Peter Navarro, senior counselor to President Donald Trump for trade and manufacturing, during a special Founders Roundtable on Breitbart Fight Club said that President Donald Trump has proven the country could use tariffs to reduce its trade deficit.
“We run chronic trade deficits which exceed a trillion dollars a year. Now, we’ve exported $18 trillion of wealth so far through the chronic trade deficit, and we’ve seen a reduction in our resilience, in our supply chains, our availability. It’s hurt our defense industrial base. It’s a national emergency in every possible way that you could think,” Navarro said in response to Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle’s question about the president’s ability to strike trade and diplomatic deals.
Navarro explained that, during the first Trump administration, “we got a lot of resistance.”
He said that the “free trade RINO [Republican in Name Only] globalist Republicans, the Mitch McConnell types … weren’t buying what we were selling.”
However, he noted that the president has moved to quickly rebalance America’s trade relationship with the rest of the world.
“What the president has swiftly done is make it very clear to the world, they’re not going to cheat us anymore,” he said, adding that the president’s trade deals have brought down their tariffs and non-tariff barriers, as well as bringing in trillions of dollars of investment into the country.
Outside of fixing unfair trade relationships, Navarro noted that tariffs have brought in a staggering amount of revenue.
“Nobody thought when Donald Trump took office that we’d have tariffs in place that would turn a huge fiscal cliff deficit into what’s going to be a paydown through tariff revenues of trillions and trillions of dollars, all without creating any inflation whatsoever,” he remarked.
Navarro explained, “The really important thing burying the lead here, is that we’re in such bad shape fiscally because of Joe Biden and the reckless spending that having $5 to $7 trillion of tariff revenues coming in over the ten-year period, that’s coming up, is the difference between a crisis and a collapse in the bond market and Easy Street. Okay, that’s a huge swing. So the Republicans are going, ‘Wow, no inflation. This is going to help us balance the budget. I’m in, yeah.’”
Navarro has explained on Breitbart News Saturday that tariffs do not cause inflation; instead, he argues that they “cause growth.”
Peter Navarro served four months in a federal prison in defense of the Constitution. His new book, I Went to Prison So You Won’t Have To: A Love and Lawfare Story in Trump Land, is available now for pre-order in hardcover and eBook.
