Peter Navarro Should Not Have Power Over U.S. Trade Policy—or Anything
Navarro is a crank and a sycophant, so naturally he's going to be one of Donald Trump's top advisors.
Shortly after then-President Donald Trump launched his "good and easy to win" trade wars in 2017, Peter Navarro sat down with CNN's Jake Tapper to defend the use of tariffs.
Asked whether Americans would end up paying the brunt of the tariff cost, Navarro told Tapper to "look at the data."
"China is bearing the entire burden of the tariffs," Navarro said. "There is no evidence whatsoever that American consumers are paying any of this."
The data, of course, say the exact opposite. American consumers and businesses bore roughly 93 percent of the cost of Trump's tariffs, according to one analysis by Moody's. The U.S. Trade Commission concluded in 2023 that American companies and consumers "bore nearly the full cost" of the tariffs Trump levied on steel, aluminum, and many goods imported from China.
Then again, analytical rigor and an understanding of basic economics have never been all that important to Navarro—who will serve as "Senior Counselor for Trade and Manufacturing," President-elect Donald Trump announced on Wednesday.
As I detailed in a 2020 feature for Reason, Navarro became one of the most powerful people in the first Trump administration after a failed left-wing political career—longtime California political pundit Joe Matthews called him "San Diego's Bernie Sanders"—and two decades of churning out books with titles like Death by China: Confronting the Dragon. Along the way, he invented a fake persona named "Ron Vara," who would dispense pearls of Sinophobic wisdom including "only the Chinese can turn a leather sofa into an acid bath, a baby crib into a lethal weapon, and a cellphone battery into heart-piercing shrapnel."
Is there any evidence to back up those claims? Of course not. Did Navarro apologize when he got caught fabricating Vara and passing him off (in several books) as a supposed Harvard-educated military vet with expert knowledge of global trade? C'mon. The first rule of running a grift is never admitting you're doing it.
As director of the White House National Trade Council during Trump's first term, Navarro left his mark in ways that went beyond the tariffs. He also played a key role in killing the White House's attempt at reforming the Jones Act, a terrible piece of protectionism that makes it more expensive to ship anything around the United States by boat. He was the driving force behind the Trump administration's harebrained idea to give a $765 million contract to the Eastman-Kodak Company, a bankrupt camera company, to produce pharmaceuticals (the contract, thankfully, was canceled after the Securities and Exchanges Commission began investigating it). He concluded his tenure by being held in contempt of Congress for refusing to testify or turn over documents as part of the investigation in the January 6 riot, and he served four months in prison.
Expect more of the same the second time around. Trump says Navarro's new role "leverages Peter's broad range of White House experience, while harnessing his extensive Policy analytic and Media skills. His mission will be to help successfully advance and communicate the Trump Manufacturing, Tariff, and Trade Agendas."
During Trump's first term, Navarro "pushed protectionism, which was a drag on economic growth, didn't work to change trade deficits, and didn't work to improve trade practices by China or others," Vance Ginn, who served as a White House economic advisor during the Trump administration, posted on X shortly after Trump's announcement on Wednesday. "Why continue failed policies and expect a different result?"
"Seeking advice from Peter Navarro on how to improve trade policy is akin to seeking advice from David Duke on how to improve race relations," Don Boudreaux, an economist and senior fellow at the Mercatus Center, told Reason in response to the Navarro pick.
Despite what Trump says, Navarro is clearly a crank who should not be given any authority to steer America's $7 trillion in annual imports and exports.
He is, however, a successful political opportunist who has wormed his way into Trump's inner circle by affirming the former president's loony opinions about global trade and demonstrating a high degree of loyalty. He'll go on CNN to lie about how tariffs work. He'll go to prison for four months instead of testifying to Congress about January 6. That's the sort of thing that matters to Trump. That's how you get one of the top jobs in this administration.
