Trade adviser to President Donald Trump. Described as Trump's "trade guru". In 2010, before switching parties, he teamed up with Glenn Hubbard, a technocratic Republican, to argue that "boosting the American saving rate should be part of our national economic overall trade policy."
He has claimed that border levies could generate more than $6trn over the next decade, or $600bn a year, by applying a 20% effective tariff to America's $3.3trn in annual merchandise imports. Independent economists consider this calculation brazenly simple because it ignores the effect of higher tariffs on import demand, corporate-income- and payroll-tax receipts, retaliation and levy-dodging.
Navarro believes that other countries have fuelled America's trade deficit by keeping their currencies artificially weak, propping up their exporters and blocking American goods from their markets.
He has complained that "China uses Vietnam to transship to evade the tariffs...They slap a made-in-Vietnam label on it and they send it here", claiming the "China wash" accounts for a third of Vietnam's exports to America. Caroline Freund of the University of California, San Diego, estimates the true share peaked at less than 8% in 2020.
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