Peter Navarro

Peter Navarro (born July 15, 1949, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.) is an American economist and a top trade adviser to U.S. Pres. Donald Trump. Navarro is one of Trump’s most hawkish economic aides and has advocated for a maximalist approach to imposing tariffs on U.S. trading partners.

Early years

Peter Navarro’s father, Al Navarro, was a saxophone and clarinet player who often took the family to hotel gigs in New Hampshire in the summer and Florida in the winter. When Peter Navarro was about 9 or 10, his parents divorced. His mother, Evelyn Littlejohn, raised him and his older brother in a garage apartment while working for retailer Saks Fifth Avenue in Palm Beach, Florida. As a child, Navarro rode his bike along the sandy beaches and sometimes past the Mar-a-Lago estate that would in 1985 become the home of his future boss. The family later moved to Bethesda, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C. As a teen, Navarro worked several jobs, including pumping gas. He told Bloomberg in 2017 that his tough upbringing made him stronger. “You learn to survive on your own,” he said. “I was a latchkey kid. By high school, I pretty much was cooking a lot of my meals.” He was a guard on the high-school basketball team and attended Tufts University on a full academic scholarship.

After graduation he joined the Peace Corps, spending three years in Thailand. His time in the Peace Corps, along with his early economic hardships, proved pivotal in shaping his worldview. In a 2025 interview with The New York Times, Navarro said of his time in Asia: “It just makes you humble. You’re a small speck in a sea of humanity.” After the Peace Corps he went on to earn a master’s degree in public administration and a doctorate in economics from Harvard University.

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Starting out as a Democrat

Navarro’s career path has seen a striking evolution, from a liberal Democrat who championed the environment to a conservative Republican political adviser. In 1981, for example, he teamed up with a Harvard economics professor to write a New York Times op-ed assailing a Ronald Reagan administration tax proposal, claiming its “perverse result is to transform the corporate income tax into a very large corporate subsidy.”

While a professor at the University of California at Irvine, Navarro became politically active, launching a group called Prevent Los Angelization Now (PLAN) to try to stop what he considered unchecked development. He ran unsuccessfully for a string of offices as a Democrat, starting with a bid for San Diego mayor in 1992. In 1996, when Republican Newt Gingrich was the powerful House speaker, Navarro ran for Congress, calling himself “the Democrat Newt Gingrich fears most!” Taking on incumbent congressman Republican Brian Bilbray, Navarro said, “It’s essential for this seat to come back to the American people to take Congress from Newt Gingrich, the extreme right, and Brian Bilbray.” He got on the radar of national Democrats, including Vice Pres. Al Gore, who attended one of his fundraisers. Navarro even got a speaking slot at that year’s Democratic National Convention, where he told delegates, “I’m proud to be carrying the Clinton-Gore banner for San Diego’s 49th Congressional District.” But he lost that race too.

Changing his tune

Navarro, who taught economics and public policy at UC Irvine, had a revelatory moment on trade in the early 2000s when he noticed that his former students were having difficulty landing and holding on to good jobs. The culprit, he would later write, was China, which he said was inundating the U.S. with cheap products, “thereby beginning to put Americans like my MBA students out of work.” It was not just cheap labor that gave China an advantage, Navarro wrote, but unfair trade practices that were harming the U.S. economy. In 2011 he wrote a book with Greg Autry called Death by China: Confronting the Dragon—A Global Call to Action. Navarro would later admit that one expert quoted in the book, Ron Vara, was made up and, in fact, an anagram of “Navarro.” Nonetheless, the book was turned into a documentary the next year, narrated by actor Martin Sheen; Trump praised the film in a promotional blurb: “Right on…I urge you to see it.”

It was during this period that Navarro’s protectionist tendencies took hold. He came to rail against a series of actions that he viewed as placating foreign and Wall Street powers at the expense of ordinary Americans. He was quoted in The New York Times in 2025 as deriding economists as:

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the same damn fools who supported NAFTA, China’s entry into the WTO, and every other trade deal that was supposed to benefit America but only benefited Wall Street and the foreign nations screwing us. Those mainstream economists need to get out more often—maybe to Ohio or North Carolina or Pennsylvania or Wisconsin or Michigan.

Trump administration and prison term

During the 2016 presidential race, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, impressed by Death by China, hired Navarro as the campaign’s trade adviser, describing him as an “eccentric former professor.” After Trump became president, he installed Navarro as director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy. But Navarro often sparred with pro-trade aides who thwarted his bid for a trade war with China. In his 2021 book, In Trump Time: A Journal of America’s Plague Year, Navarro claimed he was a “one-man China hawk totally without power or allies in a White House filled with a symphony of Wall Street transactionalists and China dove appeasers.” He particularly singled out Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and National Economic Council director Gary Cohn.

After Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, Navarro helped Trump’s efforts to overturn the results. In Trump Time he wrote that the plan was to “put certification of the election on ice for at least another several weeks while Congress and the various state legislatures involved investigate all of the fraud and election irregularities.” Navarro was later convicted of refusing subpoenas from a House committee that was investigating the January 6 U.S. Capitol attack. He served a four-month prison sentence, and hours after his release, he spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Triumphant return and “Liberation Day”

After Trump’s victory in the 2024 election, Navarro took center stage as the president’s voice for across-the-board tariffs, which the president announced on his so-called “Liberation Day,” April 2, 2025. But Navarro’s numerous detractors contest that the no-holds-barred trade strategy he is pursuing will do more harm to Main Street Americans than to Wall Street elites. R. Glenn Hubbard, an economic adviser to Pres. George W. Bush who wrote a book with Navarro in 2010, said on PBS in 2025 that the current tariff policy would lead to “higher prices. It means disrupted supply chains. It means job losses and lost output.”

Navarro’s success has not been unfettered. The week after Liberation Day, when stock and bond markets were roiled by the uncertainty, Trump announced a 90-day pause on tariffs. In July he extended that pause to August 1. In advance of that deadline, Trump announced trade deals with some countries, including Japan and South Korea, as well as the European Union. But on July 31 the administration announced higher tariffs on dozens of U.S. trade partners, including Canada, Brazil, Taiwan, and Switzerland. Navarro’s greater success in the second term seems to be attributable to one factor: he and Trump remain fundamentally aligned on tariffs. Moody’s chief economist, Mark Zandi, said in a Washington Post article in 2025:

The reason Navarro has such influence is it dovetails with what the president thinks about the world.