The Influencers: The People Shaping Trump’s New Washington
This story is part of a series exploring the backgrounds and agendas of the players — the well known names and behind-the-scenes operators alike — who will wield power in Trump’s second term.
Years before Peter Navarro went to prison for contempt of Congress, he was already known for his contempt for Congress.
Throughout Donald Trump’s first term, lawmakers often left meetings with Navarro — the president’s trade attack dog — uncertain of the new administration’s strategic endgame. They were hearing concerns from companies in their districts about Trump’s tariffs on imports from America’s allies, which were causing higher prices and threatening jobs. Could someone explain, they wondered, why paying more for steel and aluminum from Canada and Mexico was necessary for national security?
Rep. Warren Davidson shared apprehensions like those in a meeting with Navarro, but it left him frustrated. It was “a complete waste of time,” he recalled in a recent interview with NOTUS.
Reports afterward were that Davidson, an Ohio Republican, was so agitated, he flipped a chair in anger as he left. He now promises, looking back, that he didn’t flip the chair on purpose. It was more that when he stood up to leave — yes, angry with the conversation — his knees knocked over the flimsy plastic chair he had been sitting in.
“There was no throwing of anything,” he said.
Still, Davidson was upset.
“His goal for the meeting was to say that we had a meeting and then to go out and do a press statement to say, ‘I’m working with Congress,’” Davidson said of Navarro. “But he was not listening at all.”
Navarro, a Harvard-trained economist who might just love tariffs even more than Trump, didn’t bring polite disagreement or diplomacy to those first-term trade wars like then-U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer. No — he brought more of a long-simmering rage to the table. Navarro was furious that much of America’s manufacturing capacity had moved overseas. He was angry that cheap products had reshaped U.S. consumption and investment habits after America normalized trade relations with China. And he was angry, more broadly, with the “globalists” who want to ease the flow of goods between nations.
Challenge Navarro’s ideas, and you might find yourself labeled a globalist, too, with any number of creative epithets attached. He shares Trump’s passion for crafting insults, once calling then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy a “HYPOCRITE BLOWDRIED CCP BITCH.”
Even his allies say it’s impossible to win an argument with him.
“You can’t,” said Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser who counts Navarro as a close friend.
“Peter’s one of the most intense guys I’ve ever met,” Bannon told NOTUS. “He’s very aggressive, and he rubs a lot of people the wrong way. He just does. He can be abrasive. But that’s his greatest strength. His superpower is his relentlessness.”
Navarro’s desire for companies to make most products within the United States isn’t just an “obsession,” according to Bannon. “This is as close to a religious belief as he’s got: the American worker and American manufacturing.”
Navarro didn’t respond to interview requests from NOTUS or requests for comment on the details in this story.
Plenty of GOP lawmakers would love to see more manufacturing in the U.S., like Navarro does, and they’ve grown increasingly critical of China’s trade practices. Some members even want to end permanent normal trade relations with China, introducing bipartisan legislation in January to do so.
But Navarro’s willingness to strike U.S. allies with trade penalties during Trump’s first term — and pushing for them again this time around — seemed counterproductive to some Republicans.
“I went to the U.S. Military Academy,” Davidson told NOTUS. “Every military academy on the planet would say some version of: ‘You’re more likely to win any conflict if you multiply your allies than if you multiply your enemies.’”
“Why put tariffs on everybody all at once,” Davidson asked, “when we could actually build a coalition to go after China?”
Navarro is back in the Trump administration as a close trade adviser — one of the few staffers to return from the first round. His loyalty to Trump is unwavering: He served four months in federal prison last year for defying a congressional subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee. Trump sees him as a true believer, and they align on trade policy. The president is already rolling out ideas Navarro supports. He’s upending international trade and invoking emergency presidential powers this week to place 25% tariffs on most goods from Canada and Mexico, as well as 10% tariffs on products from China.
Trump and Navarro hope those tariffs will incentivize American companies to make goods almost entirely domestically, even if production costs more.
The plan is sure to cause supply chain disruption and an outcry from U.S. manufacturers relying on products from Mexico and Canada. American companies usually pay tariffs, not foreign countries, and those firms are likely to pass increased costs on to American consumers. Mexico, Canada and China have also already promised sweeping retaliation, threatening to slap tariffs on many American exports.
Trump defended his decision by pointing to the national debt. He also argued (again) that Canada should simply join America as the 51st state to enjoy duty-free commerce.
“We’re not going to be the ‘Stupid Country’ any longer,” he declared in a social media post over the weekend. “MAKE YOUR PRODUCT IN THE USA AND THERE ARE NO TARIFFS!”
The new tariffs are far more radical than any Trump rolled out during his first term, covering roughly $1.4 trillion of imports. The main dynamic that’s changed since then is that he and Navarro will actually have far more allies on Capitol Hill, at least publicly, during this trade war. In interviews before Trump approved the tariffs, Republican lawmakers expressed support for Navarro and backed any impending tariffs on close allies, despite clashing with him in the past. Even Davidson described Navarro as knowledgeable and skilled, adding that he’s “excited” to work with him again. And Navarro’s foremost critics within the GOP during Trump’s first term, like former Sens. Bob Corker and Jeff Flake, have retired or been run out of Congress. Others have changed their tune.
Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, for example — who once co-sponsored a bill to revoke Trump’s ability to unilaterally roll out tariffs for broad national security reasons — is more reluctant to criticize the tactic today.
