Former Trump chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said Tuesday that tariff adviser Peter Navarro should have been canned already. (Watch the video below.)

“Does Peter Navarro — who went to prison for the president — does he need to be fired?” CNBC host Brian Sullivan asked on “Power Lunch.”

Mulvaney didn’t hesitate.

“I would have fired him a long time-, I would’ve fired him when he got caught making up his academic sources for his papers with his Ron Vara imaginary friend,” Mulvaney said, referring to a fictional economist Navarro invented out of the letters of his name to use in a book.

“But I mean that was Donald Trump’s call then, it’s Donald Trump’s call now,” Mulvaney continued. “I think folks watching this show are caring more about what is the policy of the White House, what is the policy on tariffs, what does the future hold on this, and Peter Navarro is not a reliable source for information about that.”

The show had been discussing the beef between Elon Musk, an opponent of the tariffs, and Navarro, who’s seen as one of its architects. Musk cracked wise recently on Navarro’s Harvard cred in forging the aggressive tariff strategy, which has roiled markets. Navarro advised Musk to stay in his lane. Musk unleashed name-calling, including “moron.”

But Mulvaney appeared less concerned with the in-fighting than Navarro’s “demoralizing effect.”

“Peter is really tough to work with,” Mulvaney said. “There’s no question about that. One of the things that makes him so difficult to work with is that he pretends to speak for the president when he does not, alright? Peter was notorious back in Trump 1.0 to walk out of a meeting when everybody would sort of assume we’ve got sort of a consensus about something, and he would go on TV and say the exact opposite.That has a tremendous demoralizing effect on the White House, and it does tend to mislead markets.”

“When he says, ‘We all know in the White House…’ that’s not the White House speaking, that’s Peter Navarro,” said Mulvaney, who served as the acting chief of staff for about 15 months during Trump’s first term before Trump replaced him with Mark Meadows.

Election conspiracy theorist Navarro was released from prison last year after serving briefly for defying a Jan. 6 committee subpoena. In December 2024 Trump tapped Navarro, who served on the White House trade council in Trump’s first administration, to be his”senior counselor for trade and manufacturing.”

He’s been making the media rounds defending the tariffs despite the economic turmoil and telling the public not to panic.