Press Briefing: Peter Navarro Speaks to Reporters Outside the White House - October 9, 2026

What's the problem?

Well, I, I usually take my direction from my superiors, not from anybody else.

Really? I, I come here and you, you always take -- you run the camera.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Okay.

The, the top-ranking official in the White House coming to talk to the press. [Laughs]

I, I got my bosses. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

That's why we're the independent media. You know what I mean?

Yeah, I see.

Who haven't been treated so well, by the way, you know?

We have not.

No.

No. Um, no, this is, uh --

Are you, are you taking questions, sir?

I'm gonna do a gaggle here, right? So --

[Inaudible]

What's that?

I'm, I'm from a red state down sou- -- down south.

You ready?

Oh, here's my boss here.

How's it going? John Tabacco.

I'm in the middle of doing something.

I just wanted --

Oh.

-- to tell you last night that we ran into you --

We're, we're shooting.

Okay. Yeah. I thought it was [Inaudible].

[Laughs]

I thought you were off.

Call Bryn Jeffers.

Calling Bryn Jeffers.

[On telephone] Hi.

So, the shithead at the pool camera, right, right on the camera, what's, what's the deal with that?

[On telephone] So, the press team -- I, I just popped over because I needed to send something out. The press team should be handling that. I have to give Anna Kelly a call because I don't know. Let me, let me call her.

Is Anna [Inaudible]?

[Inaudible] Peter fixing to take some questions.

I got [Inaudible]. So, can we do this at your C-SPAN camera?

All right, sir. Give it a go.

This shit. Are --

I'm ready.

Okay, he's ready. Okay. He was giving me a hard time. Okay. Thanks.

You can do that. I was just going to record [Inaudible].

All right. Y'all set?

Yeah, I'll take that white shirt. Give me that white balance. I'll take that white balance, sure. Great. Okay, thanks. Okay.

Okay. My name's Peter Navarro. I'm the director, uh, here at the White House at the Office of Trade Manufacturing Policy and a senior counselor to the president. Um, what I announced today, uh, is an American renaissance in, in manufacturing. This is a story which has not been covered much at all by the mainstream media, but it's truly remarkable what's happening across this country.

And what we have, um, is over 500 new manufacturing projects that have been announced since Donald Trump took office. Uh, it's about $400 billion worth of investment, about 165,000 jobs directly, probably half a million all told when you include, um, multiplier effects. What's drawing this renaissance, uh, are two specific policies which this administration embraces.

It's tax policy and it's our trade and tariff policy. What the Big Beautiful Bill did specifically to bring manufacturing home to America is what's called 100% expensing for factories built here on U.S. soil. So rather than wait 39 years to de- -- de- -- depreciate all of that expense, you do it right off the bat, boom, done.

And it really makes a huge difference in the location of decisions that companies make as to whether to locate here in the U.S. or locate offshore. So that's number one. But most importantly is the tariffs that President Trump has imposed. Um, these tariffs represent a protective wall in the best sense of the word for American businesses, factories and American workers.

And because of these twin forces working, we've seen this, this, this just, just boom in manufacturing. And it shows up in the data. There's an index called the ISM Manufacturing Index. It's one of the oldest gauges we have. And it tells us whether manufacturing is expanding or contracting. And dating back to the middle of the Biden administration, they lost over 200,000 manufacturing jobs, and the ISM index was below 50 for the two years leading into the Trump administration.

We, we inherited that. What we're seeing in this macro trend now is first we had a construction boom, because you can't have factories until you build them. And starting in January, the ISM manufacturing index came above 50 and has been trending up, showing just a magnificent rebound in American manufacturing, uh, across most, um, of the country.

Now, my job at the Office of Trade Manufacturing Policy is, is to kind of look beneath the hood at the microdata. So what I did was look at all of these projects. They're across nine industrial sectors. And the first thing we did was look at, uh, how much of that is foreign investment, how much of it is domestic investment.

And surprisingly, two-thirds of that investment in America right now is coming from offshore. And why that's important is it used to go the other way. American companies would go to China or Vietnam or any other places, make their stuff there, close our factories here, and then ship stuff back here. And then President Trump said, "That's not gonna happen anymore." And he, um, put up his tariff wall plus the tax breaks for investing.