“Tariffs are definitely a double-edged sword. But I’ll give the president the benefit of the doubt,” he told NOTUS. “He won the election. He talked about this.”
Johnson added that he became “a big Peter Navarro fan, when all was said and done.” He pointed to the coronavirus pandemic when Navarro raised alarms over the fact that medical products and components of personal protective equipment are made in China.
“I view him as an ally,” he said.
And Rep. Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican who once told me he’d like to see more congressional authority over trade, said Navarro is a “bright, able guy” who is “clearly very supportive of the president.”
“I look forward to working with him again,” Cole told NOTUS.
Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina also said Navarro is “one of the sharpest, most engaged men I’ve ever met.”
Norman remembered meeting with Navarro to advocate for a company that wanted an exemption to Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs. “He worked it out,” Norman said.
Norman is a lot more supportive of tariffs today than a Freedom Caucus member might have been a decade ago: “We’ve got to get self-sufficient to manufacture things,” he told NOTUS, echoing Navarro’s longtime ethos. “We can’t depend on China to do it.”
Others said they’re already telling businesses in their districts to toughen up ahead of new tariffs.
“They’re worried about it, of course,” Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett said of manufacturers back home. But “it’s a negotiating tool for Trump.”
“A lot of these businesses are looking at their bottom line, and they need to start looking at America and our people and what’s good for the country long-term,” Burchett told NOTUS. “If they could just rally around the president, I believe we could really put America back on track.”
Republicans might sound like they’re on the same page, but the proof will be in how long they’re willing to withstand higher prices for companies in their states. And differences often arise when they have to answer this question: What are tariffs for?
Scott Bessent, Trump’s treasury secretary, has pointed to three purposes: to respond to unfair trade practices by countries like China, to raise revenue and as a negotiating tool. But Navarro’s vision is grander — he wants to see American products made almost entirely in America. Tariffs, for Navarro, serve that purpose and, ideally, redirect supply chains to domestic companies. Any resulting higher prices or supply chain challenges are simply growing pains.
“America’s record on trade — specifically America’s chronic and ever-expanding trade deficit — says that America is the globe’s biggest trade loser and a victim of unfair, unbalanced, and nonreciprocal trade,” Navarro wrote in the trade section of the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.
He lambasted the theory that free trade is beneficial for nations, since it reduces the prices of goods and can make production more efficient. Economists often illustrate those benefits by describing how painstaking it would be to make something as simple as a sandwich without trading with anyone else for the ingredients. (You’d have to farm the wheat, harvest it, make flour, bake the bread and so on.)
But according to Navarro, free trade theories don’t have “any relevance in global markets dominated by industrial espionage, rampant cheating, intellectual property theft, forced technology transfer, state capitalism and currency misalignments.”
Economists who do believe free trade is, on the whole, positive for all countries argue Navarro is often more confident than correct.
“Navarro’s maybe most famous claim was that no countries would retaliate when the Trump administration imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum,” said Scott Lincicome, a trade expert at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute. “And of course everybody retaliated instantly.”
“The guy says that trade deficits subtract from GDP, and that’s just flat wrong,” Lincicome added.
Still, even Lincicome sees some tactical interest in having Navarro in the administration.
“It is somewhat savvy of Trump to bring Navarro back, if only to let him execute his kind of madman theory of international relations,” he told NOTUS. “If governments don’t believe Trump is crazy enough to do these types of crazy tariff things, then they are less likely to cave to his demands, right? There is a strategic benefit to having Navarro in the Oval Office, because there’s always a little fear that somehow Navarro is going to convince Trump to do it.”
As adamant as Navarro is about reshaping America’s economy, Trump and his allies seem to have recognized they can’t embrace all of Navarro’s most aggressive ideas, like withdrawing from the World Trade Organization, from the jump. Many voters have said they chose Trump because they hoped he would bring down prices of consumer goods. Tariffs do the opposite.
That’s why a few Republicans are still willing to share their concerns about Navarro’s ideas.
“I am hopeful that we’ll be judicial,” Rep. Ryan Zinke of Montana told NOTUS when asked about tariffs.
He described Navarro as “driven,” “pretty forceful” and “very convinced of his ways.” Zinke was Trump’s interior secretary when the president decided to slap tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum the first time. Almost as soon as Trump gave the thumbs-up, Zinke remembered, he got a call from Johnny Morris, the founder of Bass Pro Shops.
“Johnny was livid because that little tariff we just put on aluminum, it raised the price of a fishing lure by a couple bucks,” Zinke said.
“When you do a tariff — buyer beware — the supply chain is tenuous,” he added. “It’s kind of like a valve or a button on a nuclear submarine. Don’t be flipping switches and valves unless you know what they do.”
For his part, Bannon thinks Navarro has a good chance of success. He remembered shouting matches between Navarro and Trump’s former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin about tariffs, when Navarro learned the key to success is to never give an inch.
“This guy will never back down,” Bannon said. “To wit, he went to prison.”
Navarro was involved in efforts to keep Trump in power after he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, later insisting that any communications about it were covered by executive privilege and weren’t subject to subpoena. It was the culmination of Navarro’s transformation from a Democrat before Trump’s rise to power to a die-hard MAGA devotee. (He ran as a Democrat both for mayor of San Diego and a House seat, and he expressed support for Hillary Clinton.)
After his conviction, Navarro spent four months in a Miami prison. He spoke at the Republican National Convention last summer, the same day he was released.
“They convicted me. They jailed me,” he said. But “guess what? They did not break me.”
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Haley Byrd Wilt is a reporter at NOTUS.