Trump's trade adviser Peter Navarro: Devoted to tariffs, unafraid of breakage

Once sidelined, US President Donald Trump's counsellor Peter Navarro has returned to Washington and quickly upended the global trading system, writes Ana Swanson from Washington

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n a clear day last July in Miami, Peter Navarro emerged from four months in federal prison, where he'd been imprisoned for contempt of Congress. Navarro had refused to testify in an investigation of the Jan 6 attack on the Capitol, an action he described as a defence of the Constitution.

Just hours after his release from prison, Navarro flew to Milwaukee to speak at the Republican National Convention in support of Donald Trump's re-election.

“They convicted me, they jailed me. Guess what? They did not break me,” he said that night, punctuating each word as the crowd roared. It was an exercise in loyalty to Trump that seems to have paid off.

For much of Trump's first term, Navarro, a trade adviser, had been sidelined, mocked and minimised by other officials who saw his protectionist views on trade as factually wrong and dangerous for the country.

But in the second Trump administration, Navarro, 75, an economist and trade sceptic, has been newly empowered. He returned to government more confident in his revanchist vision for the American economy, more dismissive of his critics, and with more than a dozen trade-related executive orders already drafted, many of which the president has since signed. Trump also came back to Washington more determined to finally realise the trade views he has held for decades, that an unfair trading system was ripping America off and needed to be radically changed.

As the 100-day mark of the president's term approaches this week, Navarro has already helped Trump roll out half a dozen major trade moves. These steps have brought tariffs to levels not seen in a century, in an attempt to curb American dependence on imports and force factories back to the United States. Two people with knowledge of the administration’s deliberations said Navarro was the likely origin of a controversial formula the White House used for calculating tariff rates based on US trade deficits.