How Peter Navarro went from Democrat to inmate to Trump’s tariff guru

One year ago, Peter Navarro sat in a federal prison in Miami, sending messages that he was a martyr for MAGA. He had begged for help paying legal bills that he said would reach $US750,000 ($1.2 million).

Now Navarro has a prime seat in the Oval Office, where he is an architect of US President Donald Trump’s tariff policy – butting against the secretaries of treasury and commerce and Elon Musk, who called him a “moron”.

Navarro’s journey to one of the most powerful positions in the White House has been one of spectacular flameouts and surprising comebacks. He tried to launch a similar tariff war in the first Trump administration but lost influence before the inauguration, according to his own account. This time, he vowed it would be different, and the results have been explosive: a trembling stock market, trillions of dollars in losses, and the threat of recession.

To Navarro, all is going according to his plan.

“This is unfolding exactly like we thought it would in a dominant scenario,” he said on April 13 on NBC’s Meet the Press, predicting the Dow Jones Industrial Average would soar.

But critics say that Navarro, 75, has aligned with Trump to enact policies that could set back the United States for years to come, regardless of whether the president wins some concessions.

Mark Zandi, the chief economist of Moody’s, said the policy was so “egregiously bad” that it could “wreck the economy”. Zandi said that while economic consensus on anything was rare, in this case, he doubted whether even one out of 100 economists would agree with Navarro’s approach – but Trump does.

“The reason Navarro has such influence is it dovetails with what the president thinks about the world,” Zandi said. While others in the administration may have privately pushed back, there is nothing like the opposition Navarro faced in the first term, when he also served as a trade adviser, Zandi said.

The story of how this one-time staunch Democrat has won so much influence has become a defining tale of the early days of the second Trump administration, raising concerns even among many Republicans about how the economist has gained such extraordinary power.

An examination of Navarro’s memoirs, interviews and other documentation shows that it is a war he has sought for decades. The enemy is not only China, he has said, but also the Wall Street titans who benefited from Beijing’s policies and who, notably, are among the most powerful players in the Republican Party, including some now in Trump’s cabinet.

If Navarro’s battles in the current Trump administration are anything like they were in the first term, they are filled with shouting matches, name-calling and endless effort to curry the president’s favour.

Navarro and the White House did not respond to a request for comment.

From Clinton to MAGA

Little in Navarro’s background suggested he would be at the centre of White House discussions that could determine the nation’s future.

Navarro was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and spent part of his childhood living with his mother in a garage apartment in Palm Beach, Florida, near a mansion owned by the Kennedy family, before moving to the Washington area and attending Maryland’s Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School. After attending Tufts University, his liberal leanings led him to join the Peace Corps, serving from 1973 to 1976 as a volunteer in Thailand, the agency confirmed via email. Navarro recalled listening to Voice of America and hearing Jimmy Carter run for president on his “message of hope”, he told the San Diego Union-Tribune.

After earning a master’s degree in public administration and a PhD in economics at Harvard University, in 1981 he moved to San Diego, where his early career was marked by his criticism of tariffs.

In his 1984 book, The Policy Game: How Special Interests and Ideologues are Stealing America, Navarro warned that “as history has painfully taught, once protectionist wars begin, the likely result is a deadly and well-nigh unstoppable downward spiral by the entire world economy”.

Navarro became politically active and ran in a number of San Diego races. His main issue was limiting the number of houses in the city and, by extension, the number of immigrants. He advanced in a 1992 primary for mayor but lost the general election.

Then, in 1996, he ran for Congress and spoke at the Democratic National Convention.

“I’m proud to be carrying the Clinton-Gore banner,” Navarro said, referring to the ticket of Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

But while Democrats retained the White House, Navarro lost his race. Gradually, Navarro underwent a political radicalisation. Instead of focusing on housing, utility regulation and zoning, he had a much bigger target: China.

Navarro wrote in one of his several memoirs that he had an epiphany while teaching economics and public policy at the University of California, Irvine. He noticed that students who had earned a master’s degree in business administration were having a hard time getting and keeping good jobs.

Navarro wrote that after investigating why his students were unemployed, he concluded that “all roads began leading to Beijing”. Reborn as a trade hawk, he wrote that China was able to flood the US with cheap goods, “thereby beginning to put Americans like my MBA students out of work”.

Navarro turned his new way of thinking into a series of anti-China books. Some, including Death by China, relied on a supposed expert named Ron Vara, who Navarro later acknowledged was fake and an anagram of his name.

One day during Trump’s first run for the presidency, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, happened upon Navarro’s work. As Kushner told it in his memoir, Breaking History, he liked the thesis of Death by China so much that he hired the “eccentric former professor” as the Trump campaign’s trade adviser.

