President Donald Trump’s senior trade counselor—and fellow convicted felon—Peter Navarro is helping out with the White House’s spin on Trump’s failures.
Speaking to Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Thursday, Navarro claimed that Trump not only deserved to win the Nobel Peace Prize, but that he should also receive the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
“You know, a lot of people, Maria, talk about Donald Trump for the, for the Peace Prize, the Nobel Peace Prize. I’m thinking that since he’s basically taught the world trade economics, he might be up for the Nobel on economics because he—this is a fundamental restructuring of the international trade environment in a way where the biggest market in the world has said, ‘You’re not going to cheat us anymore. We’re going to have fair deals,’” he said.
He went on to praise Trump for his tariffs, which have caused inflation to spike.
“And everything he’s doing has defied the critics. The tariffs have been tax cuts rather than inflation. And it’s just working beautifully,” Navarro added.
Navarro might want to submit that Nobel application soon, considering that Trump’s tariffs are starting to hit consumer goods, like medications and cars.
As for the magical trade deals that Trump keeps boasting about, most economists agree that they’re going to increase prices for U.S. consumers, ostensibly functioning more like a regressive tax than any sort of tax cut.
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Shortly after Navarro’s interview, the future Nobel laureate Trump once again backed down on his threatened tariff hike on Mexico.
The unfortunate result of Trump’s rollercoaster approach to trade policy—threatening and then chickening out—is a constant state of uncertainty. Instability in the global market hurts small businesses, raising costs for consumers and ultimately damaging the United States’ economic credibility.