Elon Musk And Peter Navarro Just Won't Stop Fighting And Golly That's Sad, Huh?
Oh dear. Please, stop. It's so sad when wingnut idiots fight.
It’s WHITE HOUSE IN DISARRAY time, as two of Donald Trump’s favorite advisers (for the moment — it’s always contingent) are fighting publicly over the wisdom of Trump’s beautiful new tariffs. Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, is simply in love with the wonderful new $6 trillion tax on American consumers, because he’s been Trump’s tariff whisperer ever since Jared Kushner found Navarro’s fake book about China when Trump ran the first time. Elon Musk, Trump’s partner in demolishing government, has a lot of money tied up building and selling Teslas in China, so he’s not a fan of wrecking the economy, just democracy.
Let’s just be clear here: Elon Musk attacking Peter Navarro is a good thing, because Navarro is a fucking idiot. However, it does not make Elon Musk any better, because he too is a fucking idiot. The enemy of our enemy is also an asshole. We think it’s very important to point this out so we can stay upon — like any mushroom hunter who’s found abundant tasty gourmet fungi on a hilltop — the morel high ground.
It all started on Saturday, when Musk got all shirty in reply to two Twitter users who praised Navarro for being super smart, way smarter on tariffs than any of the “paid fake media expert class” on corporate media!!! After all, said the first of the twits, “Navarro has a PhD in economics from Harvard,” and also is not a globalist, if you (((know what he means and on Twitter you do))).
Musk, who hates all credentials that are not his, shot back that a “PhD in Econ from Harvard is a bad thing, not a good thing” and that it “Results in the ego/brains»1 problem,” which we think was meant to sound like an astute math formula if you’re 14 years old, but makes no goddamned sense.
When a second Navarro booster pointed out that the tariff genius has been “obsessed with trade for quite a while,” Musk replied, VERY TOUGHLY, “He ain’t built shit,” so how’s that for a takedown?
Also, Musk replied “Yup” to a quote from rightwing faux-intellectual shit-stirrer Thomas Sowell, who said that “In every disaster throughout American history, there always seems to be a man from Harvard in the middle of it,” so take that, Ted Cruz and JD Vance, BOOM!
Navarro hit back with his own idiot take on Musk on CNBC, claiming that Musk is just acting in his own financial interests, as if that were a bad thing in Trumpworld, and not the entire point. “Look, Elon, when he’s in his DOGE lane, he’s great,” Navarro said, but when it comes to tariffs, and trade, he added, “We all understand in the White House — and the American people understand — that Elon's a car manufacturer. But he's not a car manufacturer — he's a car assembler.”
Ooh, them’s fightin’ words! Navarro then confused “engines” with “batteries,” and said that all of Musk’s batteries “come from Japan and come from China.” In reality, it’s more complex: Tesla builds its battery packs at factories in the US, but the battery cells that make up those packs are a mix of domestic and imported, and the exact sourcing of battery components also varies by model. Tesla is also working on building more of those component cells in the US, including refining lithium sourced from Nevada and from imported sources. We rate Navarro’s claim “Half-Assed.”
In contrast, real American Patriots like Navarro “want the tires made in Akron. We want the transmissions made in Indianapolis. We want the engines made in Flint and Saginaw. And we want the cars manufactured here.” Here, Navarro completely ignores that thanks to Trump’s own trade deal, “American” car components are made all over North America, and that it would take years, if not decades, for American manufacturers to shift all their production to the USA. What’s more, Trump might well drop the high tariffs on Canada and Mexico if they kowtow to him, which would remove any reason for such costly retooling. Oh, details, details. Here’s the pro-tariff idiot:
Musk got very angry about the charge that he only assembles cars in the US, which really is unfair to Tesla employees who actually do all the work while Elon fucks around on Twitter all day and tries to interfere in all countries’ elections. He proclaimed on Twitter Tuesday that “Navarro is truly a moron,” and insisted — citing an article from 2023 — that “Tesla has the most American-made cars. Navarro is dumber than a sack of bricks.” This is both true and not evidence that Musk is any smarter.
While he was at it, Musk insisted that
By any definition whatsoever, Tesla is the most vertically integrated auto manufacturer in America with the highest percentage of US content.
Navarro should ask the fake expert he invented, Ron Vara.
We aren’t entirely sure about that, but we did find this November 2024 story noting that, among companies who filed content data with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Tesla definitely has the most cars with North American parts overall. All Tesla models have between 60 and 75 percent of their parts made in the US or Canada, which is not yet America. However, for its most North American-sourced vehicles, two Model 3 versions, Tesla is actually tied with a Honda model, the “Ridgeline AWD TrailSport.” All three vehicles have 75 percent US or Canadian parts. However, in second place, with 70 percent US/Canadian parts, two Tesla models also tie with a whole bunch of different Honda models, so we can see why Musk went with that 2023 article that put Tesla in a better, more American-American light than his own late-2024 reports to NHTSA.
Oh, also, Fox Business host Dagen McDowell has taken to using the term “Girl Math,” when discussing Navarro’s fanciful projections for the wondrous effects of tariffs. But she also added that,
“The quicker that they [the administration, or her own network? We can’t tell! — Dok] get him off of TV and away from numbers, the better. And I’m not going to call it girl math anymore, I’m going to call it Navarro math.”
In the latest development, we suddenly found out that Elon Musk has a brother named Kimball Musk, who said on Twitter Tuesday night that Trump should shitcan Navarro, writing, “if Peter Navarro has lied to you about Ron Vara, what else has he lied to you about? Put America first and fire him!” We guess this Kimball Musk character must be real, since his name isn’t an anagram of “Elon.”
Hilariously, when asked about the snit-duel between two of Trump’s favorite dicksniffers, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday, “Boys will be boys, and we will let their public sparring continue, and you guys should all be very grateful that we have the most transparent administration in history.” Then she added, “I think it also speaks to the president’s willingness to hear from all sides,” although Leavitt didn’t say whether Trump prefers the moron who’s dumber than a sack of bricks, or the car assembler who unlike Trump is just in it all for himself.
In conclusion fuck all of these people, they’re terrible, the end.
[Axios / Daily Beast / CNBC / Daily Beast / Not A Tesla App / Joe. My. God.]
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I've always said that Dok's dad jokes make him a fun guy.
| the term “Girl Math”
We're not bad at math; it's just that y'all lie to us all the time about what eight inches looks like