The Washington Post: Mick Mulvaney Says GOP Inconsistent On Deficit Concerns; White House Touts U.S. Economy But Silent On Soaring Deficit
BERMAN: President Trump is campaigning for reelection on a robust economy, but the White House has remained mostly silent on the ballooning deficit which has nearly doubled since President Trump has taken office. "The Washington Post" reports that at a speech yesterday, the President's Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said, "My party is very interested in deficits when there's a Democrat in the White House. The worst thing in the whole world is deficits when Barack Obama was the President. Then Donald Trump became President, and we're a lot less interested as a party". Joining me now is Peter Navarro President Trump's Direct Review Officer Trade and Manufacturing Policy. You're laughing. Why?</s>PETER NAVARRO, WHITE HOUSE TOP TRADE ADVISER: You put Mick on the hot seat here. Deficit is a legitimate issue to talk about. But elections do have consequences and this last budget we had to do, we had a Democratic House. We - bill was a little higher than it did otherwise would have been. My focus John is creating good jobs for people who work with their hands. That's kind of what I focus on.</s>BERMAN: I get it. But the first two years, the President was off he had a Republican Congress.</s>NAVARRO: He did.</s>BERMAN: Right. And the deficits were way up then as well $779 billion in 2008 $984 billion in 2019 and then of course the estimate for this year $1.2 trillion. So you can't put this all on the Democrats. So the Republicans at the Senate at the whole time you have Republican in the White House. Why have they doubled?</s>NAVARRO: The question is, is it a bad thing? Will it get better? What our focus is on, John is basically growing the economy as fast as possible. The difference between the 2 percent and 3 percent growth rate, 3 percent, 3.5 percent is all the difference in the world. What we've been trying to do is consistently outperform CBO predictions which we've actually done.</s>BERMAN: Which you've been at 2 percent in the last three quarters. So you're not at 3 percent.</s>NAVARRO: Well, we're outperforming projections. I think if you look at everything we're doing, we've got household income up. The real GDP is actually performing better than expectations. Manufacturing jobs we've created over half a million although they've been down recently.</s>BERMAN: Although down the last two months.</s>NAVARRO: Yes. And you know there are certain head winds we've had to deal with that. I think the GM was a challenge. The Boeing was a challenge, but here's the thing. The beauty of the Trump Administration culture is that we have a President who every day gets up thinking about how to create jobs. And that's a different kind of culture than we had. And we do it not just with macro policies like deregulation, tax cuts, and fair trade, but my job is to do it kind of one job at a time in places like Lime, Ohio where we combat vehicle plans. So Marionette, Wisconsin make it sure littoral combat shift. With Philly we're rebuilding that Philly shipyard. This is kind of what we do.</s>BERMAN: Look, these are - but manufacturing jobs in some of these states are down even worse than nationally.</s>NAVARRO: Well, but the unemployment rate is at historic lows.</s>BERMAN: Absolutely. But you yourself said your job is to add manufacturing jobs.</s>NAVARRO: I think we're doing quite well at that. If you look at the Obama Administration, they were down 200,000 manufacturing jobs. And they said they would never coming back you know the famous Obama Magic Launch Speech. We did half a million so far. Like I said, the culture of this administration is basically focusing on people who work with their hands. I think we're doing quite well with that.</s>BERMAN: Okay, the President wakes up every morning thinking about jobs. Has he woken up any morning you said thinking about deficits?</s>NAVARRO: I'm sure he does. But until the bond market starts reacting negatively to that and still we start seeing inflation, that's not going to be a concern. What we're going to focus on is growing wages for workers. We're not afraid of that cause and inflation like some people on Wall Street. We're going to increase productivity through investment. And that's the plan and it's working beautifully. I think if you look at the stock market, that's outperforming the Obama Administration. If you look at just every single metric, we're doing better.</s>BERMAN: Just one more question on deficits. You spend most of your life as an economist, not necessarily a political figure. But if deficits are bad in a Democratic Administration aren't they also bad in a Republican one? You can't have it both ways.</s>NAVARRO: We had the same issue in the Reagan years. There was a deficits don't matter. Deficits do matter. I think my focus is basically on manufacturing jobs. That's where I'm at. And today by the way--</s>BERMAN: You're here just to go to the airport, yes?</s>NAVARRO: Yes. This is a great day. We've been working on these operation Mega Flex Blitzes. So I'm going out with a whole team today from customs and border protection and for the eighth month in a row we're going to be opening thousands of packages from China to check for things like counterfeits, controlled substances, and agricultural violations. And John, it's absolutely frightening what we've seen across the ports of entry coming in. We get a double digit hit rate. We get a million packages coming in by air from China every day. If we're getting more than 10 percent hit rate for things like counterfeits, certainly there is a 100,000 Americans a day are being potentially harmed by this. Defrauded or actually in some cases like child car seats which are counterfeits. Those things kill.</s>BERMAN: So that's a big part of your job. And that's why you're in New York today. How much of your job or what's your role been in recent weeks and months trying to figure out who anonymous is? Who wrote the anonymous book and the anonymous op-ed?</s>NAVARRO: Sure and I think ever since that op-ed came out, there's been a poll cast over everybody in the administration. Everybody's a suspect. So within the administration, everybody's hunting, as it were, for anonymous.</s>BERMAN: Including you?</s>NAVARRO: Yes of course. It's a vocation with everybody.</s>BERMAN: How much time? What does that mean? What have you been doing?</s>NAVARRO: You read the book, you read the op-ed, you think about it. That's about it. But here's the point. We've had over 20 people in this administration accused in print of being anonymous. That's a terrible poll cast over the White House. It makes you distrust everybody. So I would think that at this point the honorable thing would be whoever anonymous is come on out and do this. Let me ask you a question. Do you think that that it's right for somebody to lie within an administration; Democratic or Republican basically spy on the President?</s>BERMAN: I wouldn't call it spying. But we've said from the beginning we're dying to know who the identity of an anonymous is. I'm not willing to call it spying but let me ask you this--</s>NAVARRO: What would you call it?</s>BERMAN: Victoria Coats who was the Deputy National Security Adviser moved over to the Department of Energy. Did you think she was anonymous?</s>NAVARRO: I have - suspects are everywhere.</s>BERMAN: But she moved and there are now people inside the administration saying it wasn't her who are saying that you were saying it was.</s>NAVARRO: Here's what's interesting about that, John. Find me a story about that that actually quotes somebody with a name. Again, it's all leaks from so-called senior administration officials. I'll give you one tip, John.</s>NAVARRO: I'll bet you a million dollars right here that whoever anonymous is not actually a senior administration official like "The New York Times" claims. We'll see. This is going to be one of the greatest mysteries of all time.</s>BERMAN: You know who spoke off the record for 15 minutes on the plane yesterday? President Trump. I mean, we know that there are unnamed senior administration officials all the time who do talk. Will you acknowledge that?</s>NAVARRO: But you take my point that a lot of these stories have came out of China, on the China stories. It is always like a person close to I just - transparency would be a nice thing.</s>BERMAN: We love the fact that you have come on. It's great to have you on CNN. Thanks for coming on.</s>NAVARRO: I appreciate the hospitality. And hopefully we find some counterfeits and put an end to that because that's a big thing for Americans.</s>BERMAN: All right, good luck. Appreciate it.</s>NAVARRO: Yes, thanks John.</s>ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN HOST: Okay, John up next, a rare look inside a makeshift hospital in the epicenter of the Coronavirus outbreak. What life is like for people in quarantined?