CNN
—
As Wall Street executives and traders white knuckle their way through the most acutely volatile market period since the pandemic, desperate to avoid the economic blast radius of President Donald Trump’s sweeping new trade war, Peter Navarro’s name is never far from the topic of conversation.
In group chats, private messages, client notes, small gatherings at bars, clubs and restaurants, or even private calls to Trump administration allies — the tariff-loving White House senior counselor for trade and manufacturing makes for a convenient villain.
Executives, their deputies and analysts have explored seemingly every channel available — TV interviews, social media, earnings calls, industry conferences — to push for the elevation of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the billionaire former hedge fund manager seen as a moderating presence in the wake of the administration’s initial wave of tariffs. And many of them cheered when Elon Musk launched a series of personal attacks on Navarro last month.
One finance executive, asked by CNN to summarize the anti-Navarro sentiment, was happy to provide a laundry list of grievances on the condition that his name wasn’t attached. A sampling: Navarro’s understanding of global supply chains is “egregiously simplistic,” they said, while comparing his “grasp of basic trade economics” to “that of a doorknob.”
“I’m not trying to start a public war with that guy as long as he’s got the president’s ear,” the executive said in explaining his refusal to speak on the record at the same time he declined to mention Navarro by name — as if he’d achieved a kind of Voldemort-like status. “I think we’re all hoping he’s been sidelined, but he always seems to pop back up.”
Trump’s most consistent and unrelenting tariff hawk hasn’t been bashful about his view that the feeling is mutual. All of which helps explain why much of Wall Street spent the past month frantically seizing on any sign Navarro had been cast aside.
Bessent’s role in Trump’s decision to announce a 90-day pause on the “reciprocal” tariff rates announced on April 2 was followed by his elevation to the front of the trade team tasked with securing dozens of trade deals in that compressed time window. Bessent has also served as the primary public economic spokesman for the administration in recent weeks, making a number of high-profile TV appearances including conducting a White House press briefing on Tuesday morning.
Meanwhile, Navarro was largely absent from TV over the past two weeks, fueling hopes on Wall Street that his influence had waned since markets began gyrating after tariffs rolled out in early April.
But Navarro remains a critical player within the economic team and maintains close access to Trump, according to officials. Buoyed by his years of internal fights in the first Trump administration, plus his maximalist trade views shared by the president, sources close to the White House say Navarro’s standing with Trump hasn’t waned.
In interviews with more than a dozen current and former Trump officials, both allies and enemies of Navarro say that his brawls with the rest of Trump’s economic team in the president’s first term are instrumental in understanding his longevity — and his role as an accelerant to Trump’s all-consuming view that transformational change on trade is a necessity.
Trump has long viewed Navarro’s public appearances through a strategic lens – one designed to drive a hardline or unrelenting message. When Trump grew annoyed with headlines about exemptions and carveouts in mid-April, Navarro was deployed to push back sharply against any perception of weakness.
After a report showed the US economy shrank for the first time since 2022, Navarro was back on television Wednesday morning, touting increases to domestic production and arguing in a CNBC interview that the economic news was in fact positive.
“We really like where we’re at now,” Navarro said.
Navarro is well aware that his views on trade run contrary to those of practically every mainstream economist. He embraced the lonely and gadfly-like role — and every rhetorical battle that it brings — for nearly two decades. While he’s never lacked confidence in the face of mainstream pushback, he’s more certain than ever he’s on the right side of the fight.
“They’ve all been discredited,” Navarro recently said of his detractors as he walked CNN through the details of Trump’s first-term China and sector tariffs. “What we got in the first term was not recession or inflation, we got price stability, robust economic growth and rising wages just as we thought we would.”
Navarro’s loyalty — he went to jail for Trump last year — has only further cemented his long-standing place in the rarified air of MAGA originals. Steve Bannon, whose podcast, “War Room,” boasted Navarro and Bessent as contributors in between Trump’s first and second terms, wrote the foreword for Navarro’s most recent book and fondly refers to him as a “honey badger” for his relentless and unapologetic push for policies embraced by Trump’s base.
Trump, in conversations where Navarro’s name comes up, has been known to say of Navarro: “He went to jail for me.”
Navarro has long had Trump’s ear — and Oval Office privileges — on key issues, and his place within Trump’s inner sanctum has only been strengthened in the new administration. Crucially, Navarro also made clear before that he entered the White House with deep respect for Trump’s powerful chief of staff, Susie Wiles.