By Navarro’s account in his 2022 memoir, he was strolling on Victoria Beach near his home in Laguna Beach, California, when he got a call from Trump’s then-speechwriter, Stephen Miller. The two talked about an upcoming Trump speech in Pittsburgh that blamed globalisation for the shuttering of steel mills. By Navarro’s account, the speech was “pure MAGA magic” – referring to the Trump slogan “Make America Great Again” – and Trump, who had long spoken harshly of trade deals, was smitten.

Navarro was given an office on the 14th floor of Trump Tower, where he worked on economic plans that focused heavily on launching a trade war with China. After Trump won the election, he named Navarro director of the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy.

Navarro had an ally not only in Miller but in Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, a former Goldman Sachs investment banker who had once profited from globalism but turned against it after becoming convinced that the US was at economic war with China. He read Navarro’s China books and used his influence with Trump to push Navarro’s views.

Bannon, in an interview at his Capitol Hill townhouse, recalled how Trump’s top advisers were arguing against tariffs during a 2017 meeting at Mar-a-Lago. “Where’s my Peter?” Trump said, according to Bannon, who then brought him into the room to argue for tariffs.

Bannon said Navarro was often “mocked” and that his place in Trump’s orbit was underestimated. Bannon said Navarro was one of the few people who had been by Trump’s side during three campaigns and two administrations and that he reinforced Trump’s decades-long belief in tariffs.

“When people say, ‘he has gone too far’, this is not Peter Navarro’s” agenda, Bannon said. “This is Donald Trump’s. It dovetails. This is a core conviction of Trump.”

In one of his books, In Trump Time in 2021, Navarro wrote that he urged Trump to go “full Sudden Zen” and launch the all-out trade war against China. But, Navarro wrote, he was a “one-man China hawk totally without power or allies in a White House filled with a symphony of Wall Street transactionalists and China dove appeasers”.

Among his enemies was Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin, who held senior positions at Goldman Sachs and whom Navarro accused without evidence of having “made millions from Communist China”. Mnuchin could not be reached for comment. Navarro also battled repeatedly with National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, former president of Goldman Sachs, who Navarro wrote was “one of the worst and most treacherous misfits of the entire Trump administration”.

Cohn, now vice chairman of IBM, declined to comment. After leaving his White House position, Cohn said in 2019 that, among economists he knew about, Navarro was the “only one in the world” who thought tariffs worked. “Tariffs don’t work. If anything, they hurt the economy because if you’re a typical American worker, you have a finite amount of income to spend,” Cohn said in an interview with the Freakonomics Radio program.

More recently, Cohn has stressed in television appearances that tariffs can be a key bargaining instrument for a president against a country that is subsidising a product, but he warned in September that improper use of tariffs on goods the US did not produce “would just be debilitating to our economy”.

Wilbur Ross – who served as commerce secretary in the first Trump administration and pushed back against some of Navarro’s tariff proposals – was vilified in a Navarro memoir because he would “stick stilettos in my back”.

Now Ross is watching Navarro’s influence on Trump’s second term without voices of caution, and that causes him concern, he said in an interview with The Washington Post.

“I think it’s always good for the president to be exposed to a variety of opinions, especially on as crucial a topic as tariffs,” Ross told The Post. “And so I think it would be far preferable if there were other strong voices in the administration advancing, if not contrary views, at least views addressing some of the details.”

‘I am your wake-up call’

Navarro concluded that a second Trump administration was his best chance to realise his tariff policy goals. Few would work harder to embrace Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Navarro had worked on a plan called the “Green Bay Sweep”, in which Republicans would manoeuvre to send the counting of 2020 electoral votes back to state legislatures, which Navarro believed could end up approving electors who would declare Trump the winner. The plan was never enacted because then-vice president Mike Pence refused to follow along, which led Navarro to write that he was a “traitor”.

In his memoir Taking Back Trump’s America, published in 2022, Navarro made little-noticed complaints about how Trump managed trade in the first administration and ran for re-election.

Describing what he called Trump’s “Achilles’ heel”, Navarro wrote, “I would tell you in a nanosecond that it is Bad Personnel choices”, criticising Trump for surrounding himself “with a confederacy of globalists, Never-Trump Republicans, wild-eyed Freedom Caucus nut jobs and self-absorbed Wall Street transactionalists” who didn’t understand Trump’s working-class voters.

Moreover, Navarro wrote, it was “unforgivable” for Trump to have failed to make China the most important issue of his 2020 campaign, calling it “one of the greatest missed opportunities in presidential campaign history”.

Navarro, meanwhile, was indicted in June 2022 for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. The lawmakers called on him to provide a deposition and documents about his knowledge of the events surrounding the assault. Navarro asserted that he could not comply because Trump had invoked executive privilege.

As his trial began in September 2023, he told reporters that he expected to face legal bills of $US750,000. “Do I look like a rich man?” Navarro said. “This is the same suit I wore in 2017 going into the White House, OK?”

Navarro later said that Trump helped pay $US300,000 and that he raised more in an appeal on a website that lists anonymous gifts and some named contributors. The website says at the top, “No need for more donations now!” The Trump administration has not responded to a request by The Post for Navarro’s financial disclosure report.

