trade advisor, right?
And he had like every time Fauci got into political trouble with Trump, Redfield, CDC, Steve Hahn, the head of the FDA, Azar, the head of the Health and Human Services, come to his rescue.
And, you know, I would spend the next, I went from trade czar and Chinahawk to quartermaster.
I was the guy for the next nine months that would try to make sure we all had the masks and the PPE and the hydroxychloroquine before they took that away.
And I'll leave you one last thing on it, which amuses me and pains me to this day.
I used to hold these weekly meetings over at HHS, the Health and Human Services, on supply chain, making sure we had everything.
And every time I walked in there, the place was empty.
Empty.
Okay?
This is like wartime, kids.
Get your ass to the office.
I don't care if you're putting yourself at risk.
That place was a ghost town.
And so, anyway, I...
Did you end up taking a vaccine yourself?
I did.
I did not.
You never took the vaccine.
Okay.
So you got it.
And I'll, you know, why?
I'll tell you why.
I had the opportunity to get the vaccine on my way out.
Okay.
Get my exit medical interview with Walter Reed.
Right.
And it's like I'm looking at the situation and you've got people dying by the tens of thousands, and particularly in the African-American community.
I mean, it was getting hit really hard.
I'm thinking to myself, you know what?
What is this?
It's like, I'm not going to stand up in front of the line just because I'm a White House official.
No, no, let other folks get this.
You know, it's kind of like, it's like you're the last man who leaves the ship thing.
No, no, no, no.
And then, you know, once I got out, I'm a hydroxychloroquine guy.
I don't know if you want to go there.
We don't need to do it.
We end up 50 times.
Yeah, yeah.
But the thing is, it just never got there.
And as more information came out, I think the decision's been interesting.
Let me ask this question.
There are certain personalities that have created a lot of hate and anger towards them, okay?
A lot.
The left has that towards President Trump.
They just have that up.
From day one.
From day one.
Yeah.
And from the day he came down the escalator.
So that's that.
But a lot of people on the right and the center, and even some on the left, have that for Fauci.
They're not fans of Fauci on the way he did a lot of things, right?
Now, you know, according to Guardian, I don't know if you're aware of this or not.
He is the sexiest man alive.
You know, he's been recognized by a lot of people.
He's got some baseball cards.
He's got all these other things, right?
This is a very good looking guy, according to Guardian.
Yeah, I mean, Bradford's got nothing on Fauci.
But the thing here, the question.
The worst opening day pitch ever by anybody.
I don't know if you ever saw that.
You've never seen 50 Cents or something.
No, This was the worst.
You've never seen this one.
Or Obama.
No, Fauci's was the worst.
Plug it in.
Yeah, yeah, get that up there.
He should have been fired right after that.
Yeah.
Anyway, go ahead.
Not Nolan Ryan.
The question I'm asking is the following.
So here's a criticism.
When I'm talking to, if you want to pause it, Rob, because I don't want people to be distracted, I want to say on this question.
We'll look at that here in a minute.
The question or play it for some people that are not curious, just fast forward to the business.
I want to get your judgment to see if 50 Cents.
I've seen it go right there so we can get.
Come on, come play.
By the way, he's out there.
Sunlight.
Are you kidding me?
He had his mask on.
That's a guy with the mask.
That's actually not that.
He was aiming at the camera lady.
You know what he told me?
I knew him.
That's what I crap.
By the way, by the way, his press conferences go the same way.
Yes.
That's the sexiest man alive, right?
According to Guardian, sexiest man alive.
But here's what I was going to ask you.
I was going to ask you, so there's people that are saying.
So there's people that are saying, hey, President Trump, you said you're going to drain the swamp.
Well, you didn't drain the swamp.
We voted for you draining the swamp.
This is literally the conversation that happens when I talk to people.
You did not drain the swamp.
If he was part of Swamp, why did you leave him there?
Why did you keep him there?
So now there's certain people that are sitting there.
The next concern, I call 2023 the Euro investigations.
I call this in December of last year saying this is going to be a year where everybody's going to be going through investigations.
The most viral moment of the debate in 2016 between President Trump and Hillary Clinton was what?
Because you'd be in jail.
Boom.
It was a most viral moment.
And you know what a lot of people said?
Man, we would love for her to finally be held accountable.
Nothing happened.
Hey, you know, Governor DeSantis said, I would have fired Fauci.
I think he said that on the Pierce Morgan show that he did.
Okay.
Now, Anthony Fauci this week, when he was being interviewed, he said, I think we need to stop with this playing game and kind of move on, right?
A person like this that gets away with all of that, what can the president do?
Say President Trump does get elected.
The voters may say, one of the things we want you to do is we want you to investigate the origins of COVID as well as things that Anthony Fauci did, kind of like what we got with Twitter files.
We want to find that out.
Can the voters get something from President Trump to get to the bottom of what happened with Fauci?
Yes.
Look, the big overarching principle here from the Taking Back Trump's America book, which was quite harsh in terms of criticizing my colleagues inside the West Wing and in the administration, the old saw of personnel is policy, right?
That Reagan said you get the right people, you get the right policy.
Well, in the Trump administration, bad personnel was not only bad policy, it was bad politics.
And there were just a lot of people that stabbed him in the back that had been appointed or talked into things that he knows now he shouldn't have done.
Okay.
And when you talk about Hillary Clinton, the two problems we had was Jeff Sessions as AG, Attorney General at the DOJ, and then Bill Barr.
Sessions, I love Jeff.
Wasn't the brightest bulb on the planet, but if he had been Secretary of DHS, Homeland Security, he would have been there for four years and served admirably, okay?
Putting him in at the Justice Department into that shark tank.
He got immediately taken out when he recused himself on the Trump-Russia hoax stuff.
And that left inside the career bureaucrats to deal with the issue, and it never got dealt with, right?
And then Bill Barr comes along.
He's a white shoe globalist Republican who, you know, when the boss appointed him, I just like said to myself, why?
This will end badly.
And it did.
And Barr, for example, the worst thing Barr did that actually cost Trump the election, and it did cost him the election, was not prosecute swiftly the information on the Hunter Biden laptop himself.
I don't know if you know this, but they had, Bill Barr had that laptop over a year before the election, and they just sat on that.
And we know now that that laptop was real, that what's in it implicates Hunter Biden and in all likelihood, the big guy, Joe Biden, in all sorts of 10% of the big guy.
Yeah, I mean, it's like, so and the Trump, Trump administration was riddled with people like that.
In the West Wing, the guys I always had to fight on the trade issue was first Gary Cohn, the Goldman Sachs New York Liberal Democrat.
