Navarro also served as a senior adviser on trade in the first Trump administration.
President-elect Donald Trump announced on Dec. 4 that he has selected Peter Navarro as senior counselor for trade and manufacturing.
During Trump’s first term, Navarro, a staunch advocate of tariffs, served as director of the National Trade Council and as director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy.
Trump said the new role “leverages Peter’s broad range of White House experience while harnessing his extensive policy analytic and media skills.”
Navarro’s “mission will be to help successfully advance and communicate the Trump manufacturing, tariff, and trade agendas,” the president-elect said.
Navarro was released from prison on July 17 after serving a four-month sentence for refusing to appear before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol.
Tariffs were an integral economic policy feature of Trump’s 2024 election campaign. Since his victory last month, Trump has threatened to impose 25 percent tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports, slap 10 percent levies on Chinese goods, and implement a 100 percent tariff on countries engaged in anti-dollar activities.
As one of the top White House economic and trade advisers in Trump’s first administration, Navarro was a leading voice in enacting tariffs on the United States’ trading partners, particularly China.
Navarro said levies would help level the playing field and rectify what he viewed as unfair imbalances in international trade.
“President Trump has made it clear he’s a free trader. He’s made it abundantly clear that for this administration, free trade means is free, fair, reciprocal, and balanced,” Navarro said in prepared remarks at a June 2018 Hudson Institute event outlining Trump’s policy regarding the U.S.–China trade relationship.
In 2019, he also championed Trump’s threat of tariffs on Mexico in response to Mexico’s “exports” of “illegal aliens.”
“This is strictly about national security and threats to our economy from illegal immigration from a criminal enterprise,” Navarro told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.”
Despite various criticisms that Trump’s tariffs would ignite inflation pressures and weigh on economic growth prospects, Navarro defended his trade agenda as “one of the most successful applications of a defense trade policy in U.S. history.”
By Jackson Richman and Andrew Moran
