Press Briefing: Peter Navarro Speaks to Reporters Outside the White House - August 3, 2026

All set?

Yep.

I'm Peter Navarro, White House senior counselor for trade and manufacturing policy. And as so much is happening in the news cycle related to foreign policy, sometimes we forget the important bread and butter economic issues and news that the media really should focus more on. So I just want to give you a quick update on a very important economic report that came out today.

It's the ISM Manufacturing index. It's what we call a diffusion index between 0 and 100. Anytime it's above 50, that means the manufacturing sector in America is expanding, and that's important because those are the real blue collar manufacturing jobs for America, but they also would constitute our manufacturing and defense industrial base and give us not only economic security, but national security.

The ISM Manufacturing Index report was off the charts today. It's the seventh straight month of going up. It's above 50. Robustly, it came in at about 56. It's a very strong number. More importantly, the major parts of the index, production, orders, inventories, delivery, supplies and, most importantly, employment, were all above 50. And this was the first time employment crept above 50. That's been lagging a little bit.

But what this tells us is that President Trump's tariff policies are working to onshore our manufacturing and tax cut policies like 100 percent expensing of investment. So this was a really good news report for American workers. It signals that we're going to have robust economic growth going forward. It's also deflationary in the sense that when you have this kind of development, you're going to have rising productivity, which will, in turn, help with inflation.

So take a look, ISM manufacturing index. I'm sure that the financial news networks the Bloomberg, CNBC, Fox Business will cover it, but this is worthy news of for the mainstream media, Fox News, CNN, MSN Now. This is good news. I expect the left will not cover this because it is good Trump-nomics news, but I'm bringing it to you, Peter Navarro, right here from what we call Pebble Beach at the White House.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right, brother.