From the Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey. It's Thursday, April tenth, twenty twenty five. The bar for teacher training has never been lower. Some Australian universities are enrolling students to their teaching programs with ATAR scores below fifty, and it could explain why student teacher numbers have suddenly jumped. That exclusive story from Education editor Natasha Beta is live
right now at The Australian dot com dot au. Two of Donald Trump's closest advisors are at each other's throats. The world's richest man, Elon Musk, is openly ridiculing Peter Navarro, the architect of the Trump tariffs that have rocked the world today. What's going on inside the White House?
Navarro's truly a moron. What he says here is demonstrably false.
That's a tweet by Elon Musk, Donald Trump's right hand man, and he's talking about Trump's left hand man, Peter Navarro.
Ritardo is dangerously dumb. Independent experts agree that he is retarded.
Those are Elon Musk's words, but we've used an AI voice to read them. Navarro is one of the key architects of Trump's tariffs, you know, the ones presently wiping billions of all our retirement savings, the Australian dollar and the value of all stocks. Masque's beef with him is about tariffs and Navarro's suggestion that Mosk's car company Tesla uses foreign components.
Dsla has the most American made cars. Navarro's dumber than a sack of bricks.
Trump is a chaos agent. In fact, I think he tends to thrive on chaos.
Joe Kelly is the Australian's correspondent in Washington, DC.
I think there'd be a lot of frustration about the status that Navarro has in Trump's center circle. And I think that's what we're seeing from Elon Musk, who clearly thinks the direction of trade policy makes no sense and is publicly revealing his frustrations, which is the other fascinating thing.
He feels free he can do that, that he can say these things on social media and there's been no intervention from Trump, and in fact, Carolyn Levitt in the press briefing earlier today sort of almost seemed to poke fun at it. Obviously, two individuals who have very different views on trade and on Tariff's boys will be boys and we will let their public sparring continue.
Here's what Navarro said.
The American people understand that Eli's a car manufacturer, but he's not a car manufacturer. He's a car assembler. In many cases, if you go to his Texas plan, a good part of the engines that he gets, which in the ed case is the batteries come from Japan and
come from China, the electronics come from Taiwan. What we want and the difference is in our thinking in elons on this is that we 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.
During a flurry of ridicule on x, Musk also said.
Peace 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 just as an assign.
That's a character Pitanavarro, who's a Harvard trained economics PhD, invented when he was a university lecturer in several of his books, Navarro quoted an individual named ron Vara that's an anagram of his own surname, offering wisdom on issues like investing. He subsequently said it was a whimsical pen name he occasionally used.
Joe.
It's not surprising that the interests of a billionaire like Elon mask or even a billionaire like Donald Trump would clash with an anti free trade agenda. Billionaires have had hundreds of millions of dollars wiped off their personal wealth. Speaking by and large, but Masks dislike of Peter Navarro seems to be more visceral than that. What do you think is actually going on between these two men.
Well, to be honest, Claire, I think what's going on is that there's annoyance and frustration within the Trump administration that Navarro is the guy who's calling the shots on trade. Navarro is the guy who seems to be able to influence Donald Trump to take a really strong, across the board stance on tariff's with a baseline ten percent tariff.
And my information is that when you look at the influence of the broader range of economic members in Trump's team, we're talking about people like Scott Bessett's Treasury secretary, how Lutnik is Commerce Secretary. Even Jamison Greer is the USTR. Trump seems to be more inclined to listen to Navarro. I think it must be frustrating to other members of the Trump economic team. But Navarro is part of the
inner circle. He's been there in the trenches with Trump for years, and so he's got a lot of loyalty capital with Trump that's built up.
It's a really interesting philosophical difference, isn't it, between you know, the old team Trump and the new Does it prompt us to ask questions about what is it exactly that Elon Musk sees in Donald Trump. If he doesn't like this core belief of Donald Trump's which he's been talking about since the eighties, then what is it?
Yeah, it's a really fascinating question, I think Claire, this alliance between Elon Musk and Donald Trump, and also between the tech giants and Donald Trump, which we're also seeing at the moment. Look putting trade to one side, Donald Trump has adopted fiercely sort of pro business policies. He has a very aggressive deregulation agenda, which Elon Musk certainly likes and obviously would see lots of advantages in that
for himself. He's got a load tax agenda as well. Obviously, this was what a lot of the excitement was going into January twenty. Wall Street was really excited about the prospect of a booming US economy and growth really taking off. And it's the tariff agenda which has served as the dist which is undermining that sense of optimism and really creating a lot of uncertainty for business owners. People are
talking about tariff whiplash. So even if the tariffs, you know, are changed after a short period of time, or an exemption is granted before particular tariffs come in for a month or however long it is, there's really no certainty for businesses to make plans. There are parts of Trump's agenda which seem at conflict with one another. This is what makes Trump such a complicated political figure and operator.
There are probably aspects of the Trump agenda Elon Musk doesn't really like, and he's making it clear, which is really fascinating.
Coming up. So if Peter Navarro is the one shaking the world, what does he really believe in?
They're coming now and saying, we want to talk, will lower our tariffs to zero. If you'll lower your tears, that's not the problem.
Here's an insight into what Peter Navarro thinks. Having just orchestrated globe shattering tariffs, he says, well, tariffs can't really fix the big problem anyway.
Vietnam is a great example, Lauri. They sell US fifteen dollars for everyone we sell them zero. TIFFs would get us no reduction in the one hundred and twenty three billion dollar deficit we have.
The big problem, Navarro says, is the fact that the US imports more than it exports to low wage countries like Vietnam, which he thinks are stooges for China anyway. But then on other issues, Navarro argues the opposite, like Australia. For example, America has a trade surplus with US, that is, we buy more of their exports like machinery and chemicals then they buy of Australian goods like raw meat and some manufactured goods.
Navarro was able to exert great influence over the shape of Donald Trump's Liberation Day tariffs, and he was the person that Donald Trump listened to the most. He was forcefully arguing for a universal across the board tariff, and frankly, given his influence, I think Australia actually was quite lucky to get away with the ten percent. I think that baseline tariff, had Navarro had his way, could have been substantially higher than ten percent. He was particularly exercised about
Australian beef. For example, the US keeps saying that we ban American beef. Well, actually, we just have a requirement that the US needs to certify that the beef comes from America, and we've been insisting on that, I think since about twenty nineteen, because we're concerned about beef coming in from Mexico or Canada that might have diseases in it. We accept that the beef is fine from the US, but we just need to know that's where it comes from.
Yeah, And it suggests that this is not the only instance in which Peter Navarro has got the wrong end of the stick, doesn't it? Or that the American administration has the wrong end of a stick in what it perceives as being it's trade relationships and that everybody's doing America over.
Well, look, I just make one other point about Peter Navarro. Since the Liberation Day tariffs were announced, the stock market has gone crazy. I think in the first two days it was about six point five trillion in value gone. Navarro is out very forcefully saying the stock market will be booming, it will bounce back. This is all an adjustment period. Things are going to be okay. Don't panic, don't sell your shares. But the reason he's saying that
is because he's got the most to lose. I think, if this policy is seen to fail, and so far I don't think it's looking good, the person with a target on his back, in my view, is Peter Novara.
Joe Kelly is The Australian's correspondent in Washington, DC,