PETER NAVARRO’S NO-GOOD ECONOMIC NATIONALISM
PETER NAVARRO IS a loser. Literally.
He has run for office five times and never won. He has never gained approval from the Senate to occupy an official cabinet post. He started a trade war that may not technically be lost yet, but it hasn’t been a roaring success by any account.
And yet, somehow, he’s become one of the most powerful people on the planet.
In a presidential administration that quickly jettisoned the few serious economists who signed on to help steer it away from catastrophe, Navarro has been the perfect fit. He’s a tough-talking Democrat-turned-Republican who maintains a set of deeply held beliefs that influence his policy choices and who refuses to be compelled by expert opinion or facts. He has no governing experience and recognizes few of the practical or institutional limits on governmental behavior. In many ways, he is a magic mirror for President Donald Trump: He reflects Trump’s ethos and ideas but adds enhancements and policy details that would likely otherwise elude the president.
By anointing Navarro as, effectively, the czar of a new “economic nationalism” project that disdains free trade and delivers corporate handouts to favored firms, the Trump administration—and, by extension, the GOP—hasn’t found a new formula for winning elections or countering China. Instead, Republicans have embraced a warmed-over variant of what they once would have recognized and denounced as the losing economic policies of the political left.
“I DON’T KNOW why so many people in America hate Hillary Clinton; I found her to be one of the most gracious, intelligent, perceptive, and, yes, classy women I have ever met,” wrote Navarro—yes, the same Peter Navarro—in 1999’s San Diego Confidential. The book is a thoroughly egotistical exercise: a first-person, beat-by-beat account of Navarro’s failed 1996 bid for a seat in Congress. From the perspective of 21 years later, it is also an intriguing historical artifact that is equal parts jarring and illuminating.
That’s particularly true whenever the Clintons enter the picture. In the book, Navarro lavishes praise on the then–first lady, who flew to San Diego to host a Navarro rally less than two weeks before the election. He describes the event as “a heavenly experience,” even including a copy of the next day’s front-page story in The San Diego Union-Tribune, which features a picture of Navarro and Hillary standing side-by-side onstage. When it comes to then–President Bill Clinton, Navarro takes a sharper tone: He criticizes Clinton for working with then–Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and selling out the left wing of the Democratic Party in the process—a wing with which the Navarro of 1999 clearly identifies.
Indeed, is chock full of anecdotes that seem out of place for someone who would eventually rise to power in a Republican White House. Navarro recalls marching in a pride parade in San Diego and makes an appeal for Democrats to
