Bulwark Takes - Elon Musk Just Torched Navarro

Episode Date: April 8, 2025

Tim Miller and Andrew Egger Talk About How Elon Musk and Peter Navarro Are Clashing Over Trump’s Trade War. Navarro Insults Telsa and Musk Comes Back at Him With Some Facts and Some Insults.

Hey everybody, it's Tim Miller from The Bulwark. I'm here with my colleague Andrew Egger who writes our Morning Shots newsletter, so go subscribe to that over at thebulwark.com. We wanted to talk about the ongoing internal war, catfight, inside the White House between one-time shadow President Elon Musk and Trump's tariff guru, Peter Navarro. I want to play the clip of Navarro that started all of this. But first, Andrew, do you just kind of want to set the scene for what you see is kind of happening there and what the maybe significance is? It's always been the case that Trump likes to do this like gang of rivals thing, team of rivals thing, right? Where he assembles a bunch of people. Some of them have divergent opinions on different things. They're going to fight it out.

Team of weirdos. Team of cranks. Right, right, right. We got to upgrade it. I don't know, something. Yeah, his words. Not his words. But yeah, exactly.

These people are at loggerheads. The weird thing about this time around is the White House has taken real pains, basically, as far as messaging is concerned, all along to pretend that's not happening. You will you will constantly get these headlines of these like behind the scenes squabbles. And the White House will always put out a statement. Carolyn Leavitt will comment to the piece like this is all a bunch of fake news baloney. Everybody's on the same team. Everybody's rowing in the same direction. We're all on the same page. This is the first time that has really started to kind of spill out just very nakedly and openly in public. Yeah. We have some childish name calling coming, so stick around for that. But first, I want to play kind of the clip that kicked us all off. When it comes to tariffs and trade, we all understand in the White House and the American

people understand that Elon's a car manufacturer, but he's not a car manufacturer. He's a car assembler in many cases. If you go to his Texas plant, a good part of the engines that he gets, which in the EV case is the batteries come from Japan and come from China. The electronics come from Taiwan. The tires come. What we want, and the difference is in our thinking and Elon's on this, is that we want the tires made in Akron. We want the transmissions made in Indianapolis. We want the engines made in Flint and Saginaw. And we want the cars manufactured here, it's like this business model where BMW and Mercedes come in to Spartansburg, South Carolina, and have us assemble German engines and Austrian transmissions. That doesn't work for America. It's bad for our economics.

It's bad for our national security. We want them to come here. And Elon is fine. He's a car person. He's a car person. That's what he does. And he wants the cheap foreign parts, and we understand that. But we want him home. We want him home for our national security, economic security, and everything's good with Elon.

In response to that, Elon Musk sent two tweets. The first one was, Navarro is truly a moron. What he says here is demonstrably false. And then he decided that that was not quite significant enough of an insult, and he then followed that up with Peter Retardo.

So there you go. It's very, it's like an Algonquin roundtable in there, Edgar, with Musk going after Navarro. I guess I do have to say, on the merits, it seems like Musk is right. Not the retardo part, but just on the fact that Peter Navarro doesn't know what he's talking about. Peter Navarro doesn't know what he's talking about with regards to tariffs and doesn't know what he's talking about with regards to how Musk builds the Teslas. But and yet, you know, not ideal, I guess, to have him out there. How grisly is it now that after everything that's happened in the last couple of months,

we need to look at this new story and be like, you know, the one who's making some real good points here is Elon Musk. The president should listen a little more to him. No, I mean, there's a couple of things. One is that on this particular issue, Musk is on the outside looking in as far as the administration is concerned. Peter Navarro totally has Trump's ear because they are completely simpatico as far as their own sort of deep feelings, bedrock beliefs about what trade and tariffs do. I mean, Navarro is just an advisor. He's a czar.

But he's the guy. He is the guy who is completely Trump's soul brother when it comes to trade in these tariffs. So Elon is kind of barking about that. You can see why he's frustrated. It's his business. And I mean, Peter Navarro is correct that Elon Musk's business interests are totally at risk in all of this stuff. Him and every other business owner who relies on any kind of outside inputs in the whole country. Right. So the other the other thing is just, though, that that. As we've been talking about Elon, I mean, like the ticking time bomb with Elon all along has been OK, Trump has this guy on his team who is rowing in the same direction as him, who has a lot of who has helped him out tremendously,

has opened him up to, I think, a subset of voters that were not core MAGA people going into 2024, right? Some of these like younger people, some of these bro-y people. It's not, you know, a gargantuan subset, but like Elon helped a lot of these people like transition to Trump and gave him a bazillion dollars and all this stuff. But now Trump has this guy around who is his own outside messenger, right? Everybody else in Trump's orbit is a moon to Trump's sun completely. And Trump can, Trump can like blot them out off the face of the earth at any time, as far as like their importance in Republican politics is concerned, or just politics is concerned.