That’s a stark change compared to the first Trump administration, when a number of White House advisers, including former chief of staff John Kelly, worked to keep Navarro — and his ideas about trade and tariffs — as far away from Trump as possible.
“He doesn’t have to employ all these crazy gimmicks to get to Trump now,” one source said.
To understand Navarro’s ascent in Trump’s second White House — and durability throughout his first — it is necessary to step back from the traditional bureaucratic scorecard of policy wins and losses.
There are no shortage of disagreements and divergent opinions on Trump’s second-term economic team, advisers make clear, even if the warfare is far tamer than the first Trump administration. What speculation about his standing on any given day in the White House tends to miss is the attribute Trump values most: win or lose, Navarro relishes the fight.
In a statement, White House spokesman Kush Desai said: “Peter Navarro was decades ahead of mainstream ‘experts’ on how China’s unfair trade policies are undermining American workers. … Peter Navarro is an American patriot, and his commitment to President Trump’s America First agenda makes him an invaluable asset for the administration’s trade and economic team that’s working at lightning speed to restore American greatness.”
‘Screw them. Stay the course.’
Navarro spent Trump’s first term in a perpetual state of warfare with chiefs of staff, senior advisers, rank-and-file staffers, congressional Republicans and pretty much every mainstream economist who made the mistake of wandering near his field of vision.
But Navarro’s relationship with Trump dates all the way back to 2011 — five years before Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner discovered his books on China and invited Navarro to join the campaign.
Navarro writes in his book that he reached out to Trump in 2011 when he came across a Los Angeles Times blog post that listed Trump’s 20 favorite books on China, attributed to an apparent interview that China’s official state news agency, Xinhua, conducted with Trump. Navarro saw his book “The Coming China Wars” was ranked sixth and sent a note to Trump to express his appreciation.
He received a response shortly after in the form of a letter from Trump’s longtime assistant, Rhona Graff, with Trump’s trademark handwritten notes filling up the margins. Navarro continued to exchange notes through Graff in the years that followed, and shortly after Trump’s 2015 campaign announcement, Navarro sent word he was on board to assist in any capacity.
By 2016, he was regularly on the phone from California, helping Trump’s speechwriter and now powerful policy chief Stephen Miller draft a major economic speech. Miller would be the primary advocate within the Trump campaign pushing for Navarro to join the campaign full time.
After Kushner formally hired him, Navarro was technically the 2016 campaign’s top economic adviser, yet he entered the first Trump administration physically barred from senior staff meetings and without an office or title that held any true authority.
Any direct line to Trump in the opening months was severed by then-director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn, who tried in vain more than once to have Navarro dismissed. Navarro couldn’t even secure an office for nearly a month, leaving him wandering the halls of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door to the White House, laptop in tow.
Kelly also tried to have Navarro fired, before settling on a demotion that ensured he’d never set foot in any critical meeting. Navarro drove palpable fear among senior staff with his innate ability to push policies that “locked incorrect ideas in the head of the president.”
These were clarifying experiences for Navarro — and, in hindsight, for those who desperately wanted him out of Trump’s orbit. Trump was never going to fire Navarro. Making his life miserable in the hopes he’d resign only emboldened him .
“It was on more than one night I thought, ‘Screw them. Stay the course,’” Navarro later wrote.
Past and current colleagues have described Navarro as “brass-knuckled,” “eccentric,” “dogged and prescient,” “intemperate,” a “trade warrior,” having a “difficult manner,” “the most colorful of all the substantive characters” in Trump’s orbit, someone with a reputation for “rudeness, ignorance and dishonesty.”
None of those descriptions were anonymous or leaked. They’re all from books written about Trump’s first term by Navarro’s former colleagues .
The ‘poster boy’
Navarro cuts a distinctly unique figure in Trump’s White House. He works around the clock, and at 75, still exercises frequently. Aides say it’s not uncommon to see him walking around the Eisenhower Executive Office Building or the West Wing in exercise clothes. His office is traditionally decorated with takeout food containers, his desk covered in stacks of disorganized papers and his dry erase board filled with to-do lists on outstanding business.
During Trump’s first term, Navarro was a man in perpetual motion, “like a caged lion pacing around the Oval Office,” one adviser said, always armed with blown-up charts and graphs close aides learned were the best way to capture Trump’s attention on any policy concepts.