Why is he there to support Wall Street?
And then Kudlow, who replaced him, and then Steve Mnuchin, another kind of so my point is that the second time will be different.
I am convinced of that.
At the end, the boss had Johnny McEntee running personnel.
And I can think of nobody better than Johnny McIntye to make sure that the people who go in are Trump people and that they know what to do.
And the beauty of a second term is that the learning curve, that's why DeSantis would not be a good, good immediate choice.
There's a big learning curve in the White House.
We have to learn from 2020, okay?
And based on your book, Taking Back Trump's America, Why We Lost the White House and How We Will Win It Back, I'm going to read a couple things from your book and I'm going to get your reaction to it.
So during the home stretch of the 2020 election, President Trump was rocked by one of the worst presidential campaigns in modern history.
You're saying this.
That's your claim.
They ran effectively one of the worst presidential campaigns in modern history with stark contrast to his 2016.
The president himself, I think, did a wonderful job leading the country.
He had a vision, but he frankly was let down by bad personnel that got inside the West Wing and never should have.
Navarre told the Washington Examiner on Monday at a cocktail and press event for his new book, Taking Back Trump's Why We Lost the White House.
And you continue.
But in Navarre's mind, the election should have been a landslide, that they would have likely eclipsed any potential fraud campaign ineptness, morphed Trump's showdown with Biden into something far closer than it otherwise would have been.
And then you continue to talk about the West Wing dumpster.
He has long lamented that the Trump administration was stacked with poor personal choices, such as former Chief Economic Advisor Gary Cohen, former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, and former Chief of Staff John Kelly.
And then last but not least, there was one man in particular whose involvement, particularly Pete Navarro, Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
In 2016, we were significantly outspent by, but the money was used wisely.
And in 2020, we had plenty of money, but Kushner burnt it like a monkey with a flamethrower.
And when push came to shove in the final six weeks of the campaign, we ran out of money.
Navarro said there were young kids over there making six figures.
And then when the pandemic hit, they didn't even work, come to work.
While Brad Pascal was the chief of the floundering Trump campaign on paper, Navarro dubs Kushner as the de facto campaign manager responsible for much of the campaign's chaos in his book.
Slated for release Tuesday, he alleged that Kushner frequently added points to the polls and lying to the boss.
Eventually, Navarro and his allies, backed by Donald Trump Jr., concocted an unsuccessful coup coup d'état of sorts of oust Kushner from his campaign perch, according to the book to Navarro.
Kushner was part of a larger problem in the White House, fueling much of Trump's woes was the reapproachment with the traditional Republicans, the former president pursued during his early White House days.
So, I mean, this is a direct call out of Kushner.
Yeah.
Direct call out.
This is a son-in-law.
This is married to his daughter.
And this is a guy that was on the cover of Time magazine, Family Business.
You know, all the great things he's doing.
He's about 20 minutes from here.
Yeah, he is.
Setting up a money fund and leveraging his experience, such as it was, in the White House, making a ton of money, Middle East, maybe China.
And it was a business to him.
And look, if you talk about the campaign itself, I'll give you a couple of examples.
Zuckerberg at Facebook spent more money in the Battleground States where this election was settled than the Trump campaign did.
Think about that.
Zuckerberg alone spent more money.
You're talking about the $400 million?
It's more than that.
Last time I looked, it was more than that, more like $800 million.
It's a bunch of money and we didn't – look, you talked about me early on running for office.
One mistake I made.
I ran for mayor of San Diego, 92, lost by a percentage point, maybe a percentage point and a half.
The big mistake I made was I spent my money early.
All I had to do to win that race was wait till the last three to four weeks and spend my money then when people were paying attention.
We blew $10 million Super Bowl ads for 60 seconds.
And when the last three to four weeks of the campaign, we had to pull ads from the Battleground States.
And Biden outspent us in the Battleground States on ads when we outraised him.
And this shouldn't happen.
But the bigger problem, Patrick, was the messaging itself.
The message should have been tough on China.
It should have been tough on China.
And I had a beautiful, one of the things I learned, it's like, you know, I go in there, and I'm kind of a rube when I first get there, and they try to bury me.
And that's all chronicled in my In Trump Time book where they try to marginalize me.
I've been on the campaign.
I've been the top economic advisor.
And when I get there, Ryan's prebus the chief of staff and kind of the Rhino wing, they try to just bury me over in the EOB.
So what I did was dig in and learn how power works in the White House.
And the instrument of power in the White House is the executive order and presidential memorandum.
And I learned how to write those things.
And I think I had more hands and more EOs than any other person in the West Wing when the dust settled.
But the one that got away from me that would have swung the election, and it should be passed today in Congress, was an executive order that would have held Communist China to account for the virus.
It called for investigating Communist China's role in the virus and estimating the costs of that virus on the U.S. economy, demanding reparations, and basically just airing this whole thing out.
And I got within a whisker of getting the boss on board with that.
He liked it initially, but he got talked out of it by the likes of Kushner et al., who didn't want to rock the China boat.
They thought, oh, it's like, no, we can't do that now.
But that would have shifted the blame for the pandemic from Trump's shoulders, which was there unfairly, to where it belonged, to Communist China.
And that one got away.
And that's, to me, the ultimate failure of the Trump campaign.
We ran, we forgot who we were.
We were mega and we're tough on China.
We forgot that and we lost.
So with the election coming up, Peter, you've got the American people were hurting on two sides.
One, we were hurting socially because we got the virus, we got vaccines, people we know were passing away.
That's real.
It was very real.
Very real.
But then we also had economic impact.
We see what happened to credit card debt that was later bailed out by the trillions of dollars of printing money and stimulus.
So you're saying at that time, just being tough on China would have swung the election.
That seems like a broad statement with a lot going on with the American voter.
Yeah.
Okay, let's let's.
When was this?
Let's go to the date, January 28, 2020.
You're very specific about that.
When would you have implemented this tough on China?
At what point was that when they said, no, we're not going to do this?
So we can kind of see the mind and the ramp.
You're very specific and you're very convincing.
Show us the ramp into the election from that day.
Okay, let's first make the case that in January 2020, Trump was a lock for reelection at that point.
I think that the strength of the economy.
I don't think anybody would do people.
Nobody would do it.
We all remember the end where the NBA player, Mark Cuban on camera, and the NHL panics and cancels it.
72 hours in February.
It's probably a book someday, 72 hours in February, where life changed for us.
Prior to that, 100% agreement.
Yeah, and just a little side note, I was in the Oval Office with the president, with Kudlow, with Mnuchin, with others, Mulvaney, in early February before all this fell apart.
