Peter Navarro: The trade adviser who hates trade

Washington: On a clear day last July in Miami, Peter Navarro emerged from four months in federal prison, where he’d been serving a sentence for contempt of Congress. Navarro had refused to testify in an investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, an action he described as a defense of the Constitution.

Hours after his release from prison, Navarro flew to Milwaukee to speak at the Republican National Convention in support of Donald Trump.

“They convicted me, they jailed me. Guess what? They did not break me,” he said that night. It was a show of loyalty to Trump that seems to have paid off.

For much of Trump’s first term, Navarro, a trade adviser, had been sidelined, mocked and minimized by other officials who saw his protectionist views on trade as wrong and dangerous.

But in the second Trump administration, Navarro, 75, an economist and trade skeptic, has been newly empowered. He returned to government more confident in his revanchist vision for the American economy, more dismissive of his critics and with more than a dozen trade-related executive orders already drafted, many of which the president has since signed. Trump also came back to Washington more determined to finally realize the trade views he has held for decades, that an unfair trading system was ripping America off and needed to be radically changed.

As the 100-day mark of Trump’s term approaches, Navarro has helped him roll out half a dozen major trade moves. These steps have brought tariffs to levels not seen in a century, in an attempt to curb American dependence on imports and force factories back to the United States.

For more than 20 years, Navarro, who studied economics at Harvard and was once a Democrat, has been proclaiming the harm that other countries, and particularly China, have caused American workers.

Mainstream economists have some sympathy for Navarro’s view of how globalization destroyed millions of American manufacturing jobs and ravaged some communities. But they have criticisms of the tariffs, believing they will backfire by raising prices and slowing growth.

Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who studies trade, said Navarro “may be the worst trade adviser any modern U.S. president has ever had.”

Navarro declined to be interviewed for this article. In a statement, he said that he was carrying out Trump’s directives and vision, and that “going to jail was not just a demonstration of loyalty to the president but loyalty to the Constitution.”

Kush Desai, a White House spokesperson, called him “an invaluable asset” and said, “Peter Navarro was decades ahead of mainstream ‘experts’ on how China’s unfair trade policies are undermining American workers.”

Navarro seems driven purely by ideology and mission, not by a desire for money or acclaim. And he believes his ideas have been vindicated.

“The academic community can’t be trusted to critique Trump economics,” Navarro said in an interview in January with The New York Times. “And they have a credibility problem because they’ve been crying this wolf. They did it all through the first term. We’re right. They’re wrong. End of story.”

Navarro attended Tufts University on a scholarship and went on to earn a doctorate in economics from Harvard. He believed in the benefits of free trade, and in 1984, he published his first book, which featured a chapter defending it. (“I drank the Kool-Aid,” he said in the January interview.)

He taught business and economics, first in San Diego and then at the University of California, Irvine, where he became a tenured professor and worked for more than 20 years. He lectured, wrote books and appeared as a commentator on TV.

It was China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 that flipped a switch for Navarro, on both the Democratic Party and his profession.

In the early 2000s, Navarro said, his UC Irvine students were starting to unexpectedly lose their jobs, and he began zeroing in on China’s effects on trade. He assigned his students to research how the Chinese were able to price their products more cheaply than the rest of the world.

His key finding was that it wasn’t just cheap labor driving prices, but a suite of predatory trading practices, including export subsidies, currency manipulation and a lack of protections for workers and the environment.

Those ideas fed into three books he wrote on China. One of them, “Death by China,” which he wrote with Greg Autry and published in 2011, won an endorsement from Trump, who called it “right on.”

Robert O’Brien, Trump’s former national security adviser who is a longtime friend, said Navarro had always cared about working people, despite being a coastal college professor.

“He really had that in his bones, that folks in the Rust Belt got a really raw deal,” O’Brien said. “He intrinsically understood that China was eating our lunch.”

Navarro was an adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign, and protectionist rhetoric resonated deeply with the candidate’s base. After Trump won, Navarro was promised a position as head of the National Economic Council, he wrote in a 2022 book, “Taking Back Trump’s America.”

Instead, the position was given to Gary Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs, and, in Navarro’s description, a “globalist.” Navarro was appointed to lead the newly created National Trade Council, but it was given almost no resources.

Cohn and others in the administration saw Navarro’s proposals, from withdrawing from NAFTA to levying stiff tariffs, as harmful. They worked to subvert him, according to Navarro and other officials.

Navarro was required to report to Cohn and copy him on his emails. A strategy was deployed to stop Navarro from swooping into the Oval Office alone. Unlike other advisers, Navarro was not invited to speak at a weekly trade meeting.

But Trump, who was also a trade skeptic at heart, would sometimes ask for Navarro in particular, saying, “Where’s my Peter?”

Shortly after Navarro, along with Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, succeeded in getting the president to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum, Cohn left the White House. But Navarro found others to clash with. He had some “pretty monumental battles” with Steven Mnuchin, the treasury secretary, in the Situation Room and the Oval Office over whether to negotiate in the US trade war with China, O’Brien recalled.

Cohn declined to comment, and Mnuchin did not respond.

The question now is whether the tariffs can withstand the backlash they are provoking — and deliver anything like what Trump and Navarro have promised.

The Trump administration has imposed a tariff of at least 10% on nearly all products coming into the United States. It has put national-security-related tariffs on steel, aluminum and automobiles, and opened investigations that could lead to tariffs on copper, lumber, semiconductors and pharmaceuticals. It introduced higher global tariffs on nearly 60 countries, which Trump then paused for 90 days to allow for negotiations.

Carmakers, electronics manufacturers, farmers and others have been pressuring the White House over the damage expected to be caused by tariffs. Small companies say they are at risk of going under.

In debates within the administration, some advisers, like Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, and Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council, have argued for lower tariffs that could be used as leverage to open foreign markets, people familiar with the discussions say.

But Navarro has continued to push for a maximalist approach and objects to any tariff exemptions.

But the president was convinced by turmoil in the bond markets to pause many of his global tariffs this month. Trump also moved to exclude electronics from his China tariffs, and he has talked about other exemptions for industries like autos.

Amid the chaos, rumors have percolated that Navarro is on thin ice, though even some of his critics doubt he will be forced out. On NBC’s “Meet the Press” on April 13, Navarro denied reports that he had been sidelined and said the administration’s policy was still “no exemptions, no exclusions.” Everything, he said, was going according to plan.

In an email last week to the Times, Navarro said the mainstream media’s description of chaos “ignores a strategy which has the United States negotiating with over 90 countries that have acknowledged their trade cheating.”

“It’s Trump three-dimensional chess, and the nervous Nellies need to trust in Trump,” he added.