He finally has the attention of the world, but his over-the-top tariff rhetoric isn’t very convincing.
He finally has the attention of the world, but his over-the-top tariff rhetoric isn’t very convincing.
E ven many people who support the “Trump tariff war” agree that its execution has been haphazard, even more bombastic than expected, creating massive uncertainty and turmoil with the public and markets.
A big reason for that is Peter Navarro, Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing. The 75-year-old former university professor and frequent Democratic candidate from California may seem an unlikely figure to be serving as Trump’s point man on tariffs. But he clearly reinforces some of his boss’s attributes, just without his showman’s touch.
Navarro’s default rhetoric is over-the-top flimflammery. On Sunday, he appeared on Fox News to claim that tariffs are indeed the public’s best friend: “Tariffs are tax cuts. Tariffs are jobs. Tariffs are national security. Tariffs are great for America. Tariffs will make America great again.”
Other Trump advisers emphasize that their tariffs are designed to force trading partners to the table to make a better deal for the U.S. Navarro emphasizes confrontation. During Trump’s first term, he told the New York Times: “First, trade must be not only free but also fair and reciprocal.”
Now he flatly rejects Vietnam’s offer to lower tariffs: “This is not a negotiation. This is a national emergency based on a trade deficit that’s gotten out of control because of cheating.” On a Monday CNBC show, he dismissed even a zero-tariff offer from countries, saying it would be “disingenuous . . . because it won’t get us anything.”
Navarro dismisses concerns of a recession, claiming on Monday that the U.S. is only months away from “the biggest tax cut in American history,” so “any discussion of recession seems silly when you factor that in.”
When it comes to allies, Navarro is even more aggressive than his boss. Last month, he told Bret Baier of Fox News that “Canada has been taken over by Mexican cartels” who are using it to smuggle fentanyl into the U.S.
Navarro hasn’t shared the intelligence behind that assertion, but he may credit it enough to support expelling Canada from the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network, the most important such network in the world. Navarro has denied that he seeks to kick Canada out of Five Eyes, calling the accusation “crazy stuff,” saying, “we would never jeopardize our national security . . . with allies like Canada.”
Regardless, Britain’s Daily Telegraph reported in February that Navarro was “pushing US negotiators to discuss reworking the border with their Canadian counterparts.” In response, the Canadians won’t deal with Navarro, but only with Trump cabinet members “viewed by Ottawa as being less extreme.”
Like Navarro, I’m from California, and during the 1990s I followed his career as a left-wing gadfly who unsuccessfully ran five times for office in San Diego. In 1992, he won 48 percent of the vote running for mayor as a staunch progressive. The New York Times reported: “As a candidate in the 1990s and 2000s, Mr. Navarro supported abortion rights, gay rights, environmental protection and higher taxes on the rich. He even spoke at the 1996 Democratic Convention and campaigned that year with Hillary Clinton.”
But Navarro alienated people in both parties with his abrasive style. He relished the role of tough guy, boasting in one of his books that he was “the cruelest and meanest son of a bitch who ever ran for public office in San Diego.”
After his last run for public office, in 2002, Navarro wrote a series of business books. In 2011, Death by China, a book he co-authored, promoted a dark view of China as a belligerent threat to the United States. It and a previous book were noticed by Trump, who hired Navarro for his nascent presidential campaign in 2015.
When Navarro served as a White House trade adviser in Trump’s first term, he managed to alienate many in the building. The longer he stayed in the White House, the more controversial his reputation became. In 2019, the Chronicle of Higher Education revealed that for nearly 20 years, Navarro had quoted and cited an economist named Ron Vara, who began as a clearly fictional literary device in his earlier books but evolved into a much-cited authority on China trade. But even his co-authors, such as Glenn Hubbard, the former dean of Columbia University’s business school, didn’t know that Vara was fictional until the 2019 Chronicle article. For his part, Navarro admitted the name was an anagram of his own (Ron Vara = Navarro) and called it a “whimsical device and pen name.”
If Peter Navarro weren’t one of the president’s top advisers on trade and tariffs, his many “whimsical” flourishes could be easily forgotten, his misleading use of a pen name to promote his China views considered an eccentricity, and his hyperbolic rhetoric part of the static of a vast media echo chamber.
Now, Peter Navarro finally has the attention of the world. But he projects shakiness when the public craves stability and heated anger when it wants calm explanations.
“I haven’t decided if Navarro is mostly a cartoon character or a modern-day Rasputin-like mystical manipulator, monopolizing Trump’s time on tariffs,” a major hedge-fund executive who still strongly supports President Trump told me. “What I do know is that you’re not going to get championship policy on a hypersensitive issue like world trade when you have junior varsity players like Navarro dominating the playing field.”