And they're going like, don't worry about the virus.
It's no big deal.
We got it under control, right?
It's like, there's only, Kudlow goes, there's only four cases.
And I'm thinking, dude, you don't understand logarithmic progression.
You know, there's four today, eight tomorrow, blah, blah, blah, boom.
And one of the problems we had was we didn't signal that we were taking the virus seriously early.
And through the combination of, you know, Fauci became the voice of the administration.
Trump became the guy that the American people held responsible for everybody dying.
And, you know, we did some great things.
I got some great tales in the book about getting Cotton swabs over from a plant in Italy in three days after commandeering Pentagon planes and the cooperation of FedEx.
I mean, we were like, we did as well as we can, but we didn't market it well.
So, my point is that.
You talk about the first chapters of Operation Warp Speed.
Yeah, And my point is that the virus just, everybody blamed Trump.
Okay, let's agree that the American people blame Trump for the virus.
I think that's for the for not handling the virus well, right?
So that was the problem we were dealing with.
The conversation about the election and driven by CNN and MSNBC with their body counts, to a certain extent, Fox was that this is the major issue, and Trump's to blame.
I think that was the sentiment of the country.
And it's like, wait a minute, it's like we're doing a good job if we could get that message out.
But more importantly, this isn't Trump's fault.
This is a virus from a lab in Wuhan that's being hid.
So my thinking was that if we could air that out, that would basically, we were going to drop the report, okay, the preliminary report.
The EO was written.
We dropped a preliminary report in the first week in October.
And that report would be from a group of very distinguished people.
You know, you look at the data, it's like there's no doubt that thing came from the lab.
And that would have, I think that would have helped with that one issue.
It would have changed the dialogue on that.
But that one got away.
You talked about the number of people on the campaign, specifically Kushner, when you're talking about during that time.
In 2016, Brad Pascal was the digital media director.
And then I think in 2020, he became the campaign manager.
Yeah.
In 2016, I recall him being a star.
Everybody was talking about, look, what a great job he did.
But then you're criticizing him for 2020 on what he did.
So what was different about Brad in 2016 versus 2020 with his strategy?
What Parscale did well was handle digital media.
He wasn't running a campaign, mind you.
Running a campaign is a very complex task across 50 states.
I mean, you've got to do all sorts of stuff.
And what he did was one important bucket out of 100.
And the two worst mistakes that Parscale made, it was the same mistake in a way, was when he got on 60 minutes after the 2016 election and effectively not only claimed credit for the win,
you know, it was him, not Trump, that won the election because of his genius, but he also revealed that he had recruited Facebook employees and I think Twitter employees actually work inside the campaign to help them managing their messages on those social welfare platforms.
Okay.
What did that do?
That was like a wake-up, right about this in Trump Time.
That's like a wake-up call to Silicon Valley.
It's like Zuckerberg's getting hate mail.
Dorsey's getting hate mail.
How could you lie in bed and make a bunch of money from Trump?
And Parscale basically planted the seeds of Zuckerberg's counteroffensive in the 2020 campaign.
Look, Brad, Brad's a good guy.
He's a nice guy, but he's a geek.
He sits, yeah.
Again, it's like when the pandemic hit, it was a blessing for him because he could go back to what he did in 2016.
They're very important.
What he did in 2016 was sitting in San Antonio most of the time in front of his computer.
And like this time when the pandemic hit, he was down here in Miami, significantly richer with like a big boat and seven cars.
He didn't even come very often up to Arlington to the campaign.
You can't do that.
Look, look, it's like the analogy I used was like putting a champion place kicker in at quarterback.
Okay?
He was a great place kicker in 2016.
Okay.
He could hit the uprights from 60 yards.
In 2020, you can't put him in the Super Bowl.
That's the Super Bowl, guys.
That's the Super Bowl.
And he wasn't Tom Brady.
Axios, July 28th, 2020 story, 2022 story.
Navarro's dream cabinet for potential second-term run.
Navarro hardcore Trump loyalist gives Axios an exclusive look at the passage containing potential choices for second-term cabinet from his forthcoming book, Taking Trump Back, Taking Back Trump's America.
Some old gang choices for 2025.
Former Trump National Security Advisor Robert O'Brien for Secretary of State.
Love the guy.
Ben Carson to HHS.
Bob Light.
Instead of the urban.
Instead of HUD.
Yeah, which was like, come on, give me a break.
By the way, if Carson had been there when the pandemic hit, we would have been a lot better off.
Go ahead.
I think a lot of people agree.
Bob Lighthezer.
Lightheiser, yeah.
Lightheiser to commerce.
Kash Patel to Director of National Intelligence.
John Ratcliffe to CIA Director.
Ken Cucellini returning as head of Homeland Security.
Oh, he went over the DeSantis cart, so I got to rethink that.
But go ahead.
Dan Broilitt in second term of energy.
Linda McMahon to HUD.
David Barnhart in second term of interior and for new blood with strong Trump loyal tiles.
Judge Gene Janine Pirow, a Fox News Attorney General.
Some say she may not have a job for too long of a time.
Her and what's her name?
Bartaromo.
Bardaroma.
Yep, that's the name for.
I'll make that spin, but go ahead.
Okay, former Congressman Sean Duffy to head transportation.
Love him.
Bill Gertz for DNI or CIA.
Oracle CEO, Safra Katz or Laura Trump as UN Ambassador, and Mike Pillsbury, Frank Gaffney, and Brian Kennedy as ambassador to China.
So any other names you would say that, and by the way, this is for the cabinet.
Right now, for him to win.
For the West Wing.
Right.
Right now, for him to win 2024, do you think he has the right people on his team today to win 2024?
Yeah, so far, yeah, but it's early in the campaign, and there's a lot of demands on President Trump now.
One of the things that really worries me is he's got this think tank.
It's not his, but they're using his name to raise a bunch of money.
It's run by Brooke Rollins, who was a good friend of Ivanka and ran the Domestic Policy Council in the final months.
And half of the people or more at that think tank are never Trumpers and documentingly so.
It's like, what the hell's going on?
There's just a lot of people measuring the drapes now on the outside.
And, you know, my counsel to the boss over and over is going to be, you know, your most important decisions will be personnel initially.
And we can't let history repeat itself there.
What would you say were, you know, you always hear if you work for President Trump, loyalty is at the top, right?
It's very important to be loyal to him.
What other things you think he values to get people on the inside?
Well, he doesn't suffer fools gladly.
I mean, look, you got to have the smarts and the loyalty.
That's the combo.
And he's a very some of the greatest times I had in the Oval Office were when we were debating complex policy issues or in the Roosevelt room with groups of top advisors where he'd go around the room and listen.
