President Donald Trump’s trade guru shot back at Elon Musk after the Department of Government Efficiency chief called him “stupid.”
“Look, Elon, when he’s in his DOGE lane, he’s great,” White House advisor Peter Navarro said during an interview with Fox News on Sunday, noting, “Elon sells cars.”
Navarro’s comments follow an unexpected broadside from the SpaceX founder earlier on Saturday.
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In a series of posts on X, Musk ripped into the White House trade guru as someone with more ego than brains who “ain’t built sh-t” and whose Harvard economics PhD is “a bad thing, and not a good thing.”
Musk has long been known for his dim view of Ivy League universities like Yale and Harvard, responding “yup” to a post quoting U.S. economist Thomas Sowell: “In every disaster throughout American history, there always seems to be a man from Harvard in the middle of it.”
“He’s simply protecting his own interests as any business person would do,” Navarro went on. “We’re more concerned about Detroit building Cadillacs with American engines, and that’s what this is all about.”
The trade advisor denied a spat with Trump’s government efficiency czar while also dismissing Musk’s criticism of the new tariffs.
“There’s no rift here. Look, Elon, he’s got X, he’s got a big microphone. We don’t mind him saying whatever he wants,” Navarro said. “But ... the American people need to understand that we understand what that’s all about, and it’s fine.”
A staunch defender of Trump’s punitive levies against U.S. allies and adversaries alike, the White House advisor has appeared in a variety of interviews throughout the past week to stump for the recent measures.
Some of his recent performances have bordered on the bizarre, such as referring to retaliatory tariffs from Canada as a “nothingburger,” describing the new levies as ushering in “the most beautiful, bullish time,” or his verbal attacks against a Sky News journalist that eventually escalated to the point of him threatening to cut a press conference short.
Navarro has gone to bat for Trump in the past, amplifying the president’s baseless claims of fraud during the 2020 elections. In 2024, he also served four months in jail for refusing to cooperate with investigations into the Jan. 6 insurrection.
