March 28, 2024

Trump Trade Adviser Warns ‘There’s a Special Place in Hell’ for Those Who Dare to Defy the President



White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said his harsh rhetoric came from “Air Force One.” President Donald Trump had just departed Air Force One at the time of the interview. (Photo: AP)


“You can’t make this stuff up. The collapse of U.S. governance before our eyes.”


06.10.2018

After President Donald Trump drove the U.S. into an all-out trade war with Canada on Saturday with his Twitter outburst threatening to hit America’s northern neighbor with even more punitive tariffs, Trump’s top trade adviser Peter Navarro placed blame for soaring tensions entirely on Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in an interview on Sunday and warned “there’s a special place in hell” for those who cross the president.

“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,” Navarro said in an interview on Fox News, referring to Trudeau’s decision to move ahead with retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. after Trump refused to back down from his recently announced steel and aluminum penalties.

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Navarro wasn’t the only top Trump adviser to use his appearance on a Sunday talk show to take pot-shots at Trudeau for daring to respond to the president’s tariffs.

White House chief economic adviser Larry Kudlow, a former television personality who was described by one commentator as an “insufferable Wall Street hack,” echoed Navarro’s vitriolic rhetoric in an interview with CNN‘s Jake Tapper on Sunday, calling Trudeau “amateurish” and “sophomoric.”

Kudlow went on to assert that Trump’s continued tariff threats against Canada on Saturday were a show of toughness ahead of the president’s meeting in Singapore with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

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Responding to Kudlow’s remarks on Sunday—which came just as Trump touched down in Singapore after ducking out of the G7 summit early—Huffington Post reporter Matt Fuller wrote: “It’s amazing that Larry Kudlow thinks he’s helping the U.S.-Canada relationship, trade negotiations, and the Singapore talks by trashing an ally. I, for one, would definitely cut a deal with the United States after that.”

Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs express similar disbelief at Kudlow’s behavior in a tweet on Sunday.

“You can’t make this stuff up,” Sachs concluded. “The collapse of U.S. governance before our eyes.”


Originally published by Common Dreams under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.