And we've seen, uh, this influx of projects. Now, the second cut at the data, besides foreign versus domestic, it's all American here on American soil, is what we call greenfield versus brownfield. Greenfield investments are the ones where you have brand-new factories. Brownfield are the ones where you go into old factories that have been shut down or operating under capacity, like much of the Midwest, and you build them back up. And what we have in this case is a mixture of greenfield, brownfield, about 50/50, and that's an excellent trend.

And then when you look at the sector level, uh, you see across the nine sectors, you see a lot of activity which is designed to create, uh, tremendous economic prosperity, but a lot of the focus is also on national security, the defense industrial base. Um, and so, uh, across these factories that are coming in, uh, the mantra we have is economic security equals national security.

And the beauty of all this, when you look at kind of where the factories are going, um, it's all on, in, in, in most in what I like to call the flyover country. Uh, it's the small and medium-sized towns, uh, not New York, not Los Angeles, not Chicago, which is basically large crime-ridden urban areas run by, uh, socialists and communists.

Um, but it's the heartland of America where people shower after they work, um, not before. So, what we're, what we're having is this beautiful manufacturing re- -- uh, renaissance. What, what's, um, also interesting politically is, and I was surprised by this, when I looked at the, the distribution of these projects across what we call the red and blue states, uh, and you can figure out whether a red state or is, or blue, whether it's controlled by the Democrats or the Republicans by looking at the Senate seats, the House seats, the governorship and the state legislature, it's like, 26 states control 70% of these projects, 26 red states.

And there's a very small amount of activity, um, in the blue states. And we here at the White House, we don't determine that. We don't, we don't put our thumb on the scale. But what it says is that these companies that are coming here to America or the companies are here, we wanna invest more dollars are making choices where to invest basically on the regulatory environment of the state, how fast you can get permits, uh, what the income taxes are, how accommodating the leaders are.

And my message to the blue state politicians is, "Hey, take a look at this prosperity that you're missing out on because of the way that you engage, um, in your, in your various regulatory policies which pose enormous burdens, your high income tax, your high sales tax, your high crime rates, and things like that." So, um, the last thing I'll say here is, um, that it's, it's unfortunate that, uh, that much of the media is not covering this.

Uh, today, across the street, I held a, essentially a press briefing, uh, that had much more numbers and things like that. It much more fulsome that, that you could participate in. Uh, but, uh, Fox boycotted it. We didn't have, uh, CNN there, or MS NOW, or any of that stuff. Didn't have CNBC, Bloomberg. And this is the White House.

It's like, their responsibility to cover stories like this. But, uh, particularly going into election and particularly with their anti-Trump thought process, they are doing everything basically to convince you not to vote Republican, uh, and to turn, uh, the House and the Senate, uh, back, back into the irresponsible hands of the Democrats.

And th- -- this gotta stop. I mean, and Fox News in particular has gotta quit screwing around with this White House and with this country because they're masquerading as Trump Republicans when all they are is what we call RINOs. The Republican, the name only. They, they take advantage of you on camera. They throw you a little red meat, uh, about conservative issues that everybody agrees on. But when it comes to actually reporting things like tariffs, um, or interference in our election system or anything in between, uh, Peter Doocy ain't around, uh, Fox isn't around here.

Okay, okay, okay.

And, uh, it's, it -- the pool guy, uh, he's filming the camera and he's insisting that I stop saying this. But, but the truth is, where are all of these people at? We held a press conference here today.

Hmm.

Right? And none of them showed up for the data. They won't report stories on it and they didn't ask questions. So, it speaks for itself.

Are you taking questions?

So, so anyway, um, I appreciate, uh, C-SPAN for running this today. Uh, you can go to whitehouse.gov/manufacturing. You see the whole map, see an interactive map. You can put your mouse, uh, on the, the little dots all across this great country. It'll tell you exactly where these investments are. And this, this is a story that should be on the front pages and in the A block of every major media outlet today.

Uh, and it's gonna be buried, uh, but God bless C-SPAN for running this. And, uh, Peter Navarro, out. Thank you.

Two questions.

Yeah, you got questions?

Yeah, um.

Go for it.

One, so when will the -- we had a, like a record trade imbalance this month, last month.

Yeah.

So when are these things gonna take --

So, so I --

When's it all gonna ca- -- [Inaudible] catch up with you?

Question, uh, if, if you couldn't hear it from the, uh, from the camera guy, it's a great question is, uh, in his words, we had a record trade balance, uh, trade deficit. Um, actually it wasn't a record, what it was --

Not a record, but a high.

