Peter Navarro

Peter Kent Navarro (born July 15, 1949) is an American economist who served in the Trump administration as the Assistant to the President, Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, and the national Defense Production Act policy coordinator.

Navarro was born on July 15, 1949, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

His father, Albert "Al" Navarro, a saxophonist and clarinetist, led a house band, which played summers in New Hampshire and winters in Florida.

After his parents divorced when he was 9 or 10, he lived with his mother, Evelyn Littlejohn, a Saks Fifth Avenue secretary, in Palm Beach, Florida.

As a teen, he lived in Bethesda, Maryland in a one-bedroom apartment with his mother and brother.

Navarro attended Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School.

Navarro attended Tufts University on an academic scholarship, graduating in 1972 with a Bachelor of Arts degree.

He then spent three years in the U.S. Peace Corps, serving in Thailand.

He earned a Master of Public Administration from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1979, and a PhD in economics from Harvard under the supervision of Richard E. Caves in 1986.

From 1981 through 1985, he was a research associate at Harvard's Energy and Environmental Policy Center.

As a doctoral student in 1984, Navarro wrote a book entitled The Policy Game: How Special Interests and Ideologues are Stealing America, which claimed that special interest groups had led the United States to "a point in its history where it cannot grow and prosper."

In the book, he also called for greater worker's compensation to help those who had lost jobs to trade and foreign competition.

His doctoral dissertation on why corporations donate to charity is one of his most cited works.

He has also done research in the topic of wind energy with Frank Harris, a former student of his.

Navarro has written more than a dozen books on various topics in economics and specializing in issues of balance of trade.

He has published peer-reviewed economics research on energy policy, charity, deregulation, and the economics of trash collection.

From 1985 through 1988, he taught at the University of California, San Diego and the University of San Diego.

In 1989 he moved to the University of California, Irvine as a professor of economics and public policy.

He continued on the UC Irvine faculty for more than 20 years and is now a professor emeritus.

He has worked on energy issues and the relationship between the United States and Asia.

He has received multiple teaching awards for MBA courses he has taught.

He previously served as a Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of the White House National Trade Council, a newly created entity in the White House Office, until it was folded into the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, a new role established by executive order in April 2017.

He is also a professor emeritus of economics and public policy at the Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine, and the author of Death by China, among other publications.

Navarro ran unsuccessfully for office in San Diego, California, five times.

Navarro's views on trade are significantly outside the mainstream of economic thought, and are widely considered fringe by other economists.

A strong proponent of reducing U.S. trade deficits, Navarro is well known as a critic of Germany and China, and has accused both nations of currency manipulation.

He has called for increasing the size of the American manufacturing sector, setting high tariffs, and "repatriating global supply chains."

He is also a vocal opponent of multilateral free trade agreements such as NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.

In the Trump administration, Navarro was a hawkish advisor on trade, as he encouraged Trump to implement trade protectionist policies.

In explaining his role in the Trump administration, Navarro said that he is there to "provide the underlying analytics that confirm [Trump's] intuition [on trade]. And his intuition is always right in these matters."

In 2018, as the Trump administration was implementing trade restrictionist policies, Navarro argued that no countries would retaliate against U.S. tariffs "for the simple reason that we are the most lucrative and biggest market in the world".

Shortly after the implementation of the tariffs, other countries did implement retaliatory tariffs against the United States, leading to trade wars.

During his final year in the Trump administration, Navarro was involved in the administration's COVID-19 response.

Early on, he issued private warnings within the administration about the threat posed by the virus, but downplayed the risks in public.

He publicly clashed with Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as Navarro touted hydroxychloroquine as a treatment of COVID-19 and condemned various public health measures to stop the spread of the virus.

After Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election and Donald Trump refused to concede, Navarro advanced conspiracy theories of election fraud and in February 2022 was subpoenaed twice by Congress.

One subpoena required him to produce documents to the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack; the other subpoena required him to give testimony to the committee.

Navarro refused to comply, effectively ignoring both subpoenas, and was referred to the Justice Department.

On June 2, 2022, a grand jury indicted him on two counts of contempt of Congress.

On September 7, 2023, he was convicted on both counts, and on January 25, 2024, he was sentenced to four months in jail and fined $9,500.