After hosting a town hall meet with President Donald Trump (via phone) to discuss his first 100 days back in office, NewsNation held a panel discussion with moderators Chris Cuomo, Bill O’Reilly, Stephen A. Smith, former Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel and former New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, who endorsed and campaigned for Nikki Haley before endorsing Trump during the 2024 presidential election.
After Sununu called Trump’s trade advisor Peter Navarro an idiot, Smith asked him: “Why is an idiot your top trade advisor?”
Sununu replied, “Not mine!” and then said, “The problem is the messaging…I think we’re willing to see where this plays out over the next year and it’s gonna take a year.”
Sununu said: “The benefit Trump has given us, because he said, ‘look, I’m gonna give myself 90 days, he’s putting himself in a box, I got 90 days to renegotiate 70 to 100 deals with 100 different countries. That wasn’t Navarro’s idea, that was Trump’s idea.”
“You just said Peter Navarro is an idiot. So why is an idiot your top trade advisor?” – Stephen A Smith
— Spencer Hakimian (@SpencerHakimian) May 1, 2025
Goat.
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Sununu added of Trump and his tariff agenda: “I think he had bad advice early on, I think there’s a lot of loyalty he had there, god bless him, but bad advice early on, bad messaging long term.” The former Governor said, “I’m willing to give the 90 days.”
Note: Billionaire U.S. Secretary of Interior Doug Burgum also spoke favorably this week about Trump and his “fearless” tariff negotiations on CNN with Kaitlin Collins.
Burgum said: “When you start walking through a hundred announcements with 100 different countries in every single one of those we end up with a better trade deal than what we have right now, I mean, how could anybody say that’s not a good deal for this country.” Collins said of Trump: “He’s arguing that he’s made 200 trade deals so far.”
Trump said in an interview with Time magazine that he has already struck 200 trade deals but he refused to say with whom. There are about 200 countries in the world: the United Nations includes 193 member countries and two recognized independent nations (Vatican City and Palestine).
Trade deals, of course, aren’t always comprehensive and therefore one per nation — the U.S. could have multiple trade protocol with a single country. Burgum explained Trump’s “200 deals” claim by saying the President was talking about “sub deals.”
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