In Navarro’s scramble to set up office space after his implicit exile upon entering the White House, he stumbled across the White House print shop in the basement of the EEOB.
The oversized, always colorful poster-board charts became a signature for Navarro, as did his new pejorative nickname: “poster boy.”
By 2018, Trump’s fixation with slapping tariffs on America’s trading partners ran into a wall of opposition from his own lawyers and economic team. He could not, they insisted, use his executive power to unilaterally impose reciprocal tariffs on countries around the world.
Instead, he needed to work through Congress, where House Republicans clung to a slim majority and their Senate counterparts had little appetite for upending global trade. Trump tapped Navarro to craft a bill that could gain support on the Hill.
It was, in many ways, the perfect assignment for Navarro — though his solution didn’t exactly catch fire.
An early draft circulated within White House policy teams was titled the “Fair and Reciprocal Tariff Act,” a name with inevitable branding issues. The FART Act was the source of significant amusement among its many in-house detractors, whether due to the policy itself or its unfortunate acronym.
Navarro’s relentless Capitol Hill wrangling managed to land a sponsor for what had become the United States Reciprocal Trade Act — Wisconsin Rep. Sean Duffy, now Trump’s Transportation Secretary. Together, they coaxed and cajoled more than two dozen lawmakers to sign on as co-sponsors. The bill ultimately went nowhere, though Navarro and Duffy were rewarded with a high-profile endorsement: a shoutout by Trump in his State of the Union address that year.
The State of the Union inclusion was an unmistakable signal inside the West Wing: Trump’s obsession with tariffs was real, and Navarro was the most direct embodiment of that obsession.
‘I am the only one supporting the president!’
Navarro is viewed even by those who like him as almost universally difficult to work with, with a mix of respect and disdain. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard while expressing devout belief in proposals fellow economists in Trump’s first term viewed as devoid of any semblance of substantive academic or real-world support.
Navarro has described the first term senior staff trade meetings, a weekly fireworks forum that reached the brink of physical altercation more than once, as a “battleground” where he was the sole defender of Trump’s true beliefs. He approached them accordingly, often announcing his presence as he burst into a meeting by shouting: “It looks like we’re having another meeting where I am the only one supporting the president!”
Not every trade adviser became an enemy. Navarro and Kevin Hassett, who also served as a trade adviser in both administrations, are friends on a personal level, even practicing the martial arts discipline aikido together in Hassett’s office during Trump’s first term (Hassett is a black belt.)
Navarro calls him “The Hassett Man” and clearly makes him one of the very few first term White House officials not to face his viscerally acerbic criticism in his books recounting his experience.
Hassett credits Navarro and his trade hawk colleagues with shifting his own views on trade.
“I came in as a defender of free trade, a ‘globalist asshole,’ but I learned that our trade deals really had disadvantaged the US,” Hassett wrote in his book recounting his time in the White House.
It was Navarro, Hassett said, who drove the administration’s hardline China policy.
“Peter Navarro has a difficult manner, but he was right about China, and his impact on our China policy was one of the most positive any Trump adviser had on any topic,” Hassett wrote.
‘God save us if Peter Navarro comes back’
In the final weeks of Trump’s first term, Navarro diligently pursued Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud long after most senior aides had gone to great lengths to separate themselves from Trump’s quixotic and Democracy-threatening quest.
He landed in federal prison last summer for his refusal to testify about those efforts, where he spent his time in the prison’s law library wrapping up yet another book that sketched out his aspirational second-term economic agenda.
The morning Navarro completed his four-month sentence, he rushed directly to a Florida airport for a flight to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. He received a hero’s welcome, kissed his MAGA-hat wearing fiancé on stage, and delivered a flame-throwing speech where he presented himself as MAGA’s foremost martyr – right next to Trump himself.
“If they can come for me, if they can come for Donald Trump, they can come for you,” Navarro said. “I went to prison so you don’t have to.”
Trump “absolutely loved it,” one adviser told CNN a few weeks later. “How could he not?”
Still, there remained an aspirational view among some of Trump’s more mainstream supporters that perhaps Navarro wouldn’t be a major player in Trump’s second term.