And, you know, if somebody started saying something that wasn't smart, he'd cut them off.
Or if he, you know, he has an eerie way of finishing your thought.
He can see kind of he moves things along.
But in 2016, after he won, there wasn't a lot of developed talent at that point because nobody thought he was going to be able to run.
And there was some problems we had early that paved the way for rhinos to get into positions of power.
I mean, I like Reince now.
And by the time Reince got fired, he was on the Trump train.
But when he first came in, he wanted no part, no part of anything related to getting tough on trade.
He was a strict Paul Ryan, Wisconsin Republican.
They just wanted to pass a tax bill and repeal Obamacare.
They talked the boss into that, and it was a disaster because they couldn't deliver the votes.
So point is, bad personnel is bad policy.
And I would be remiss here.
I've been good about not mentioning this, but let me just say that, you know, I'm canceled right now.
I appreciate you having me on your show, but I'm canceled on places where I used to go normally, like CNN, MSNBC, Fox News.
And what I've discovered, and this is why this is a great entrepreneur show, there's this thing, this Substack thing, that has enabled me to speak directly to people in a way which helps me raise money also for my legal defense fund.
It's a million-dollar fight I'm in.
But it's peternavar.substack.com, peternavarro.substack.com.
And what I'm trying to do with the substack is about three times a week, I'm putting out op-ed-length missives on issues related to communist China, the economy and the financial markets, which speak to my strength as a macroeconomist and my Harvard PhD, things related to Fauci, and then just all things, Trump 2021.
We have the link.
We've posted it four or five times already.
I appreciate it.
Can I ask a question on the personnel?
Sure.
We're talking about Trump's personnel.
Yes.
And for the audience, Brace for Impact.
You may or may not like the question, but this is a direct question to you.
Trump prides himself on hiring the best.
He's like, I do the best.
I hire the best.
The apprentice, you're fine, all that, all that.
So, you know, I had a conversation one time with former chief of staff General John Kelly.
And we had a cocktail.
We were at a financial conference.
He was the guest speaker.
And I candidly asked him a question.
I said, what did you enjoy the most about working for President Trump?
And what did you least enjoy the most?
Or what was your biggest issue with him?
He goes, my biggest problem with President Trump was that he was not willing to listen to experts.
This is his former chief of staff, General John Kelly, telling me this.
This is what he's saying.
Okay.
We just went down the list.
Gary Cohen, Mick Mulvaney, General Mattis, General Kelly, Bill Barr, you said it was potentially a bad hire.
Even Mike Pence at this point is not exactly in best favor with Trump, although I think he was a very loyal vice president.
John Bolton, not exactly a fan.
If Trump is elected again.
Yes.
How much should he actually listen to experts and how much should he go with his gut?
Like you even gave the example of you think that Fauci lied to him, right?
Who he keeps around him.
So if you're Trump.
But he didn't know that at the time.
Right.
Well, you never know if someone's lying to you up front.
Like you kind of find out in the end.
But to be clear, if Trump gets elected again, how much should he trust the advisors around him?
Who should he, we just went through this list versus just kind of go with his gut and do it by himself.
What do you recommend?
So I had an interesting relationship with John Kelly.
I admire a man who puts on a uniform and puts his life at risk out in places like Afghanistan and has it and basically sacrifices one of his sons to that war because he lost a son there.
Kelly was not suited for being chief of staff in the Trump White House.
He should have stayed at the Department of Homeland Security.
He understood border security and national security issues, and he would have done a good job there.
But when Kelly came in, he committed the Corey Lewandowski-Dave Bossey ultimate sin was he didn't understand to let Trump be Trump.
And letting Trump be Trump means actually being able to listen, not just to experts, but to everybody.
And what Donald Trump loves to do every day, he's got a discipline.
He's the hardest working man in show business.
Trust me on that.
What he loves to do every day is scan all of the media.
He reads everything.
He's watching TV, picking up all that.
And then he's on the phone most of the day, or he's got in-person meetings with people asking him about issues.
And he values people in the streets' opinions as much as he does some of the so-called experts.
And so when Kelly says that, what Kelly means is that he wouldn't listen to some of his advisors who he figured out pretty early on weren't on the Trump train.
And Kelly wouldn't let him listen to others.
I mean, Kelly used to eavesdrop on conversations.
And see, what the boss would do at night, you know, if you wanted to talk to the boss, and I had to do this a number of times, it's like Kelly wouldn't let you talk to him.
So I just called him a night.
And then the next day, it's like, Kelly, what did you call the boss for?
He says, I had to talk to him.
I'm an assistant to the president.
I'm a highest rank.
I don't report to you.
I report that you have that conversation.
But the point is that that's a bad rap.
That's just wrong.
And Kelly's mistake when he came in is he fell in with the wrong people, particularly on the trade issue.
I mean, he went right with Mnuchin and Cohn and Rob Porter at the staff secretary office.
And they did everything possible with Kelly helping him to stop the stealing aluna tariffs, to stop the China tariffs.
And the boss looks up like six months later and he goes, you know, where's my Peter?
That was his rallying cry.
He pulls me in.
There's a famous scene in the book about how I go in there monoimana with Gary Cohn, and it's like the boss finally says, no, we're going to do this, and we did it.
And then shortly thereafter, Cohn's out the friggin' door.
But that was Kelly's fault because Kelly tried to wall the boss off and wall people like me off who supported the Trump stuff, which he viewed, frankly, as dangerous.
And he went with the regular line.
And, you know, that's the sad thing was there's a poignant moment in the book where we're sitting in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and it's like one of Kelly's last days.
He's no, he's out the door.
He's sitting right by me and he apologizes.
And he basically says, you know, it's like, you were one of the good guys, and I'm sorry I didn't get that right.
And I said, you know, John, that's cool, man.
We're good.
Quick follow-up.
I totally appreciate having people that are on your team on the Trump train, certainly in your cabinet.
But not sync offense.
That was my question.
Willing, like, I argue with the boss as much as I agree with him.
Right.
Okay.
I'll go in and tell him, tell him stuff that he might not want to hear.
But he respects that.
He respects that.
That's why I was able to stay so long because he knew when I came in there and told him stuff, I wasn't bullshitting around.
I just looked him in the eye.
This is what I think.
Right.
And so, yeah, I guess, how do you not insulate yourself with yes men versus people who are on your team, but who also give you critical feedback when you're not making the business?
He dopes that out.
He dopes that out quickly.
Yeah.
I mean, he was like, he gets these people in there and then he's stuck.
I mean, Mattis, Mattis, that guy, he sets up, again, he's a general.
