Musk vs Navarro: Is the Trump team divided on tariffs?

United States President Donald Trump has doubled down on his tariffs plan, even as markets crash around the world.

However, signs of divisions among Trump’s aides are emerging with key ally Elon Musk publicly clashing with trade adviser Peter Navarro on Saturday. Others have also presented diverging narratives.What happened between Musk and Navarro?
On Wednesday, Trump announced sweeping tariffs impacting most of America’s trading partners. This marked a major break from decades of US trade policy and sparked criticism and concern from economists and countries targeted by Trump’s tariffs.

In the aftermath, the three major stock indices in the US – the Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500 and Nasdaq – dropped by more than 5 percent over the past week. This marked the biggest stock market drop in the US since 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Longtime Trump aide and the administration’s senior counsellor for trade and manufacturing, Peter Navarro, defended the tariffs in an interview with CNN on Thursday.“The market will find a bottom. It will be soon, and from there, we’re going to have a bullish boom, and the Dow is going to hit 50,000 during Trump’s term,” Navarro said. As of Monday, the Dow Jones stood at 38,314 before the start of trading.

After an X user posted a clip of Navarro speaking to CNN and alluded to the adviser’s doctorate from Harvard University, Musk hit back on the platform, which he owns.

“A PhD in Econ from Harvard is a bad thing, not a good thing,” Musk posted.

The first phase of the new tariffs – 10 percent levies on countries including the United Kingdom, Australia, Argentina and Saudi Arabia – came into effect on Saturday.