The trial judge ruled that Navarro failed to prove the existence of a conversation or a formal invocation of privilege by Trump that directed Navarro not to co-operate with lawmakers. Navarro was found guilty and served a four-month sentence in a Miami federal prison starting in March 2024.

On the same day he was released from prison, Navarro arrived at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where he said, “The J6 committee demanded that I betray Donald John Trump to save my own skin. I refused.”

Twenty-eight years after he spoke at the Democratic National Convention and bashed Republicans, he told the GOP gathering that “Democrats come for your kids. They are indoctrinating them with poisonous attitudes on race and gender”.

Navarro added, “I went to prison so you won’t have to. I am your wake-up call … On election day, America will hold these lawfare jackals accountable.”

‘I’ve been called worse’

A pair of prosecutors, Elizabeth Aloi and John Crabb Jr, said during Navarro’s case that he acted as if he were above the law. After Trump was re-elected, Ed Martin, a loyalist who was named interim US attorney for D.C., demoted Aloi and Crabb and five other top prosecutors to low-level positions. Aloi and Crabb could not be reached for comment.

Bannon, who also went to prison for contempt of Congress, said Trump felt a “very special bond” with him and Navarro because of the court cases.

Trump announced in December on social media that Navarro, who was “treated horribly by the Deep State”, would be his senior counsellor for trade and manufacturing, a post that put him in a position to push his tariff war. Navarro predicted that the tariffs would raise $US6 trillion; The Post’s Fact Checker said credible analyses put the figure at half that much or less.

The extent of Navarro’s tariff prescription appears at odds with the view of some who worked closely with him.

‘The reason Navarro has such influence is it dovetails with what the president thinks about the world.’

Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi

R. Glenn Hubbard, who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers during President George W. Bush’s administration, co-wrote a 2010 book with Navarro titled Seeds of Destruction: Why the Path to Economic Ruin Runs Through Washington, and How to Reclaim American Prosperity. The book billed them as offering “a bipartisan, commonsense blueprint for reversing America’s economic decline”.

But in a recent interview on PBS, in which Hubbard did not mention his co-author, he said the tariffs meant “higher prices, it means disrupted supply chains, it means job losses and lost output … You’re talking about shaving about a full percentage point” from growth in the gross domestic product.

Hubbard declined a request for comment.

Inside the White House, the extent of Navarro’s influence with Trump has stoked rampant speculation. The president has implemented a range of his recommendations – only to partially or wholly reverse them under pressure, while also keeping Navarro and his drastic ideas within reach.

At the outset of Trump’s second term, most of Navarro’s prescriptions appeared to be readily adopted. Navarro was a driving force behind large tariffs on Canada and Mexico, which have drawn unusual rebukes from GOP lawmakers. He successfully pushed for the administration to close a loophole allowing Chinese products worth less than $US800 to be imported duty-free, overcoming objections from private carriers such as FedEx and UPS, two people familiar with the matter said.

Ahead of the announcement of tariffs on April 2, which Trump billed as “Liberation Day”, Navarro pushed for universal tariffs on all imports and strikingly aggressive tariffs on dozens of countries worldwide. That approach – which jettisoned far more modest measures proposed by White House economists, the Office of the US Trade Representative and the Treasury Department – was also adopted.

Yet Trump has also been willing to reject Navarro’s advice. With financial markets going haywire the week after April 2, commerce secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury secretary Scott Bessent persuaded Trump to approve a 90-day pause of the tariffs on dozens of countries so a deal could be reached.

But Navarro opposed that proposal, according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations. The next week, Trump agreed to temporarily exempt electronics from Chinese import duties under pressure from Apple CEO Tim Cook – another plan that Navarro had resisted as weakening the tariff policy.

Navarro has tested the limits of his power by seeming to go out of his way to antagonise Musk, asserting that the world’s richest person relies on China for his Tesla business. Tesla could lose much from Navarro’s style of trade war. China is the second-largest market for the electric vehicle company, and Tesla’s Shanghai factory produced its 3 millionth car in October. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.

Navarro appeared to speak dismissively about Musk in a CNBC interview, calling him a “car assembler”, not a “car manufacturer”, because many Tesla components come from China and other countries.

Musk was outraged, launching attacks against Navarro on his social media platform, X. After writing that Navarro’s PhD in economics from Harvard was “a bad thing, not a good thing”, he posted that Navarro was “truly a moron”, “dumber than a sack of bricks” and saying things that were “demonstrably false”.

While some of the tariffs have been paused, the US is currently imposing tariffs of 145 per cent on Chinese products, in an unprecedented financial escalation with Beijing that reflects Navarro’s influence.

Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press on April 13, Navarro insisted that his relationship with Musk was “great”, adding: “I’ve been called worse.”

Alice Crites and Spencer S. Hsu contributed to this report.

The Washington Post

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