You admire his service in the field, but he wasn't trained to run the Pentagon.
He goes over there and he walls himself off.
He won't accept the appointments of anybody we send over to him.
Instead, he wants to put in a bunch of liberal Democrat folks.
And the biggest thing that I fought him on was in order to get steel and aluminum tariffs passed, and we need a steel and aluminum industries in this country, we had to have buy-in from the SECDAF, the Secretary of Defense, on the Department of Commerce, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross's effort.
And he fought us on that.
And the boss is going, I remember there's a this did not, this did not turn out well for me over time because I took I would take a lot of heat from these guys.
But he brings me up boss, brings me into the Oval and he's got Mattis and Rex Tillerson there, the Secretary of State yeah, and he's all these names.
It's like the greatest hits I've ever heard.
He's going, he's going, he looks at and Rex was outgunned by the position from day one.
Yes but but, but he goes, he goes.
Peter, tell these guys why we need to put tariffs On South Korea, please, and renegotiate that deal.
Would you tell me that, please?
And it was like, it's like, guys, it's like national security is economic security.
Economic security is national security.
If we keep letting the Koreans get away with all the unfair trade and putting our pickup truck industry and our auto industry out of business, we're not going to have the plants or the government revenues to make your tanks and planes.
And by the way, Rex, we're not going to have the status as a superpower if we're diminished by that.
That's those guys, those guys.
Someday I've got to publish this thing.
It's just a short letter from Kelly to me, Chief of Staff Kelly, when I was like as a White House advisor, I was in charge of foreign arms sales.
Okay.
They were like dragons.
So the idea is that if we can sell F-16s to Bosnia, right, that's a good deal for the American people because it creates jobs and it also outsources some of our defense obligations.
Like we don't have to be there.
They'll do it for us.
And Mattis's office was giving me hard times.
I kind of like, next thing I know, I get this email from Kelly.
It's like, stop.
Navarro, what was it?
What the hell do you think you're doing?
General Mattis.
You strikes me that.
It's a CCTV.
What the hell did you think you were doing?
I was doing Trump's desire because he had told me to get those foreign arms sales going.
And that's the job of a White House advisor, by the way, John, to use the power of the White House to move the Trump agenda.
And I looked at that and I was like, oh, fuck.
Yeah, it's like, and I just kept doing what I was doing.
But that's the kind of dynamic in there that, you know, it's like.
Let's transition into a couple other stories.
Sure.
That was very helpful.
We got a few more minutes.
I want to do a couple of stories.
So Abby's fun, by the way.
Yeah.
You're fired up.
My life is great.
You guys have some fun on this show.
And you haven't even had any chocolate.
Oh, I had a few bits before I got in.
You said that dark chocolate?
That's a long.
It's going.
That's a long, slow burn.
It's nice.
It keeps you going.
We'll get you chocolate after this.
So Abby Grossberg, Abby Grossberg, who she works at Fox.
She was working under Tucker, I think at one point.
She was their senior booker.
I don't think her and Tucker have ever met.
She criticizes Tucker, what the environment's like.
They don't care about telling the truth and they don't care about women.
This is what she said of Fox News.
All they care about is ratings and revenue, right?
That's her.
Now, the exchange came about where your Ari Melber, I think eight days ago, you've been on Ari multiple times.
You guys have had some good exchanges together.
And he shares a recording.
And here's what he says.
I want to get your thoughts on this.
So recording February 27, 2021, you say Trump also has to clean up the people who surrounded him in the final days of administration and who are crowding him now at Mar-a-Lago.
Like tens of millions of dollars left in the campaign that they didn't spend in time to challenge the election issues.
And oh, that was criminal.
Abby Grossberg says, what happened to all that money?
Navarro.
Well, now they're going to, I'm going to name names.
Bill Stapian.
Step in, yeah.
Stapian, Justin Clark are the campaign guys now that they'll go on the payroll and they'll spend that money and it'll go right into their pockets.
Brad Parskill might get some of that as well.
It's crazy.
So one thing we're learning about Abby, if you're ever talking to her, just assume there's a recording going on and she's recording a conversation.
But what happened if you don't mind sharing?
Because as much as I like Abby and I interacted with her only when she was Barta Romo's producer before she got with Tucker.
Is she trusted?
The idea, she's very good at what she does.
And I can talk a lot about how the problem at Fox, but let me just say that she had no business recording me without telling me.
And by the way, I don't mind.
When I say something, I consider it to be on the record.
These reporters say, well, you want to do background.
No, no, no.
It's like, here it is.
I'm just, I'll tell you that.
But I think what's interesting about Abby Grossberg and my interactions with her as a frequent guest on Barta Romo's Sunday show was kind of the progression of my cancellation from Fox.
You know, when I first got out of the White House, I would go on Bartiromo's show like I did when I was in the White House.
It was like no big deal.
But what would happen afterwards, it's like Abby would put me in.
Maria would want me on, and some other producer somewhere who should have had no business intervening would say, no, he can't do that or he can't talk about this.
There was one case, and this is breaking a little news, where I actually recorded a segment.
I think it was on Fauci.
And it was, I mean, if you play that today, it was like fidelity.
I mean, it was just so spot on.
But for whatever reason, it was too hot to handle.
They canceled it.
They took it out of the lineup.
And they did it at such a late date because they taped the show and then they put it together just before airtime that they had like a gap kind of at the end from it.
But what that tells me is that the sensors at Fox were the never Trump wing of the Fox News Network, which is large and larger now, was already beginning to work their magic.
And Abby was caught in that because she was trying to do legitimate, hard-hitting news that would appeal to the Fox viewer.
And she wasn't being allowed to do that.
I don't know what happened with the Tucker stuff.
I love Tucker.
I don't want to get in the middle of that, but I do know when she was working for Bartiromo, the Fox News producers with orders from the second floor.
That's what they'd always say.
It was from the second floor.
Who's that?
That's Suzanne Scott, who runs the network, and Lauren Petterson.
Most powerful person in media.
Suzanne Scott and Lauren Petterson.
Don't count her out.
She is more of a snake than Suzanne is.
Suzanne will tell you to your face.
Lauren will just stab you in the back.
So numbers came out, Fox News, first week.
Viewership dropped 29.6%.
First week.
Dropped 29.6%.
Since the firing of Tucker?
Since the firing of Tucker.
29.6%.
That's a lot of numbers right there.
After paying $750 million.
$787.
$787.
So on top of that, you have to find that you're being paid.
Joe Biden's writer writes one of the best jokes where he's at the White House, then whatever correspondence centers, well, you know, there's a lot of NBCs here that owns MSNBC and, you know, Dominion's here that owns Fox News.
