NewsNation host Leland Vittert interviewed President Trump’s Senior Counselor for Trade and Manufacturing Peter Navarro, to discuss the high cost of — well, according to Vittert’s onscreen graphics, just about everything. Navarro suggested to Vittert that they “go item by item,” and that they start with energy, saying “energy was the easiest thing to flip.”
The lower energy costs that Navarro claimed as a Trump administration accomplishment will unfortunately need 12 months, he said, to impact the larger economy and help lower other consumer prices.
With Trump’s campaign promise to lower prices on “day one” of his second term in the unspoken background, Navarro — one of the architects behind the Trump tariff policy — faced Vittert as he read from an email he received from a self-described “Trump supporter.”
With the screen showing a graphic titled “Grocery Prices Continue to Climb, 1-Year Change” — featuring photos of coffee (up 45%), beef (up 12%), orange juice (up 12%), bananas (up 9%), potato chips (up 8%), and chicken breast (up 5%) — Vittert read aloud from the viewer’s email:
“Feelings don’t matter. Prices in the grocery store do. My bread has risen 50 cents this year. Hamburger is now $8.00 a pound on sale. It was $4.00 a pound on sale last year. I call that a 100 percent increase.”
Vittert asked Navarro: “What do you say to her right now?”
“But the president calls it a con job!” NewsNation anchor Leland Vittert calls out top Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro to his face when he claims “we feel your pain” due to rising prices. pic.twitter.com/4yuuUQ2wWu
— Mike Sington (@MikeSington) November 12, 2025
Navarro replied: “We feel your pain. We are literally doing everything we can. I actually meet with a group once a week in the Roosevelt Room, where we’ve got an attack plan to deal with beef prices.”
Vittert interrupted, centering his inquiry on the consumer pain represented in the email, and asking Navarro to square the seemingly opposing views that prices need to come down and that stories about high prices are “fake news.”
(NOTE: Specific to beef, Trump has acknowledged the high prices and launched an investigation into “the nation’s largest meat packing companies for potential collusion, price fixing, and price manipulation.”)
“The President called this a con job,” Vittert said, quoting Trump on higher prices. “How [do] the American people think he feels their pain — when he says it’s a con job?”
Navarro replied: “At the political level, that’s what’s going on. They blame him for Biden’s legacy, and that makes him angry.”
But on the issue of higher prices, not all Republicans are singing from the same sheet music. On The Sean Spicer podcast this week, the increasingly impatient Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said: “Gaslighting the people and trying to tell them that prices have come down is not helping. It’s actually infuriating. People know what they are paying at the grocery store. They know what they are paying for their electricity bills… You don’t gaslight the American people, you don’t lecture them, and you don’t deny what’s happening.”
MTG: “Gaslighting the people and trying to tell them that prices have come down is not helping. It’s actually infuriating. People know what they are paying at the grocery store. They know what they are paying for their electricity bills… You don’t gaslight the American people,… pic.twitter.com/vXcTOsxMib
— Ron Smith (@Ronxyz00) November 13, 2025
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