The Protectionist’s Protectionist

But Trump’s announcement of new steel and aluminum tariffs on March 1, and Cohn’s subsequent resignation, suggest that protectionism’s time has come. Navarro, 68, began popping up on cable news, and he made his Sunday political show debut on March 4—appearing on three of them. Fox News host Chris Wallace asked Navarro about the significant opposition from the president’s own party to the new tariffs. “Donald Trump ran against 16 Republicans. None of those Republicans supported Donald Trump’s positions on trade. He beat every one of them,” Navarro said, grinning. “And then Donald Trump went on to the Democratic opponent who didn’t support his positions on trade and he beat them, too.”

The Navarro view on American trade policy—that the U.S. government has been abetting Chinese cheating and gutting the domestic manufacturing sector—is reflective of the president’s own instincts. But unlike his boss’s, Navarro’s background is in academia, not business. He got a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard in 1986 and taught at the University of California, Irvine, for two decades. His research interests involved electricity and environmental policies. One of his first books, published in 1985, had the scintillating title The Dimming of America: The Real Costs of Electric Utility Regulatory Failure. From the beginning, he earned a reputation for making pointed, dogmatic arguments—with perhaps a bit of sleight of hand. “One aspect of The Dimming of America that will be disquieting to those knowledgeable about the electric utility industry is Mr. Navarro’s selection of statistics to support his underlying thesis,” reads a contemporary review. “Quite simply, they are suspect.”

Navarro ran repeatedly and unsuccessfully for public office in the 1990s as a Democrat, including a 1996 bid for a House seat in San Diego. He also wrote books on investment and management advice before turning his attention to China. Navarro’s 2006 book The Coming China Wars hit on the themes that would become staples of his commentary—the original sin of allowing China to join the World Trade Organization, the litany of illegal trade actions proliferated by Beijing, the environmental costs of the economic opening between China and the West.

By 2011, Navarro had abandoned the idea that economic war with China was imminent because, as he wrote in Death by China, the war was already here and America was losing. Navarro described China’s “weapons of job destruction,” including manipulation of the value of its currency, theft of intellectual property, and illegal export subsidies.

That book became a documentary, which Navarro directed and produced. It’s available on YouTube, and watching it is uncannily like listening to one of Trump’s campaign speeches advocating protective trade measures. It’s also a window into the party-bending nature of trade politics.

Narrated by Hollywood-liberal-in-good-standing Martin Sheen, Death by China features friendly interviews with members of Congress from both parties, conservative commentators Peter Morici and Gordon Chang, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, and Obama administration economist Jared Bernstein. Against the film’s crude animations depicting our trade regime as a shell game, the interviewees all confirm Navarro’s position: that collusion between the federal government and corporate America to allow China to trade freely with the United States has gutted American manufacturing and destroyed the working class.

It’s no wonder Trump invited Navarro onto his campaign and then into the White House. But for most of his tenure, he’s remained on the sidelines with just a few allies, including the two Steves (Bannon and Miller) and Commerce secretary Wilbur Ross. Navarro’s office was seen as particularly redundant by the rest of the West Wing, as trade issues traditionally are in the portfolio of the NEC.

Cohn, like most of Trump’s policy aides, didn’t share the president’s affinity for protectionism. This resulted in shouting matches with Navarro. “During their showdowns, Mr. Cohn at times accused Mr. Navarro of lying to the president about the effect of his proposals and often laced his accusations with a colorful round of expletives, said White House officials who witnessed their debates,” the Wall Street Journal reported. Navarro hit back by questioning the motives of Cohn and other “Wall Street globalists” who, he said, opposed tariffs because of the effects on their own financial holdings.

Despite being outnumbered and outgunned in the White House, Navarro turned out to have the only ally who mattered: Trump himself. Cohn and the free traders may have won the battle for a time, but Navarro’s presence served to confirm Trump’s gut beliefs about the problems with our economy. To his opponents in the West Wing, Navarro brought out the worst in Trump.

Navarro believes himself to be the Trump-whisperer on matters of trade and tariffs—though he puts it differently in public. The tariff proposal “is the president’s vision,” he said on Bloomberg TV on March 7. “My function, really, as an economist is to try to provide the underlying analytics that confirm his intuition. And his intuition is always right in these matters.”

But it may not be that simple. On March 14, the White House confirmed that Cohn’s replacement was not another protectionist but Larry Kudlow, a TV journalist and free-market advocate. Kudlow, who like Navarro was an economic adviser to the Trump campaign, had just days earlier coauthored an op-ed with Stephen Moore, urging Trump to reconsider the steel tariffs. Kudlow is not entirely unsympathetic to Navarro’s broad argument about bad Chinese practices—and even makes a brief appearance in Death by China—but he is no protectionist.

Moore, who also advised the Trump campaign, said Kudlow and Navarro are friendly and don’t view each other as adversaries. When Kudlow appeared on CNBC hours after the news of his appointment broke, he offered an acknowledgment of his future White House colleague’s new status. “In my mind, Peter Navarro is an equal,” said Kudlow.

For the time being, though, Navarro may be first among equals when it comes to crafting trade policy. According to Politico, when Trump was presented in a cabinet meeting in early March with a $30 billion tariff package against Chinese imports, he told U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer to go bigger. Navarro couldn’t have said it better himself.

Michael Warren is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.