“God save us if Peter Navarro comes back,” said Hugh Hewitt, a prominent conservative media voice, in a podcast a week before the election. He justified his belief Trump would cast aside Navarro in a second term as a demonstration of his refusal to “double-down on a loser.”
‘Soldiers out in the field’
Navarro would be announced as a member of Trump’s economic team a few weeks later. When Trump’s first trade action on inauguration day took the form of a sweeping guidance memo, instead of sweeping actions, there was a collective exhale from Republicans on Capitol Hill and in the GOP’s ranks of mainstream economists.
The relief lasted all of 10 days.
Trump’s decision to declare a national emergency and launch a tariff war with America’s three largest trading partners started more than two months of market instability and confusion.
Navarro was the adviser who publicly represented, briefed and ran point on Trump’s announcement. He wasn’t just back in the White House — he was ascendent, and more powerful than ever before.
<div data-uri="cms.cnn.com/_components/video-resource/instances/cma5boua4003m3b6miktjf9xd@published" data-component-name="video-resource" data-editable="settings" class="video-resource" data-fixed-ratio="16×9" data-parent-uri="cms.cnn.com/_components/video-resource/instances/cm9buofzk00003b6o7j9kull2@published" data-video-id="me3f3872ef004610eed9e147c9ca7b522ae7091408" data-media-id="me3f3872ef004610eed9e147c9ca7b522ae7091408" data-live="" data-analytics-aggregate-events="true" data-custom-experience="" data-asset-type="hlsTs" data-auth-type="none" data-content-type="mediasource-clip" data-medium-env="" data-autostart="unmuted" data-show-ads="true" data-source="CNN" data-featured-video="true" data-headline="Peter Navarro brushes off concerns over market whiplash as 'pure spin'" data-has-video-player="true" data-description="<p>CNN's Kasie Hunt speaks with Peter Navarro about the wild swings in the stock market after President Donald Trump announced a 90-day pause on most reciprocal tariffs.</p>" data-duration="03:00" data-source-html='<span class="video-resource__source"> – Source:
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By <a class=”byline__link vossi-byline__link” href=https://www.cnn.com/profiles/kasie-hunt><span class=”byline__name”>Kasie Hunt</span></a>, CNN
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Trump’s final decision on reciprocal tariffs was both deeply tethered to a decades-long belief and — difficult as it may be to believe given the global disruption in the days that followed — represented a more moderate approach than what Navarro was advocating for behind the scenes, according to multiple people involved.
Navarro was instrumental in ensuring trade deficits were listed as the first issue that needed to be remedied in Trump’s Inauguration Day trade memo. Many of its key elements tie back to, or are an outgrowth of, the executive orders he and his team drafted in the first four years.
Even as he campaigned on seeking reciprocal tariff authority from Congress, Trump maintained behind-the-scenes his first term view that he had executive authority to launch them unilaterally. Navarro agreed. There were still legal concerns about the approach voiced through the internal White House debate, according to people directly involved.
After all, launching the largest tariff regime in a century through a national emergency authority never before used to justify tariffs of any kind is going to invite serious legal challenge. Those warnings were delivered and viewed as worth the risk.
As Trump weighed his options to enact the tariffs, a cross section of administration trade experts and economists from the White House, USTR and Commerce Department crafted analysis and methodology that formed the basis of several options for setting each nation’s rate.
Trump chose an option — based on US trade deficits — that has been universally pilloried by economists and historians across the ideological spectrum. More critically, the actual rates stunned Wall Street and foreign capitals alike, in part because of the seemingly arbitrary nature, but also because they would devastate many economies.
Following a backlash from Wall Street and backpedaling from the White House on some of the tariffs rolled out last month, Navarro’s absence from the rotation of White House officials dispatched to TV sparked market chatter that he’d been sidelined.
Navarro’s return to television Wednesday sparked a minor freakout among traders and market observers who’d convinced themselves he’d been cast aside.
CNBC’s David Faber directly asked Navarro about the real-time Wall Street “parlor game trying to understand your influence and how much you have on the president any given time?”
The ultimate survivor in Trump’s inner circle is still seated firmly at the table and, whenever Trump wants to send his most hawkish message, in front of a camera.
“All this kind of like, ‘Game of Thrones’ stuff that’s played out in the press through anonymous leaks – I would just heavily discount it,” Navarro said. The president, he added, is the one guiding strategy and tactics. “And the rest of us are simply soldiers out in the field making sure that the war gets won.”