Elon Musk is not that way. Elon Musk has his own independent thing. He has his own gigantic megaphone. He owns Twitter. He owns X. I mean, like, like, it is not it's always been sort of like, I wonder what happens if Musk and Trump kind of actually get at loggerheads about important stuff, like a potential kind of economy capsizing trade war might be. So we're very early in that. We don't really know where this is all going to go.

Obviously, right now, Musk is just blowing off steam, specifically at this sort of lesser light, this guru, Peter Navarro. But it's not clear. I mean, like plainly he is no longer on script as far as like no fire inside the administration is concerned. And so who knows? Who knows where it goes from here? Yeah. Also, Musk has no filter and like is tweeting at all hours of the night.

Who knows what that's fueled by? But like so that is that has always been the interesting thing. And to me, it was always kind of like the thing Musk had on Trump. Like a lot of people always say it's like the money, right? That in some ways he's as heavy putting a lot of money into these races. And there's something to that. Like Musk, you know, has a financial stake in Trump to a greater degree than any of the other kind of past people. You know, it's not like in the first term when Trump got pissed at Scaramucci or Reince

or something like, you know, that was going to cost him 200 million in midterm, you know, investments like, you know, Elon is unique in that sense. And yet there are other rich guys out there. The way that he's truly, you know, sui generis is like the fact that like he if i mean if you undecided that like trump was crashing the economy and he's been being an idiot about it and decided to start and that he wasn't listening to him and decided to start popping off publicly i mean that would be a cat five storm for the administration and like we're just seeing the tiniest little hint of what that would look like here and i think a lot of people have underestimated the kind of the tail risk of that just because there's this there's this idea that what Elon is doing is sort of like putting on a performance of some kind in this sort of like like deep plot to, you know, insinuate himself with the White House and basically prop up his own business interests and get a zillion contracts and kneecap all of his competitors and so on and so on.

And I think there is some of that going on. But I think that that narrative undersells pretty significantly how much, like to your point, Elon is just going. Elon believes in a lot of in his own projects extremely deeply with that kind of like tech bro glazed eye zeal. He believes in Doge that way. He believes in the Trump project that way. He believes in all the anti-woke stuff that way. But he does not believe in this trade war that way. In fact, it seems very, very much the opposite. Exciting

to watch. Okay, I've got one bonus thing for everybody. It's not really directly connected to the story, but it's just so fun. And if you don't know about this, you really should. Andrew Egger, do you know about the very well-documented economist Ron Vara? No. You know about Ron Vara? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. He's got a long track record of white papers, peer-reviewed studies. And Peter Navarro, over the course of his 13 books, cited Ron Vara in five of the 13 books.

He cited Vara more than a dozen times. And it turns out Ron Vara is actually just Peter Navarro's alter ego. Ron Vara is an anagram for Navarro. What? Yes. Moonlighting? Okay. his alter ego ron varna is a anagram for navarro what yes lighting okay yes this is a fun story this one story kind of came out like under the radar like in 2020 during the campaign you know and it was like there are a lot of other things on people's minds and and i and i kind of remembered it but somebody re-put it into my feed yesterday and i had to go back and read it again and it is insane yeah no peter navarro uh cited himself in his books but just gave his name an anagram and like didn't you know admit it wasn't like there was a little footnote there's like lol you know or anything he just he just went with it and ron shows up in five different books

so there you go that's the kind of guy we're dealing with uh maybe maybe elon can come up with a play on words of ron vara that in use that uses a childish uh insult uh maybe something for him to consider that is like exactly the sort of like weird little story of like a hidden thing that drives elon absolutely up the wall like he's to start posting about this constantly. Somebody get it to Elon if you can get to him. All right, everybody. Thanks for watching us.

Subscribe to the feed. We'll be back soon. Thanks, Dan Drager. Peace.