EXCLUSIVE — During the home stretch of the 2020 election, former President Donald Trump was rocked by “one of the worst presidential campaigns in modern history,” former White House adviser Peter Navarro claims.
As Trump sought the steer the nation through the COVID-19 pandemic and throw political haymakers at then-candidate Joe Biden, some of his campaign advisers were fudging polling numbers to give him a rosier outlook on the election and squandering money away on frivolous gambits, rendering the election a much tighter contest than it should have been, Navarro alleged.
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“[They ran] effectively one of the worst presidential campaigns in modern history with stark contrast to his 2016 campaign. The president himself, I think, did a wonderful job leading this country. He had the vision, but he frankly was let down by bad personnel that got inside the West Wing and never should have,” Navarro told the Washington Examiner on Monday at a cocktail and press event for his new book, Taking Back Trump’s America: Why We Lost the White House and How We’ll Win It Back.
Following Trump’s election defeat, Navarro penned the “Navarro Reports” outlining heavily disputed allegations of fraud and irregularities in the election. He also pioneered the so-called “Green Bay Sweep” plan to nix the certification of the 2020 election and give Trump a second term.
But in Navarro’s mind, the election “should have been a landslide” that would have likely eclipsed any potential fraud. Campaign ineptness morphed Trump’s showdown with Biden into “something far closer” than it otherwise would have been.
Navarro spares Trump from much of his sharp criticism, instead directing his ire at the “West Wing dumpster.” He has long lamented that the Trump administration was stacked with poor personnel choices such as former chief economic adviser Gary Cohn, former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, former chief of staff John Kelly, and others.
But much of that spilled over to the campaign. There was one man in particular whose involvement particularly peeved Navarro: Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
“In 2016, we were significantly outspent, but the money was used wisely. And in 2020, we had plenty of money, but Kushner burned it like a monkey with a flamethrower. And when push came to shove in the final six weeks of the campaign, we ran out of money,” Navarro said. “There [were] young kids over there making six figures, and then, when the pandemic hit, they didn’t even come to work.”
While Brad Parscale was the chief of the floundering Trump campaign on paper, Navarro dubs Kushner as the “de facto” campaign manager responsible for much of the campaign’s chaos. In his book, slated for release Tuesday, he alleged that Kushner frequently added points to the polls and lied to “the boss.”
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Eventually, Navarro and his allies, backed by Donald Trump Jr., concocted an unsuccessful coup d’etat of sorts to oust Kushner from his campaign perch, according to the book.
To Navarro, Kushner was part of a larger problem in the Trump White House. Fueling much of Trump’s woes was the “rapprochement with the traditional Republicans” the former president pursued during his early White House days.
The so-called “RINOs” (short for “Republicans in Name Only”) share many common goals with Trump Republicans, such as the pursuit of lower tax and regulatory burdens on businesses, Navarro says. But the two sides diverge dramatically on immigration, trade, and foreign wars: core policy issues.
“Mitch McConnell — his business model is go to Wall Street and corporate America and raise funds, give those to Senate candidates who pledge fealty to him. He maintains his power, but he does it at the expense of being beholden to Wall Street,” Navarro said. “Therein lies the beauty of Trump. He did not have to take any of that. So we got that black swan event.”
Trump’s bid to ease relations with traditional establishment Republicans was “misplaced,” he argued. They hamstrung Trump from pursuing much of his hallmark domestic objectives such as “buy America, hire American policies,” according to Navarro.
In total, there were five strategic blunders “catalyzed by bad personnel” that ushered in Trump’s election loss, per Navarro’s book. This includes a failure to pursue a hard-line approach to “communist China,” not governing as a “firebrand populist economic nationalist,” campaign mishaps, stalled efforts to pass another round of COVID-19 stimulus in the twilight days before the election, and the inability of the White House communications team to curtail narratives from “large cadres of Never-Trump newspapers.”
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In order to remedy the pitfalls that led to Trump’s downfall in 2020, he must surround himself with strong personnel and be unwavering in his quest for a populist economic nationalist agenda, if he embarks on a 2024 stint, Navarro said.
He describes Trump as an “avid reader” and was hopeful that Trump would read his new book, which borderline functions as a letter of sorts to his old boss. Navarro declined to divulge how frequently he chats with Trump.
Navarro also joked that his new book would help foot his legal bills for his legal wrangling over the contempt of Congress charges levied against him for defying Jan. 6 committee subpoenas. He will stand trial in November.