And that's a good joke that he says.
And, you know, great job to the writer.
And you have to tell those jokes.
These are jokes that you have to say with what happened.
What are your thoughts, one, with what's going on at Fox, and as well as any thoughts you may have with Tucker?
Not related to Abby, just Tucker himself.
Well, again, a little breaking news for your show in terms of my cancellation.
With Tucker, I was on Tucker every once in a while.
But he had scheduled me twice to come down to his Florida Fox Nation studio to do the hour-long special, kind of like this.
And both times those got canceled.
And at the time, I was wondering whether it was part of the broader cancellation of Fox.
But now I'm sure of that.
So I'm kind of wondering how he let that happen in some sense.
I mean, I got pulled on my way to the video truck from Janine's show twice.
So I think Tucker, I think Tucker was really pissed off at the restraints that Fox was trying to put on him.
And I think that probably led him to even fight harder for what he wanted to say, which kind of escalated the whole thing.
But look, Fox, I think Fox will be just more than happy to let Fox News kind of fade sort of into the sunset.
They'll have like a steady thing.
Cable TV is, I mean, this is the future right here, right?
It's a streaming model.
The Fox Audience demo is a cable news, very old demographically.
It's like the Chinese population.
It's kind of literally dying off.
And they'll make all their money off Fox Sports, which is a bonanza, and Fox Entertainment, all the other kind of stuff they do.
But the politics of Fox News is quite simple.
You have the never Trump, traditional, rhino, Republican and name-only wing in control of the network right now with the help of Lachlan and James Murdoch, who are effectively Democrats.
Roger Ailes is gone, so he no longer polices that.
And Fox is never Trump and adopts that persona strictly for business purposes.
That's where the money is.
That's where the Wall Street globalist money, the Pfizer money that runs all the big farmer ads, and they just as soon have Trump go away.
So they stop televising his rallies.
They don't have him on very often.
Surrogates like me, Rudy, Mike Flynn, Don Jr., you know, it's like we're persona non-grata.
Laura, Trump left there.
And I think it's important, you know, look, I urge people now to cut the cord.
There's a frequent guest host on Steve Bannon's War Room Pandemic.
There's Newsmax, which is just up the road from here.
There's the One America News Network.
And then there's just a wealth of podcasts out there that, you know, Real America's voice, which is the one Bannon's on, also has like the young generation, Charlie Kirk, John Solomon at six with kind of the inside scoop.
So my point is that don't watch Fox.
They're lying to you.
They're lying to you until they change their ways.
There's no reason to watch Fox.
Tucker was pretty much the only reason why.
Fox is lying to you.
Oh, yes.
Yeah.
So let's define that.
Hannity.
Look, you got some people that are still brought up.
You got some names.
Look, look, look, look.
The whole election issue, they bullied Hannity and Laura Ingram into kind of like, oh, let's leave it alone.
Let's look at the net.
That was the spin.
That all came from the second floor, came from the Murdoch.
But the lie, look, Fox will still throw red meat on the traditional issues.
But at the end of the day, they're not going to tell you the truth about everything from Communist China, the real truth, to the Jan 6th, to November 3rd, any of that.
They're just not.
And Carl Rose, I mean, you look at Carl Rove, right?
He's like the most powerful person on the air.
And Paul Ryan, the ex-Speaker of the House on the board of directors, is the most powerful person at Fox off the air, besides the family itself.
So do you think Fox and Murdoch, there's a lot of talk.
They're like, oh, they're going to silence Tucker the next 18 months, and they're going to keep paying him on the contract, and they're not going to release him because they're worried he's going to be able to influence the election a lot.
So they're going to have to silence him there.
Let's just say that theory is correct.
Do you think Fox and Murdoch are for DeSantis to help?
Anybody but Trump.
But is it anybody but Trump?
Yes.
Or is it a liberal then DeSantis, then Trump?
No, no, it's anybody but Trump.
Because DeSantis, look, MAGA, right?
First and foremost, what MAGA is, is the strong American manufacturing base achieved by being savvy and tough in the international global trading arena.
DeSantis has no experience in that.
And he's getting a lot of big money from the Steve Schwartzmans, the Larry Finks of this world, who own Wall Street and all the hedge fund money, who make all their money from that.
So it's anybody but Trump.
And that's the way the coverage is going to go.
I mean, I look at, for example, the Sunday show on Fox.
They have Asa Hutchinson on.
The guys like polling at less than 1%.
They give him a platform.
But to your point about Tucker, what's their strategy?
I was on Eric Bowling last night.
Bowling is a former Fox alum who got the same treatment Tucker's getting.
They push him out the door.
And then the next thing you know, they're leaking all sorts of shit to try to, pardon me, the reputation stuff.
And here's the strategy with Tucker.
It's very simple, what they're going to do.
With Tucker, they're going to keep him on the payroll for a while until a couple of things happen.
One is that he signs a non-disclosure agreement so he won't be dumping on Fox when he leaves.
That's one of the things they'd like to get.
And in the meantime, they're going to use the leak machine to degrade his brand so that his options will be less.
Whatever they are now, they'll be less by the time it gets out.
And if you don't believe me, just look at the Lou Dobbs model.
That's what they did with Lou.
Lou was the Tucker of Fox business.
He was the guy with the highest ratings on Fox business.
Tucker's eyes, guy with the highest ratings in Fox News.
What they did with Lou, he was a sacrificial lamb.
They fired him.
They kept him on the payroll.
I think it was for over a year.
And now he's doing a podcast.
And I love Lou, but he's struggling to stay in the top 100.
They degraded his brand.
And so that's the strategy.
The only issue is Lou Dobbs is, what, almost 80?
Tucker's in his early 50s?
He's not talking about right now.
What he's saying is what they did to him right after.
Yeah, but that was a few years ago.
Yeah, but it's the same.
It's not talking about personalities.
He's talking about contract strategy.
Yeah, yeah.
I get it.
But Tucker's a fighter, whereas Lou Dobbs is a little bit older.
It's going to be harder to silence someone that's way more mainstream than Lou Tim.
What was Lou's sin?
Patriotism.
Yeah.
I mean, Tucker, look, Tucker's, you're right on.
Tucker's a bigger.
Absolutely.
Because you're talking about he's 77.
You know, Tucker's 53 or 54.
Yeah, with due respect to Lou Dobbs.
I watch Fox business all the time.
Charles Payne and Neil Cabuto.
I think they're great.
Barta Roma.
Tucker's way bigger than Lou Dobbs.
No, no, no.
I'm just saying.
I'm just saying.
