Dr. Peter Navarro: The Credit Card Mafia Fears a 10% Cap

STEVE BANNON (HOST): Dr. Peter Navarro, one of the senior advisors to the President of the United States, and has been for over a decade now, joins us.

Dr. Navarro, you gave this great speech at the Detroit Economic Club. I want to bifurcate out the populist policies President Trump’s on top of, that you gave us a heads up the other day, versus just the math about the economic turnaround from the disaster of the Biden regime.

Just walk me through it. Your case of why I can see it, I can feel it. I talk to guys on Wall Street. I talk to guys that are building plant and equipment. You can see it happening. But I want you to just take a minute and walk us through the economic turnaround that’s going to drive us through the summer and the midterm elections.

DR. PETER NAVARRO (GUEST): Steve, nothing’s going to be more important than that issue. You’re all over it. The White House and President Trump are all over it.

Remember the ethos of the Trump administration, going back to the first term, is to make sure that real wages for our MAGA folks, blue collar folks, are rising. Because whenever wages go up faster than inflation, people are better off. They can afford more things.

So that’s what we have in our sight. So that’s number one.

Number two, Biden caused inflation, Trump cures inflation. That’s our second mantra. And if you look at virtually any of the components of the CPI, you can trace that directly to Biden policies. And so what President Trump is systematically, at the micro level, undoing all of these macro effects.

So whether it’s housing or energy prices, latest credit card debt, he’s going at it.

Now let me just give you a couple of things. For example, mortgage backed securities. He ordered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy $200 billion of those. What’s that mean? It’s a quarter to a half point on the mortgage rate, a couple of hundred bucks a month on a lot of mortgages.

He’s banning large institutional investors, the hedge funds. These guys come in, they buy single family homes. They do it in their day. It’s like they drive prices down in that market and then drive prices up in the rents. It’s an astonishing effect. The boss is all over that.

And then the third thing is, and I love this statistic for the WarRoom. It’s like one million illegal aliens, one percent increase in rents. Twenty million illegal aliens under Joe Biden’s open border policy, twenty percent rise in rents. Right on him.

And that’s just a national average, when you know that it’s concentrated primarily in the blue and sanctuary states. You understand why rents are off the charts there. It’s Biden’s policy.

And then the irony, Steve, it’s like Mamdani and Newsom and Pritzker. They all try to blame Trump for higher housing costs, which is just crazy.

Plus, we’re also handling it by undoing the regulatory problems at the local and state level.

Gas, Steve. Look, gasoline and energy prices. Drill baby drill, certainly. But there’s a very interesting twist on the Venezuelan heavy oil that we’re going to be buying per an agreement that the President just signed.

Why does that matter? It turns out that these bespoke refineries, these customized refineries along primarily our Gulf Coast, were built originally for heavier crude. And when the fracking generation came along, that’s light crude, and it really made those refineries less efficient.

So even if we get a few hundred thousand barrels of oil from Venezuela, then that allows us to kind of leaven the loaf there at the refineries. Gas prices, diesel prices come down.

The credit cards. I mean, look, the mafia is envious of MasterCard and Visa for the amount of interest rates they can charge on debt. And it’s a debt trap, Steve. It’s like the Chinese Communist Party equivalent at the credit card level, where they hand out credit cards like candy to anybody. They don’t do their due diligence.

And now they’re whining somehow that if you cap interest rates at ten percent on debt, somehow that’s going to hurt the little guy. No. It hurts their business model, Steve.

So these are the things that President Trump is doing across all of the problems we’re having with Biden’s legacy inflation. We’re getting it done, sir.

STEVE BANNON (HOST): In all this, you had the big beautiful bill for the supply side tax cut for the factories and the capital equipment. You’ve been his chief advisor. He architects the redoing of all the commercial relationships.

We’re kind of on tenterhooks waiting for the Supreme Court to come back on that. But the report is that in all of that, and in you guys particularly being very focused on what private equity and the hedge funds and Wall Street have done in coordination with the Chinese Communist Party to ship all manufacturing over there, which you’re trying to reverse, our historical trend.

The reported number for the trade deficit. We have a trade deficit that’s shrinking, right, because you’ve got exports up, imports down.

The Chinese Communist Party just announced a 2025 number, a one trillion dollar trade surplus. How does that fit in? What does that mean as far as what you and President Trump and the administration are trying to accomplish as far as setting things right?

Because until we get the trade deficit down dramatically, because I think the cumulative is like a $22 trillion trade deficit, until we get that down, we’re really not going to be the manufacturing superpower we should be.

DR. PETER NAVARRO (GUEST): Let me unpack it.

Significant. And that’s the kind of thing we’re seeing with the trade report just a few days ago, where we had our lowest trade deficit since 2009.

Now, the trillion dollars you mentioned, Steve, is with the rest of the world plus the United States. So we’re roughly twenty five percent of China’s deficit that they hold with the world.

And what China has been doing as they’ve been facing our tariff wall is that they’ve been dumping all of their goods around the rest of the world. And they’re basically destabilizing the international trade system.

And why that’s good ultimately for us, and including the rest of the world there, is that it is basically a call to action in Europe, in Mexico, in Japan, South Korea, Vietnam to adopt similar protections against China. So this is a work in progress.

The one thing China should do but won’t do is boost their consumption by giving the laobaixing health care and pension plans that will give them some kind of assurance.

Steve, it’s remarkable that a communist country has some of the worst pension and health care benefits around the world. It’s crazy stuff. So you get savings rates in excess of fifty percent for Chinese citizens.

The laobaixing, they don’t buy any of our stuff, any stuff around the world. And so China maintains its predatory model.

So statistically, what President Trump is trying to do is to defend our manufacturing base, our supply chains, our defense industrial base, against the predation not just of China, but of much of the rest of the world, which cheats us by rule, by absolute rules, doesn’t it.

By rule, Steve, by absolute WTO World Trade Organization rule, the rest of the world can charge us higher tariffs and higher non tariff barriers and screw us in six different other ways. And President Trump says no mas, no more. Reciprocal tariffs in. And that’s kind of where this whole aircraft carrier is going.

STEVE BANNON (HOST): 2 April 2025 was Liberation Day. Dr. Navarro, social media. Where are you putting up these clips? You’re writing op eds all over the place. These daily clips are amazing. We’ve got about 30 seconds. Where do people go to get all your content, sir?

DR. PETER NAVARRO (GUEST): Peternavarro.com. That’ll get you to my X, GETTR, Truth Social, Substack, and Instagram.

And the videos are really, I think, important messaging documents there. I break this stuff down in sixty seconds. Every time President Trump does something to basically increase wages or reduce the inflation rate growth, it’s up there. So have at it.

Keep doing what you’re doing, Steve. November looms. And we’ve got to win that. We can’t let them beat us up on a crisis they created.