WASHINGTON — White House trade adviser Peter Navarro on Friday sniffed he could care less about Elon Musk — who once mocked him as “dumber than a sack of bricks.”
“I’m not glad or whatever,” Navarro told reporters when asked about Musk’s new persona non grata status with the Trump administration. “People come and go from the White House.”
Musk was the chief cost-cutter at President Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) before his and Trump’s relationship spectacularly flamed out over the past few days.
Navarro appeared to want to stay out of the fray — choosing to ignore Musk rather than give him more attention — when talking to reporters Friday.
“I work with the DOGE folks a lot here,” Navarro said when asked about the tech billionaire.
He pointed out that he is currently working on “a very special project” to “save American taxpayers a lot of money.
“We’ve taken a computer program that’s very important, that is run like a 1950s IBM punch-card operation at great expense to the American people, and we’re going to turn that from a Model T into a Ferrari,” Navarro said.
Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs prompted a spat between Navarro and Musk in April, after the trade honcho suggested Musk wasn’t “a car manufacturer” but “a car assembler,” implying that the Tesla founder’s supply chain relied on importing batteries and other foreign auto parts.
Musk fired back on X, “Navarro is truly a moron.
“What he says here is demonstrably false. Tesla has the most American-made cars. Navarro is dumber than a sack of bricks.
“By any definition whatsoever, Tesla is the most vertically integrated auto manufacturer in America with the highest percentage of US content,” Musk contended.
The month before, Trump had announced a 25% tariff on foreign-made cars and parts, though the duties didn’t take effect until May.
Some countries such as Mexico, Canada and the UK were granted exemptions because of other trade agreements.
The initial 10% global tariffs on many nations took effect April 5.
“We can have disagreements,” Navarro said Friday when asked about Musk. “I would simply say that everybody during our first term who said that the tariffs were going to be recessionary and inflationary were obviously, obviously and widely, wrong. All we got was price stability and growth.”
Trump tore into Musk on Thursday after the world’s richest man ramped up attacks over his and other Republicans’ “big beautiful” spending bill in Congress, calling it a “massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill” and a “disgusting abomination.”
“I’m very disappointed in Elon. I’ve helped Elon a lot,” the president responded.
Things got even uglier when the SpaceX founder had his government grants and contracts threatened by Trump.
“Elon was wearing thin, I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!” the president posted on his Truth Social.
He later suggested: “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
Musk, in his own posts, indicated the president should be impeached and claimed the administration was blocking files on the notorious sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein from seeing the light of day — because the documents would include Trump’s name.
Asked by The Post on Friday about the blow-up, Trump shrugged off the attacks.
“The numbers are through the roof, the stock market is up, billions are pouring in from tariffs, and my poll numbers are the highest they’ve ever been. Other than that, what can I tell you, right?” he said.