But stay on the next question.
So what if somebody, like the Fox, they learn from what they're doing?
What if somebody offers the model?
What if somebody offers to buy Tucker's current remaining contract with Fox, release him, and sell him?
No, look, the big thing is the non-disclosure.
They don't want Tucker going off and talking about the inner workings of Fox.
He goes over to like, I don't know, Newsmax or Wan America's News.
Those things like immediately their whole viewership jumps dramatically.
Real America's voice brings him in.
I mean, they don't, they have to shut him down.
They have to keep him quiet.
You know, that's what they do.
If you look at what they did with Megan Kelly, whoever, it's like they get them, they force them to sign nondisclosure deals and they leak.
That's the big thing.
They're leaking all sorts of stuff right now to kind of make Tucker look like stories.
They do the same thing that Trump gets.
He's a misogynist.
He's a racist.
He's a this.
He's a that.
You can't believe any of that crap.
There's a playbook here.
Yeah, it is a playbook.
And they're following the playbook.
It's just business and it's scurrilous business.
It's business without ethics or morals.
And that's why I say the people who watch Fox News cannot trust Fox News to tell them the truth.
Well, isn't that politics in general, business without morals and ethics?
That's the same.
I mean, that's politics.
Yeah, but when did politics become the same principles for journalism?
Okay.
Last time I looked, it's called Fox News.
It's not called Fox propaganda, although it should be.
Well, right, yeah.
We can have a whole two-hour podcast about that and CNN.
I got two chapters in the Taking Back Trump's America book on the fall from grace of the fourth estate.
But, you know, I mean, it's like we're.
Ari Fleischer wrote a whole book about that.
He was here a handful of months ago and said exactly that.
Yes.
And I mentioned Ari in my Taking Back Trump's America book because one of the problems we had early on was we lost the guy who would have been a good press secretary and Jason Miller to his own kind of personal troubles.
And then we had a succession of people that never met the standard of the Aerie Fleischers of this world or the Pierre Salingers or some of those really good press secretaries who could handle the media.
We just got handled, but that's another story.
I don't know.
We're going to see what's going to happen there.
I mean, obviously, you know, there is a massive need for something right now.
And if they're not going to release the guy because they're trying to hurt him the next 18 months and spread all these rumors, the text, the white man, you saw what they said about, you know, Tucker's exchange.
Was that how white men fight and all this other stuff?
I don't know if it's going to work.
And I think it could potentially also backfire on them.
But we will see.
We're going to see what's going to happen.
Tom, what is going on with the economy?
I know yesterday Powell said they increased the rates by a quarter of a basis point.
What do you know about what's going on right now?
Well, we have an economist in the house, so maybe we talk about the economy and talk about the Fed yesterday.
Well, as we like to say on this program, Jerome Powell did what he said he was going to do.
He head upstairs and saw the cheerleader and pounded the economy for another quarter point.
However, in his comments, the comments that Jerome Powell made, everyone was expecting him to have a very, everybody reads the statements of the Fed, and we were looking for a moderated statement.
And after this, I anticipate maybe a flat summer.
And he starts talking about manufacturing in mid-year.
Instead, he said, you know, I got to watch this economy because, you know, like training a dog, there may be more firming necessary.
And when he said the word more firming necessary in his comments, everybody, Wall Street got nervous.
And you saw the whole banking sector yesterday.
It wasn't just First Republic contagion.
It was concern that he used more firming may be necessary, which means in June, they think rates may go up.
So what's going on right now?
The most likely scenario, and I'm going to go out and say this.
So this is what I think, PBD.
Everything I've looked at.
I don't think we're going to see a rate increase in June.
I don't think we're going to see it in July because it's every six weeks, folks, that the Fed gets together with their board of governors and they all meet.
And I don't think there's going to be a rate increase than we get all the way down deep into September.
What I do think is we are, and 88% of the analysts on Wall Street believe we're going to have a mild recession that is evident in the November timeframe.
That will push the Fed's hand.
And I believe in December, you'll get your quarter point drop because they'll want to put liquidity into the economy because combination of unemployment and a defined recession.
And unemployment usually goes with recession because people are not employed, not buying stuff, which pulls back GDP.
I think that's what's going on.
I think we're about to have a flat summer, but we did not get the enthusiasm about tamed inflation that we thought we were going to get from Jay Powell.
And he put the next quarter point on there.
And it's not going to help the housing market.
It's not going to help mortgages.
And it's not going to help business liquidity.
There's a big credit crunch right now.
And commercial real estate is in deep trouble.
What do you say about that?
What are your thoughts?
Rob, do me a favor.
See if you can pull up like Bloomberg and see what right now, what the S ⁇ P is doing, whether it's up or down.
S&P's down.
30.
Third of a point.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So yesterday it dumped right after.
So my joke is that the way to be able to afford a house in Palm Beach over the last, I don't know, ever since Powell got appointed was to short the stock market whenever he got on the podium.
And there's been only one time when Jamrone Powell has got on the podium where the stocks went up.
Because even if he's got like good news, he can't, he can't, he's like selling sushi like raw fish, right?
So the guy, you know, it just doesn't make it.
But what you've just laid out is kind of, I think that's like hope is not a strategy.
It's the Mike Tyson thing.
You've got to plan when you go into the ring until you take the first punch in the face.
And we got punches coming at us.
See, here's the way, here's the one thing I can tell your viewers here.
It's like when you're in a stagflation world like we are, which is simultaneous recession and inflation, that's not normal.
You usually have one or the other.
And when you have that kind of macroeconomic condition, Keynesian policy tools do not work.
So if the Fed tries to restrain inflation by raising interest rates like it's doing, it's going to trigger a worse recession.
If it relents, like you're saying, down the road by cutting rates or stopping, it's going to exacerbate the inflation.
And so the Fed is a one-trick pony.
You can't use expansionary and contractionary fiscal policy to control stagflation.
The answer here, and this will be for the campaign in 2024, is the only solution is structural, structural changes in the economy.
And right now, what we need to do in the very short run is for Kevin McCarthy and the Republicans to hold the line and get a deal where you cut back some of those extravagant expenditures by the Biden regime because part of the inflation is what we call demand pull inflation, too much money chasing too many goods.
That would be a good step.
And the other kind of inflation you have is costs push, right?
It's the worst kind of inflation, and that's the food and energy type inflation.
And that's where you need the structural solution.
So you watch President Trump.
He is going to run on the restoration of strategic full-strectum energy dominance so that we can go back to where we were, which was the incredible position of being the number one petroleum producer in the world and a net exporter, determining the price of oil in world markets rather than what we are now where Biden has ceded that not just to Saudi Arabia, but to Russia.
