A former staffer to President Donald Trump Monday claimed that Peter Navarro—the man behind the tariff rollout—was intentionally left out of White House meetings because of his incompetence.
“What I’m stunned by, I worked with Peter Navarro. I liked Peter Navarro,” said Alyssa Farah Griffin, who served as Trump’s director of strategic communications and assistant in 2020. “But Peter Navarro was actively kept out of key economic meetings in the Oval Office by people like Steve Mnuchin, Larry Kudlow, and members of the NEC, because he often didn’t have all the facts and all the details, and gave half-baked ideas to President Trump.”
Griffin’s description of the aide on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360″ came just before Trump’s billionaire adviser Elon Musk called Navarro “dumber than a sack of bricks, ”a “moron,” and suggested he be called by the slur “Peter Retarddo.”
Navarro, who led the charge on Trump’s tariff plan, has promised the American public that the country will not sink into recession despite the fact that markets plunged early this week and only slightly bounced back Tuesday.
“I’m not surprised to know he is a chief architect of what was a disastrous rollout of tariffs,” admitted Griffin.
Trump’s sweeping taxes have been met with extreme backlash from both parties who claim that the math was faulty and the exaggerated percentages will wreck the economy. Navarro tried to assure the public during a Monday interview on on Fox News’s “The Ingraham Angle.”
He said the market is “finding a bottom now, but it … look, here’s the thing … it’s going to shift over, and it’s going to be companies in the S&P 500 who are the first to produce here. Those are the ones are going to lead the recovery.”
The taxes include a 10 percent base tariff on nearly all foreign trading partners and additional higher tariffs on several U.S. allies.
Griffin slammed the mixed signals coming out of the White House, saying “they do have a messaging problem. Everyone’s saying different things about the end game.”
Trump defends the policy, which was calculated based on an economist who has publicly rebuked the math and claimed that it is “very wrong.”
“We’re going to get fair deals and good deals with everybody,” Trump said Monday. “And if we don’t, we’re going to have nothing to do with them. They’re not going to be allowed to participate in the United States.”
Griffin referenced Navarro’s Monday Financial Times op-ed, titled “Donald Trump’s tariffs will fix a broken system.” While his essay claimed there’s “no concessions” or “deal to be made,” said Griffin, “you have others saying we’re open to negotiations.”
“But messaging is secondary to the policy issue here,” she added. “These tariffs are devastating. And every traditional economist, every Republican economist, for decades would have said that this is something that would hurt wealth in this country, that would have the impact it did on the markets.”
The tariff fallout has divided even the most devoted MAGA members, including conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro, who called the agenda “pretty crazy” and “probably unconstitutional.” Several major bankers and financial leaders, including BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, have also denounced the policy, which he said was “destabilizing the economy.”
Even DOGE leader Musk seems to distrust Navarro and has recently questioned his credentials and even broken rank with the president to stand in opposition to tariffs.
The White House declined to comment on Griffin’s statements but pointed the Daily Beast to Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s recent response to Musk’s criticism: “Whatever. We are the most transparent administration in history, expressing our disagreements in public."
