As former president Donald Trump prepares to win the White House a second time, he now understands the importance of appointing loyal personnel who will not obstruct his agenda, as often happened during his first term, says former Trump adviser Peter Navarro.
Navarro said while he expects that a second Trump term “will not be afflicted by that,” he is convinced that “part of making sure that happens is getting out the information about what went wrong sometimes in [the] West Wing.”
Navarro called this “a very bad decision” and added that Steve Bannon, CEO of Trump’s 2016 campaign and his later chief strategist, dubbed Trump’s alliance with establishment RINOs the “the original sin” of the Trump administration.
”And that set in motion, particularly in the early part of the administration, a set of really bad choices for both the cabinet and the West Wing.”
To give an example, Navarro said that when working on Trump’s trade tariff policies, he often had to contend with opposition from White House officials who previously helped to finance offshoring to China.
However, those establishment RINOs were “vehemently opposed to any kind of trade actions that would prevent their corporate donors from offshoring American jobs,” Navarro wrote.
Undermining the President’s Policy Agenda
Trump’s policy agenda was often undermined by his appointees and White House staff, the former adviser said.
Staff responsible for delivering documents to the president for his signature continually buried things that Trump wanted to get done, Navarro said.
Navarro cited an executive order related to the South Korea trade deal. Trump asked him to prepare the document and put it on his desk for his signature, but Trump’s chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, made the document “disappear into the ether.”
The document Navarro drafted at Trump’s request was to pull the United States out of a “toxic trade treaty with South Korea within a specified timeframe,” Navarro explained in the book.
“These kinds of presidential actions were designed not necessarily to exit such agreements but rather to put pressure on other countries like South Korea so that we could quickly negotiate better deals for American workers and companies,” Navarro wrote.
In addition, the White House staff member responsible for assembling the press kit each night for the president to read would “skew” the information presented, Navarro recounted. That staff member was not supposed to have any input on policy. Nonetheless, he tended to include articles critical of Trump’s tariff policy, while leaving out articles expressing different views.
Further, Navarro was dismayed that there were three generals among Trump’s top-level officials who consistently disobeyed the president’s direct orders.
Pandemic Response
Navarro prepared an executive order for Trump that he believes would have “shift[ed] the blame for the pandemic off the shoulders of President Trump—where it did not belong—to the communist Chinese.”
Executive Order Would Have Changed the Course of the Election
Navarro believes that if that executive order had been signed, it might have changed the outcome of the 2020 election.While it is unclear whether the coronavirus escaped from the Wuhan lab accidentally or whether it was released intentionally, it helped the Chinese communist regime to advance its geopolitical interests, Navarro said.
Problematic Appointments
Navarro has also criticized some of Trump’s choices for his cabinet. For instance, if Ben Carson had been made head of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) instead of being placed in “the backwater” of Housing and Urban Development, “we would have had much more cerebral, robust, and quick response to the pandemic,” the adviser said.
Realizing that he had appointed personnel who were not intent on carrying out his aims was “a slow awakening” for Trump, Navarro said. He recounted the story of a top-level meeting in 2017, as Trump was becoming increasingly frustrated “with the slow walking” of his trade and tariff policies.
When Trump’s cabinet members and advisers gathered for that meeting, Navarro was “the only guy in the room who [wanted] to get tough on China and impose the tariffs.”
It was the first concrete sign to Trump, “that he had assembled a group of people who he was going to have to overcome or persuade,” Navarro said.
“It was just a tough, tough road. We got it done. Tariffs on China, tariffs on steel and aluminum—it all worked and it helped create jobs, but it took too long, it was slow,” Navarro said. “By the time four years rolled around, we should have had more and higher tariffs on China because they were just screwing us, which is what the communists always do.”
Economy the ‘Tip of the Spear’
“What we did [in terms of economic policies] was structural in nature, designed to increase the real wages of American workers, the productivity of American workers, the prosperity of the middle class,” said Navarro, a professor emeritus of economics.“We did that beautifully through structural elements, not just the traditional Republican tax cuts and lower regulatory burdens, but by securing the southern border, which prevents a flood of uneducated, low-income workers coming in and pressing hard on the wages of black, brown, and blue-collar Americans, [and] by bringing in our supply chains and our manufacturing base.”
Navarro said of the current economic crisis: “I think the only one who fully understands how to get out of that is Donald Trump.”
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