It’s hard to know which would be worse: White House trade adviser Peter Navarro agreeing with Donald Trump’s attacks on Canada or not agreeing with them but doubling down on them anyway, as Navarro did on today’s Fox News Sunday. UPDATED.
Yesterday, after Trump gravely insulted our allies at the G7 summit, the Liar-in-Chief played the victim on Twitter:
PM Justin Trudeau of Canada acted so meek and mild during our @G7 meetings only to give a news conference after I left saying that, “US Tariffs were kind of insulting” and he “will not be pushed around.” Very dishonest & weak. Our Tariffs are in response to his of 270% on dairy!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 9, 2018
That’s bad enough. But instead of trying to repair any damage with our allies, Navarro deliberately made things worse:
NAVARRO: Chris, there's a special place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad faith diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump and then tries to stab him in the back on the way out the door. And that's what bad faith Justin Trudeau did with that stunt press conference. That's what weak, dishonest Justin Trudeau did. And that comes right from Air Force One.
And I'll tell you this, to my friends in Canada, that was one of the worst political miscalculations of a Canadian leader in modern Canadian history. All Justin Trudeau had to do was take the win. President Trump did the courtesy to Justin Trudeau to travel up to Quebec for that summit. He had other things, bigger things on his plate in Singapore, where you are now, Chris. He did him a favor and he was even willing to sign that socialist communique. And what did Trudeau did -- do as soon as -- as soon as the plane took off from Canadian airspace, Trudeau stuck our president in the back. That will not stand.
For extra Trump-fascism points, Navarro attacked the American press for not being more anti-Canadian, too:
NAVARRO: And as far as this retaliation goes, the American press needs to do a much better job of what the Canadians are getting ready to do because it's nothing short of an attack on our political system and it's nothing short of Canada trying to raise its high protectionist barriers even higher on things like maple syrup and other goods.
Host Chris Wallace confronted Navarro on the fact that the last time he was on Fox News Sunday, he had predicted that no country would retaliate for any sanctions we impose. In fact, Wallace said, “the practical effect” has been that they have raised their tariffs on U.S. products.
Navarro responded by adding Germany and “Angela Merkel’s Europe” to his smear targets:
NAVARRO: So one of my favorite quotes of this president happened just yesterday when he said, we've been the piggy bank for the world and that's got to stop. If you look at Angela Merkel's Europe, you see a continent where we run $151 billion trade deficit in goods every year. Germany has tariffs on autos four times higher than our tariffs on the equivalent German imports here and they sell us three times as many cars as we sell them.
So, on the issues alone, we have allies strategically. But when it comes to these trade disputes, these allies basically are robbing us blind. The president is not going to put up with that. And in terms of these retaliation, I want to get back to the Canadian miscalculation here. …
Wallace did not want to get back to Canada. He moved on to ask about Trump calling for Russia to be allowed back into the G7. Navarro dodged the question then turned it around to attack Canada and Europe again:
WALLACE: But, Mr. Navarro, Russia was kicked out of the G-8 after it invaded Ukraine and seized Crimea. Why does the president think they should, in effect, be rewarded when they haven't done anything to clean up their action, they're still in Crimea, but welcoming them back into the G-8?
NAVARRO: Chris, let me say a couple of things here. First of all, that -- that one's above my pay grade. Ambassador Bolton, Mike Pompeo, the president himself deal with issues like that. But just observationally, I mean, looks what's happening now in Singapore. The president is willing to talk to Kim Jong-un in the hope that we can deal with denuclearization on the Korean peninsula. He's willing to talk with any world leader. And I think the philosophy here is that when we have discussions with world leaders, we should get everybody together so that we can basically hammer some of these problems out.
So I think that the bigger problem here, from my point of view, I'm the trade guy, is that we have a bunch of countries out there, whether it's strategic competitors like China, or allies like Europe and Canada, basically using us as a piggy bank, using unfair trade practices. And my job at the White House is to help the president get jobs, good jobs, manufacturing jobs to the working men and women of America, and we can't do that unless we upset this existing world order, which basically is tremendously biased. We'd lose half a trillion dollars a year of our wealth every single year because of these unfair trade practices, and that's what the president is aiming for.
Watch Navarro’s Trump toadying and allies-alienating below, from the June 10, 2018 Fox News Sunday.
(Transcript excerpts via FoxNews.com, with my emphases added)
6/13/18 UPDATE: Navarro has apologized, as per CNN: "In conveying that message, I used language that was inappropriate and basically lost the power of that message," Navarro said at the Wall Street Journal's annual CFO Network conference. "I own that. That was my mistake, those were my words."
Further, USA agriculture is OGM-friendly which many countries feel might be risky for human health. We won’t actually know until a couple or three decades from now. Meanwhile, European consumers would prefer not to take that route.
The Donald’s art of the deal is as idiotic as it is transparent. Start asking for the moon as the blowhard bad cop then ooze praise and drop demands to butter up some sucker to close the deal. The EU and Canada aren’t falling for Trump’s bluff and promising retaliatory tariffs. Trump’s game up, he’s wetting his pants and going double down on the bad cop routine. It’s all the one trick pony knows.
This may work in the business world where if you piss off some businessman who’ll never work with you again no worries. There’s another sucker born every minute in the business world. America has a select group of allies we’ve built over many years who we can’t afford to alienate.
The United States is running a trade surplus with Canada. Serial lying Trump could ruin this with the irony being his mid-America base being the biggest losers in a trade war.