Was, was it, was up. And I did an analysis. I actually did a pool, uh, shot on this. Uh, here's the good news. Uh, if you disaggregate the data, the consumer goods deficit, all the crap we buy from China and elsewhere, was significantly down. Plus our deficit was down with our major trading partner like China, uh, the EU, India, Mex- -- uh, and others, okay?

But where the trade deficit was significantly up was in the high-end industrial goods, which we import to make the factories that I'm talking about.

Oh, that's cool --

Okay? And so that's a, that's a short-run process, okay? We're gonna, eh, we have to import that to build up the factories, and part of the factories we're building is to build those capital goods as well. So --

Did they pay tariffs on those?

What's that?

Did they pay tariffs on those imports?

Uh, yeah. I mean, we, yes. Yeah, but, uh --

Of the industrial goods, I mean.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We don't, we don't lift tariffs on that. I mean, tariffs are important protection, but the point here is that the, the deficit was virtually almost all driven by products we need to build up our manufacturing base. It's all good.

Yeah.

So if you look kind of, and again, that's a story that the legacy media doesn't put out. The, the, the top line was, "Oh, trade deficit up." It's like, no, no, no. It's like, look, look behind the curtain.

That's good.

Do you have another one?

Well, you're not gonna like this, but --

Oh, go ahead.

Do you have any examples of the communist leaders you were talking about in those cities?

Yeah, sure. Mamdani, uh. El-Sayed running in Michigan --

But they don't call themselves communists.

Of course not --

Does it fit --

Why would they do that?

The definition? But does it fit the, the definition of communism? And then how so?

I was at the pool camera just a few days ago talking about the latest report that came out of the Council of Economic Advisers, I don't know if you saw that, sir.

No.

It's a very good report. It's up on the White House website. What it did was it took the eight pillars of the platform of the democratic socialist agenda. It's like their platform.

Oh.

And basically did a cost analysis of it. And the total came out to 50 trillion, $50 trillion over the next 10 years.

Social welfare benefits, is that what we're talking about?

32-hour workweek, Medicare for All, free education for everybody, removal of all student debt, uh, free, free housing. I mean, it's, it's a pretty extreme agenda, right?

I hav- -- have not heard about free housing.

Rent, rental kind of controls.

Oh.

Yeah.

Oh, sure.

Yeah, that kind of thing.

Fair enough.

And so, um, I mean, it's, the costs are staggering. It, the, the, the thing that, the most important thing about that analysis was it drives up the debt-to-GDP ratio.

Right.

Okay? That's an important metric because, uh, we're, we're, we're over 100% now. And when you, the higher that goes, the more tax dollars of yours are spent servicing the interest on the debt rather than paying for education or national defense or anything in between. National parks, whatever. And that agenda goes, uh, drives that debt-to-GDP ratio to totally unsustainable, 250%, which would mean every tax dollar you gave would go to service a debt rather than pay for anything in government.

So, um, I mean, they don't, they don't make any bones about supporting Marxism and communism. If you look at some of these people running, it, it comes right out of their, their mouth. Uh, so --

How d- --

Do, do a little reading on that.

I'd have to see some examples --

Okay --

Just because I read a lot. I don't, I don't really -- but, but fair enough, this is, okay, this is your moment.

Okay.

What about unfunded tax cuts? You know, deficit-funded tax cuts. Do you think that contributes to the debt overall or --

Well, certainly --

People talk about trickle-down economics and stuff?

Certainly, uh, certainly it's very difficult, um, to work with Congress on fiscal discipline, okay? But we have a guy over there, Russ Vought, who's the OMB director.

Yeah.

I mean, if, if they let us do what we wanna do --

Yeah.

Everything would be fine. But they play their games on Capitol Hill with a, with a, just roll the debt forward and this, that and the other thing and everybody's always running for reelection. Um, anyway, thank you for watching today. Um, again, you can go to whitehouse.gov/manufacturing and you can see this, uh, manufacturing renaissance that's occurring right here in the great United States of America.

Thank you.

Thanks, you.

[Laughs] I did want to [Inaudible], but I could tell. Every once in a while, I get it.

[Inaudible] it's good.

Thanks for your time.

Yeah, bye-bye. We'll see if I still have a job.

It's all right, it's good.