Trump’s trade warrior is rising
Donald Trump’s nationalist trade adviser Peter Navarro has staged a startling comeback.
Last year he nearly disappeared from view when his small operation was subsumed under the White House’s National Economic Council, which was headed by his rival, Gary Cohn, the free-trader who was president of Goldman Sachs. Now, Cohn’s on his way out while the steel and aluminum tariffs that Navarro advocates are becoming national policy.
One factor behind Navarro’s surprising resurrection is that Trump has taken renewed interest this year in trade and national security — Navarro’s issues — after having focused in 2017 on health care and tax cuts. The second factor is that Navarro is as relentless as a honey badger. He’s been in front of television cameras repeatedly over the past week championing the tariffs.
After losing to Cohn in the White House turf wars, someone else might have gone home to California. Instead, Navarro kept building the case for stronger action. Even now he’s not letting up, according to Michael Wessel, a steelworkers representative who speaks with him regularly.
Free-traders express their dismay about Navarro’s ascendancy — and Navarro welcomes their disdain. Although he holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard and taught the subject at the University of California-Irvine, Navarro accuses his fellow economists of blindly adhering to free-trade principles at the expense of national security.
“The president said very clearly that we can’t have a country without steel and aluminum industries, and I totally agree with him,” Navarro said this month. Echoing Trump, he added, “All the countries that trade with us are getting the better part of the deal.”
Both Navarro and Trump are former Democrats who feel no compunction to stick to Republican orthodoxy on trade. Navarro was kind of a liberal once. He served in the Peace Corps and later campaigned against uncontrolled real estate development in San Diego — ironic now that he works for the world’s most famous developer.