Elon Musk took multiple shots at Peter Navarro in reaction to a clip of the trade advisor defending President Donald Trump’s tariffs amid steep declines in the stock market.
Musk has remained fairly silent on Trump’s tariff announcement as stocks, including Musk’s
, have taken major hits. Tesla stock fell 10% by Friday, erasing billions in Musk’s wealth. Markets closed
on Friday with the week marking the worst trading week in five years.
Navarro, a senior counselor to the president, has been among the White House officials passionately defending the tariff strategy, insisting a manufacturing boom in the United States is on the way.
In multiple X posts, Musk replied to a CNN clip of Navarro defending the tariff strategy by calling out Navarro for not building “shit” and mocking his education.
In the clip, Navarro spoke with CNN’s Phil Mattingly and argued that past trade deals transferred too much “wealth” abroad.
Navarro argued:
Here’s the analytical issue we’re trying to do under the principle that the president wants to charge those countries what they charge us. As you pointed out, Vietnam has an applied tariff rate that’s much larger than ours, but doesn’t come near the tariff we charge them, so the question is how do you value the following, Phil. So let me count the ways. You’ve got to value currency manipulation, you’ve got to value the VAT tax distortions, dumping, export subsidies, technical barriers of trade, agricultural barriers to trade, quotas, bans, counterfeiting, intellectual property theft, and all of that. So here’s the punchline. If you look at the trade deficit… should the U.S. have chronic and sustained deficits? They should not.
Musk was apparently left unimpressed with the fellow Trump advisor.
“A PhD in Econ from Harvard is a bad thing, not a good thing. Results in the ego/brains>>1 problem,” Musk wrote in a reply to the clip of Navarro.
A PhD in Econ from Harvard is a bad thing, not a good thing.
And just to demonstrate the North Korea-esque nature of our current administration, we get this (source: CNN
) from the White House Press Secretary.
“To anyone on Wall Street this morning, I would say trust in President Trump,” Leavitt said. “This is a president who is doubling down on his proven economic formula from his first term.”
Sure. That’s how all of this works.
If these measures stay in place, and note that the main hope is that this is all some kind of bluff,* this could end up being one of the biggest self-owns in the history of the world.
Wrecking the US-European military alliance, destroying the rules-based international system, and removing the US as the main driver of the global economy will make America weak, not great.
I marvel that anyone thinks any of this is a good idea.
And while many people tried to warn American voters, here we are.
*Think about it: if your main hope is that the person you support isn’t really going to do the crazy-ass thing they have been promising and are actively doing, then maybe, just maybe, you shouldn’t be supporting this guy. And (spoiler alert!) this isn’t going to bring about some new mythic golden age of manufacturing.
Via CNN: Tesla sales plunge 13%.
The brief write-up calls it “the largest drop in deliveries in its history.”
I am reminded of Michael Jordan’s quip, “Republicans buy sneakers, too.” Whether he was joking or not
, the notion that wrapping up one’s brand in politics can have downsides.
It can especially have downsides when your key demographic largely adheres to one side of the spectrum and you decide to go all-in on the other side.
I am also reminded of this.
Musk: I mean, have you Tim Walz, who is a huge jerk, running on stage with the Tesla stock price.. What an evil thing to do. What a creep, what a jerk. Like who derives joy from that? pic.twitter.com/essN7FUZkn
As a messianic narcissist like Putin, Elon Musk detests “Western Civilization” because it incorporates the concept of empathy. He says caring about people is an “exploit” and a “bug.”
— Jim Stewartson, Antifascist 🇨🇦🇺🇦🏴☠️🇺🇸 (@jimstewartson) March 22, 2025
He was specifically talking about taking in immigrants (source: CNN
). The whole interview is here
.
“If they had another four years, they would legalize enough illegals in the swing states to make the swing states not swing states,” Musk told Rogan. “They would just, they would be blue states. Then they would … win the presidential; they’d win the House, the Senate and the presidency.”
[…]
“We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” Musk said, borrowing the term from Gad Saad, a Canadian scholar who is also a frequent Rogan host.
While Musk said he believes in empathy and that “you should care about other people,” he also thinks it’s destroying society.
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit,” Musk said. “There it’s they’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”
The added layer of hypocrisy here is the degree to which Musk revels in the alt-right’s usage of crass humor while constantly deploying the “just joking!” response.
But, you know, Tim Walz is an “evil” “creep” because he used Tesla stock as a political punching bag.
I don’t throw the word around lightly, but this sure looks like an oligarchic response to me: money being more important than people.
This is clearly not a person who should have the power he has been given.
Of course, I suppose some readers might assume that the decline in sales is the Biden administration’s fault, given the horrible economy he left behind, and it is just now catching up with us. As such, Musk’s tethering of himself to Trump is all just superfluous. Further, the fact that Musk and Trump had a massive photo op on the White House lawn was just a couple of bros talking cars, as bros do.