I wrote a substack about this.
This is the kind of stuff I do.
It's like right now, Putin needs $100 a barrel of oil to fund his war machine.
Saudis need $85 a barrel to fund their social welfare bribery machine.
What they do, the Saudi deal is they pay off the people there from throwing them out at knife point by giving them a bunch of government services, right?
And so we're going to have oil, which is going to be $85 to $100.
That's going to drive up food prices for the next two years instead of the $60 barrel of oil we averaged under Trump.
So that'll give you a flavor.
But, you know, if, God forbid, I were Fed chair, I'd be telling the White House and the Congress is, hey, I can't solve this problem alone for you.
You need to take the appropriate steps.
I'm raising rates to control inflation.
And Congress and Joe, you're passing massive spending bills, which we don't need, which are pushing inflation out of control.
Yes, sir.
I happen to agree with you on one thing there is American energy.
No, I'm just messing with you.
Give him tomorrow.
Jesus, by the way, that's a good troll.
Well played.
And I was about to be nice to you.
On energy independence.
And in this room, all of us in this room are all about drill, baby, drill.
Yes.
And because what you can do in Anwar, what you can do in Permian Basin, and we all know you were speaking about the economic viability cost per barrel.
We all know what happens at $60 a barrel.
Below $60 a barrel, we can't do anything in North Dakota with the shale because we have like a $55 extraction cost.
Although we're getting better.
That's right.
Moving targets.
It's come down.
Yeah, I take your point.
By the way, us in Canada with the Alberta Sands, that's why the Saudis six years ago artificially created it down to 45.
Wanted to keep it below the extraction capability of the Alberta Shell and the And Trump got all over them for that.
Correct.
So, number one, energy independence.
You're correct.
So, in other words, for people who are paying attention here, drilling is good.
Sensible drilling is good.
Sensible drilling makes you independent of other people because you can take the oil that we have here first.
And second of all, overstimulus when you're talking about demand pull, that's what people seem to understand.
When you give $1.6 trillion to the American people, they don't put it in their bank account and buy regular consumer staples and get through COVID.
They go out and buy a ton of crap.
Yes.
And it creates its own inflation not only with the demand pull, but also the value of the currency value because you just what you did to M1 and M2 because you threw all this money into the barrel.
Yes.
Last question.
Last conversation.
So you see?
Yeah.
One.
Pope is not a method, but we agree more than you think.
Just so you know where I stand on the climate change issue.
If you believe in climate change, there's only one way to solve that problem.
That's carbon capture on the supply side.
You can't have the American people just unilaterally disarm on the oil drilling and expect India and China and the rest of the world not to stay on carbons.
But anyway, last thing, Tom, I do it.
30% electric cars in California cause your umbrella.
Last thing here.
This just happened yesterday, okay?
New mortgage fees spark controversy.
They were talking about this as a possibility.
It's officially effective.
Mortgage fee at $740 credit.
Before $1,750.
Now, $3,062.
Just because you have good credit.
$250 a month, please.
You pay lesser fee for having worse credit, bad credit.
And this is calculated at a $350,000 mortgage, 20% down.
You're paying $1,300 more fee for being responsible with your credit.
By the way, finance a $350 mortgage.
It's more like $600.
I don't normally have high blood pressure, just the opposite.
But when I saw that, these woke fools are just destroying this country.
They're destroying the economy, the political system, the culture, the judicial system.
And that's why we got to take back Trump's America.
This 2024 election, if we don't take back the House and the Senate with Trump Republicans and the White House, this beat will go on.
It's like they're just, no, no.
Can we play one game for two minutes?
Sell this to me, be a devil's advocate, and sell it.
Now, the common sense makes no sense, but actually try to make an effort, Tom, to sell this.
Or, Peter, how do you sell this?
Okay.
So I'll be Biden.
What was the question?
What are we talking about?
So it's the first thing is, I'm going to help first-time homeowners who are from lower income because mortgage insurance and there's a part of this that adds to your payment.
So I want to help them.
But because it's coming from the federal side, you know, we have to have an offset.
And the offset is going to be other people are going to pay more.
And folks, folks, come on now.
A tax pays for battleships and for social programs and a lot of other things.
And the wealthier people pay more tax than these people.
Think of it that way.
How would you sell it?
How do you sell this?
I'm really trying to figure out like how to do it.
I'm trying to sell it on the inequitable tax base because that's how it's been selling.
Sell this, Adam.
How do you sell this?
Well, you can't sell it because it makes no sense.
I mean, the reason that I think I found issue with this, it's not exactly answering your question, but my issue is, you know, I've made my name, at least in the social media world, about being smart with your money, being prudent with your money, you know, being having fiscal conservative with your money and paying off debt, saving money, investing, put it in index funds, buying REITs, just driving up your credit score, doing everything you should be doing to have a good framework for your finances, and then enter this where it's like, yeah.
Turns out we don't need to do any of that because we'll give you a better loan.
And if your credit score sucks, it's all good.
So to me, it's sort of just the antithesis of what you say.
I'm willing to listen to where you sell something.
How do you sell Obamacare?
Okay.
You can sell it.
How do you sell, you know, how do you sell this?
How do you sell this?
Hey, because you are responsible, you got great credit or $740.
That means you're rich.
So you can afford to pay $1,300 more to the poor man who is not responsible with his credit because that's what we got to do.
It's a noble thing to do.
Just because you have a good credit score doesn't mean you're rich.
Just means that you're not drowning in debt.
You're paying your bills on time.
You're doing what you should be doing.
So you can hopefully become rich.
I know a lot of broke people with great credits.
I know a lot of great people, you know, poor people with credit.
Anyways, Peter, it's been great having you on.
We're going to put the link below to your sub stack, Rob, again, as well as the book.
Folks, if you haven't ordered it yet, go order the book as well as subscribe to Dr. Peter Navarro's Substack as well.
Aside from that, I think today's, what, today's Thursday?
So we've got no other podcasts.
Or we do have podcasts on Saturday.
Saturday morning, yes.
Saturday morning.
Tim Poole.
Tim Poole will be here on the podcast.
I have a podcast.
Tim Poole will be here.
I have a podcast this afternoon.
I've been at Tim Poole's shop out in the Blue Ridge Mountains here where it's like a little more rustic.
Okay.
A little more rustic.
He got animals, chickens running around in the yard, a little dust.
That's cool.
Well, we got chickens here as well, but they're different kinds of stuff.
He's slumming it down here in Palm Beach.
All right.
Very cool.
Well, Dr. Peter Navarro, again, thank you for coming on.
