President-elect Donald Trump has picked his former trade adviser, Peter Navarro, to join his next administration as his “Senior Counselor for Trade and Manufacturing.” Compared to some of Trump’s other choices — like Pete Hegseth for defense secretary and Matt Gaetz (who has since withdrawn) for attorney general — Navarro appears at first blush to be a tame choice. He is not dogged by personal sex scandals. And he has substantial formal qualifications for the job — he is a Harvard-trained economist and was a tenured professor at the University of California.
But his policy knowledge and more buttoned-up appearance shouldn’t obscure the reality that he is very much a stick of Trumpian dynamite. The president-elect chose Navarro for his fanatical devotion to two causes: economic nationalism and Trump himself. Navarro can serve as a relatively competent lieutenant — at least by Trump’s standards — while the president pursues his promised radical agenda on tariffs and China. He can also be trusted to help Trump undermine democratic institutions and sit in on top conversations with Trump that could potentially be legally incriminating — and not flip on his boss.
Their main link is a shared interest in fierce economic nationalism, protectionist views on trade and outright paranoia about China.
The Navarro pick comes just months after he was released from a four-month prison sentence after being convicted on two counts of contempt of Congress. Navarro refused to comply with a congressional subpoena from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. As Politico explained at the time of his sentencing, Navarro had a significant role in Trump’s efforts to deny the results of the 2020 election:
The Jan. 6 committee had planned to interview Navarro about his work in the aftermath of the 2020 election to stoke discredited claims of election fraud and to strategize with members of Congress on a plan to block or delay the certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory. Navarro and Bannon pushed a plan that they dubbed the “Green Bay Sweep” to encourage members of Congress to mount prolonged challenges to Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, when lawmakers met to certify the results.
Navarro defied the subpoena, claiming he could not be compelled to provide documents or testimony due to executive privilege. That is the concept that, as CNN explains, “presidents can shield their aides from having to share internal communications with Congress when it is conducting oversight.” But a federal judge ruled that Navarro failed to prove that Trump had blocked him from testifying to the select committee. Navarro became the first former White House official to be imprisoned for a contempt of Congress conviction.
In other words, even though Trump didn’t come to Navarro’s rescue, Navarro went to jail refusing to say anything that might strengthen the case against Trump. What explains his extreme devotion? It doesn’t hurt that they have similar personality traits, such as grandstanding and a tenuous relationship with the truth. “I still have some principles. But not as many as you might think because I don’t have any concern at all about making stuff up about my opponent that isn’t exactly true,” Navarro wrote in 1998 while reflecting on his many failed efforts to win public office.
But their main link is a shared interest in fierce economic nationalism, protectionist views on trade and outright paranoia about China. Navarro is formally trained as an economist, but he stands on the fringe of his field in his hostility toward free trade and his views on how tariffs work. That position made him appealing to Trump long before Trump’s presidential run. Trump even wrote a blurb endorsing Navarro’s 2012 alarmist documentary “Death by China,” a film adapted from his book by the same name. Navarro described that book as a “survival guide” to outmaneuvering “the planet’s most efficient assassin,” cautioning against ever buying products made in China and prescribing a trade war to generate new jobs in the U.S. His antipathy toward Beijing goes well beyond economics: Navarro also likened China’s growing military to Nazi Germany and counseled an aggressive defense posture toward China.
Navarro played a key role in shaping Trump’s trade strategy during his first term, and his return signals Trump is as serious as ever about pursuing an aggressive tariff strategy, unraveling free trade norms and agreements, and potentially escalating trade wars with China, as well as U.S. allies. To the extent that Navarro influences high-level conversations on China policy, he’s likely to have a high threshold for risk when it comes to destabilizing the complicated and competitive U.S.-Chinese relationship.
Perhaps the best illustration of the kind of figure Navarro is in Trump World — industrious, wonky, obedient — is that even when he was in prison this year for refusing to comply with an inquiry into his involvement in efforts to overturn the election, he was still working on detailed policy proposals for a future Trump administration. While incarcerated he also mocked his former “globalist” rivals within the first Trump administration in correspondence with Semafor. And in August, just hours after being released from prison, he offered the audience classically Trumpian sounding rhetoric at the Republican National Convention: “If they can come for me, if they can come for Donald Trump, be careful. They will come for you.” Does he believe it? Who knows. But Navarro knows that his political window is open for a little longer.