CNN aired a brutal montage of golf-loving President Donald Trump complaining about former President Barack Obama golfing too much as president, after Trump’s decision not to attend a solemn military ceremony on Friday.
CNN’s Abby Phillip introduced the montage on Friday on NewsNight
by highlighting that Trump was currently swinging his clubs while tariffs have led to the stock market taking some big hits. The president has also faced backlash
for golfing instead of attending the dignified transfer of the remains of four U.S. service members at Dover Air Force Base. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was in attendance to greet the remains.
Trump is currently at his Doral golf resort participating
in a LIV Golf tournament. The White House released a statement on Saturday touting the president’s apparent success on the course.
“The President won his second round matchup of the Senior Club Championship today in Jupiter, FL, and advances to the Championship Round tomorrow,” the statement read.
On Friday, Phillip referenced an anonymous White House official tellingThe Washington Post that Trump has reached the “peak” level of “not giving a fuck” when it comes to tariffs and bad media stories about him. The CNN anchor argued Trump golfing amid economic strife is proof the statement is true.
She said:
Donald Trump doesn’t give an F. That’s what one White House official says about the markets plunging over his trade wars. And it appears to be true. As 401Ks and companies suffered today, Trump and his allies, including many of whom cheered him on in the Rose Garden event, were MIA. The House is in recess, and as for Trump himself, he spent the day working on his golf swing, which is interesting considering what he has said about Democratic presidents.
In the various clips from 2015 and 2016, Trump promises he won’t have time to golf when he’s president as he blasts Obama for hitting the links so often.
“Obama, it was reported today, played 250 rounds of golf,” he said at a 2015 rally.
At a 2016 rally, Trump accused Obama of relying too much on “executive orders” because he “doesn’t have enough time because he’s playing golf.”
“I’m going to be working for you,” Trump said in another 2016 clip. “I’m not going to have time to play golf.”
Vice President JD Vance is clapping along with the MAGA faithful to President Donald Trump’stariffs
this week, but in the past he has repeatedly insisted that U.S. manufacturing jobs were not coming back and dismissed efforts to force them to return with tariffs as a futile exercise by “hyper-protectionists,” according to a review
of his social media posts and interviews over the past several years by CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck.
The markets were rattled
after Trump’s plans were confirmed, with U.S. stock futures plummeting in after-hours trading, and continuing to have historically bad days
on Thursday and Friday. Even a number of Republicans
have spoken out
to criticize
the tariffs as causing unnecessary economicharm
.
The CNN article
found that tariffs were yet another Trump-adjacent issue where Vance
, who had once bashed the president as someone who could be “America’s Hitler
,” had radically reversed his previous views.
When Vance was gaining fame for his Hillbilly Elegy memoir beginning in 2016, as Trump was first running for president, he “argued in repeated interviews, speeches and social media posts that automation and technological change were the primary forces reshaping the American economy and said he opposed ‘hyper protectionists’ and their policies,” reported CNN’s Kaczynski and Steck, listing several direct quotes from Vance that rejected efforts to reverse longstanding U.S. support for free trade:
“So many of these jobs that have disappeared from these areas just aren’t coming back. They haven’t disappeared so much from globalization or from shipping them overseas,” Vance said in a January 2017 interview with Education Week. “They’ve largely disappeared because of automation and because of new technological change.”
Other comments and social media activity from Vance during that time directly took aim at Trump’s trade rhetoric. Shortly after Trump met with manufacturing CEOs in February 2017 and publicly railed against America’s trade deficits, Vance pushed back.
“Can’t be repeated enough: if you’re worried about America’s economic interest, focus more on automation/education than trade protectionism,” Vance wrote…
Even when Vance acknowledged that globalization had caused deep harm in some communities, citing research that linked increased exposure to Chinese imports with strain on local labor markets, he argued that those downsides did not justify a sweeping reversal of US trade policy.
“Now does that mean that we should be hyper-protectionists in our approach to trade? I would argue no,” Vance said at an April 2017 event. “But should we be cognizant of the fact that when you have some of those communities that are really exposed to trade, it can very often harm them or at least cause some pretty negative consequences, even as it might cause some positive ones. I think we have to.”
Vance insisted that it was not possible to “go backwards in time” to bring back these jobs, referred to such efforts as trying to fight “yesterday’s war,” arguing that instead the “solution to that problem” was to retrain Americans for “the 21st-century workforce.”
“Vice President Vance has been crystal clear in his unwavering support for revitalizing the American economy by bringing back manufacturing jobs and sticking up for middle class workers and families since before he launched his U.S. Senate race, and that is a large part of why he was elected to public office in the first place,” Vance spokesman Taylor Van Kirk told CNN.
