White House senior counselor for trade and manufacturing Peter Navarro said Sunday that President Donald Trump’s tariffs are not permanent as he sought to undercut a ruling from a federal court that dealt a major blow to the administration’s trade policy.
On Friday night, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that most of Trump’s so-called reciprocal tariffs on global trading partners are illegal.
That upheld an earlier ruling by the Court of International Trade, which found that the tariffs’ legal basis under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) wasn’t valid, saying that the administration’s argument for the tariffs didn’t constitute an emergency.
“Both the Trafficking Tariffs and the Reciprocal Tariffs are unbounded in scope, amount, and duration,” the majority wrote. “These tariffs apply to nearly all articles imported into the United States (and, in the case of the Reciprocal Tariffs, apply to almost all countries), impose high rates which are ever-changing and exceed those set out in the [U.S. tariff system], and are not limited in duration.”
The Trump administration is appealing the decision to the Supreme Court, and Friday’s ruling is on hold until mid-October to give the high court a chance to consider the case.
On Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures, Navarro called the appeals court’s ruling “weaponized partisan injustice” and said the dissenting opinion in favor of the tariffs should give the White House a strong argument before the Supreme Court.
The judges who sided with the administration said IEEPA allows “broad emergency authority in this foreign-affairs realm, which unsurprisingly extends beyond authorities available under non-emergency laws.”
Navarro also said the trade deficit does indeed constitute an emergency because it is “absolutely devastating to this country.” And he pushed back against the appeals court’s characterization of the tariffs as unlimited in duration.
“Hey memo to the court: we never said they were permanent,” he said.
If the flow of illegal drugs from China, Mexico and Canada stop, the tariffs will go away, Navarro added, likewise if the trade deficit shrinks to nothing.
In April, Trump was asked about comments from administration officials who said tariffs could be negotiated and that they were permanent.
“They can both be true,” he replied. “There could be permanent tariffs, and there could also be negotiations, because there are things that we need beyond tariffs.”
In May, Trump also said auto tariffs are permanent, but those duties weren’t affected by Friday’s court ruling as they were invoked under a different law.
He has also touted the long-term benefits of his tariffs, recently pointing to the CBO’s 10-year projection that tariffs will reduce the deficit by $4 trillion and that they will bring in enough revenue to lower the U.S. debt, which tops $37 trillion.
“The purpose of what I’m doing is primarily to pay down debt, which will happen in very large quantity — but I think there’s also a possibility that we’re taking in so much money that we may very well make a dividend to the people of America,” Trump said earlier this month.
This story originally appeared on Fortune
