Republican senators hit back on Monday at White House aide Peter Navarro after President Trump’s trade adviser said there was a “special place in hell” for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Navarro’s comments, made over the weekend, add new fuel to long-simmering tensions with Senate Republicans, who take a fundamentally different approach to trade than the top White House staffer.
Sen. John Cornyn (Texas), the No. 2 Republican senator, argued that the comments were inappropriate.
{mosads}”I think if Mr. Navarro worked for me I would probably give him a stern talking to. I think that’s — attacking a foreign leader like that directly and being a staffer is to me inappropriate,” Cornyn said.
GOP Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) told CNN that Navarro’s remarks were “completely unhelpful.” Meanwhile, Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), a former U.S. trade representative, said “yeah, I don’t think it’s effective,” when asked about the comments.
Navarro hit back at Trudeau following the Group of Seven summit, where the United States refused to sign the traditional group communique. Trudeau, after Trump left the summit, said Canada would move forward with retaliatory tariffs, saying his country will “not be pushed around.”
Trump reacted with fury, saying Trudeau had been “meek and mild” in person only to change his tune before the cameras.
“There’s a special place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad faith diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump and then tries to stab him in the back on the way out the door,” Navarro told Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.”
Navarro’s comments sparked immediate backlash from the international community. But top Republican leaders on Capitol Hill, including House Speaker Paul Ryan (Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), have so far remained silent.
GOP Sen. Jeff Flake (Ariz.), a vocal Trump critic who is retiring after 2018, said in a tweet over the weekend aimed at Republicans that: “This is not who we are. This cannot be our party.”
White House legislative director Marc Short said on Monday that Navarro’s comments weren’t an “official position” of the administration’s.
“I think that those are words that I would not have chosen. … I think that the judgment day that separates us from heaven or hell is not dependent upon whether you agree with the president or not,”
Short added.
It’s not the first time Navarro, the director of the White House’s Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, has been at odds with Senate Republicans. Navarro is viewed as a trade skeptic and has been critical of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
When the administration first floated slapping steep tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, told reporters that Navarro should “know better” and that he believed he was “misleading the president.”
After the latest dust-up with Trudeau, Hatch told reporters on Monday that Navarro “should’ve kept his big mouth shut.”
