Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro brushed off the exploding feud between President Trump and Elon Musk by comparing the world’s richest man to something a consumer might forget about in the back of the fridge.

Navarro, a Trump loyalist who served four months in prison for refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena, was among the first Trump Administration officials on camera after the Trump-Musk clash went into meltdown mode.

The two men were completely at odds over Trump’s tariffs, which prompted a reporter to ask Navarro at the White House whether he was glad to see Musk out of the fray. ‘No, I’m not glad. Whatever,’ Navarro replied.

‘It’s – people come and go from the White House. He was a Special Government Employee with an expiration date,’ Navarro said. Musk served in government as a ‘Special Government Employee,’ and the administration cited the 130-day limit when explaining his departure, although Trump had the power to renew it.

Trump himself used language Thursday that gave the impression he fired Musk. ‘Elon was “wearing thin,” I asked him to leave,’ Trump wrote in just one of his slams on his former first buddy.

Later, Navarro, 75, had something nice to say about Musk’s team of programmers and aides who got access to agency computer systems and searched for contracts. ‘I work with the DOGE folks a lot here, and I’ve got a very special project, which at some point I’ll come out here and talk about with them,’ Navarro said.

He claimed to have identified a government computer program that ‘is run like a 1950s IBM punch card operation at great expense.’ ‘We’re going to turn that from a Model T into a Ferrari,’ he said. But he refused to divulge specifics on an extraordinary intervention. ‘Stay tuned,’ he said.

Navarro has been a key proponent of Trump’s tariffs, during both the first and second term, helping promote Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs that the administration calls ‘reciprocal’ to hit back at countries running a trade surplus with the U.S. In his stunning clash with Trump Thursday, Musk wrote that ‘The Trump Tariffs will cause a recession in the second half of this year.’

That put him at odds with Trump’s cherished policy – and Trump’s ‘favorite word’ in the dictionary – even while taking on Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill,’ which is Trump’s top legislative priority. Navarro tried to smooth over the policy differences.

‘Well, look, Elon Musk does not like tariffs . Full stop. He’s made that clear from Day One and going back to the first term, he’s not a tariff guy, which is fine. We can have disagreements about it. But I would say that everybody during our first term who said that the tariffs were going to be recessionary and inflationary were obviously, obviously and widely wrong.’