On July 17, 2024, Peter Kent Navarro walked out of a federal prison in Miami, and a few hours later, emerged on the stage of the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee in Wisconsin. “I went to prison so that you do not have to,” he told the believers of MAGA [Make America Great Again] flag who were moved to tears by the end of his 12-minute speech.
“Fight, fight, fight,” they chanted as he warned them of the dangers posed in the event of a defeat of Donald J. Trump, who was running for a second term in the White House.
Mr. Trump would return to the White House, and so would Mr. Navarro. As the Senior Counsellor for Trade and Manufacturing for the President, Mr. Navarro has the ear of arguably the most powerful man on the planet. If Stephen Miller, as Deputy Chief of Staff at the White House, is the key mover of all immigration and deportation decisions of the Trump administration, Mr. Navarro guides the course of its trade and economic policies. As it happens, he is paying too much attention to India and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and in the process, is subjecting India-U.S. bilateral ties to an unprecedented stress test.
Mr. Navarro’s second coming, as is that of his boss, is stronger than their respective first terms. In the first Trump administration, Mr. Navarro had worked as director of the White House National Trade Council and later the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy. When other experts in the room warned of the dangers of a trade war, Mr. Trump would reportedly wonder, “Where is Peter.”
Mr. Navarro would offer an opinion that the President and his MAGA crowd would love to hear. That loyalty would extend to a willingness to go to jail in the service of the boss and the cause. When the Democrat-controlled Congress subpoenaed him for documents and testimony regarding the January 6, 2021, violence on Capitol Hill, Mr. Navarro ignored it. That earned him the charge of contempt of Congress and a jail term of four months.
“We need to be in control of all three branches of the government — the legislature, the executive and the judiciary,” Mr. Navarro explained at the RNC Convention. A few days later, he cited Apostle Matthew to explain his incarceration: “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” But heaven could wait, he said, as there were earthly things to sort out.
Apocalypse had already come, Mr. Navarro believed, with the entry of China into the WTO, and Mr. Trump was the saviour long needed. His near-total focus in the years ahead of Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement was the alleged destruction of America being caused by China’s trade. He is the author of 16 books. In Death by China: Confronting the Dragon – A Global Call to Action, he blamed China for most of what was problematic in the U.S. Though his arguments about trade and deficit have been contested by most mainstream economists, Mr. Navarro made sense for the distressed people who were struggling to understand their situation and make a political choice.
Views on trade deficit
The core of his trade policy views hinges on a questionable assumption that all trade deficits are inherently and always bad for the country, and a trade deficit with another country is the outcome of trade barriers put up by the partner.
His detractors have wondered how this could be true as American deficits grew when global barriers came down in recent decades. Mr. Navarro also works on the assumption that services exports are inferior and inadequate in comparison with goods exports for America. Too few economists agreed with him, and hence he invented an economist — Ron Vora —who appears in five of his books, supporting his arguments. Mr. Navarro later claimed it was merely a writing device.
Mr. Navarro is a late convert to the MAGA tent. From 1994 to 2016, he was a Democrat, globalist, pro-trade, pro-choice and critical of the religious right. Born on July 15, 1949, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he did his PhD in economics from Harvard University and went on to become a professor emeritus at the Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine. Early in his career, he served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand from 1973 to 1976. In San Diego, he ran for public office five times, and failed all five.
“The biggest losers in the protectionist game are consumers,” he declared in a book in 1984, making a case of open trade. He interacted with the Clinton and Obama administrations as an adviser in an informal capacity, and as a speaker at the Democratic National Convention in 1996 — he was a Congressional candidate that year — pledged his loyalty to President Bill Clinton and vowed to support Medicare, social security and pro-choice policies.
Though mainstream economists disapprove of his theories about the economy and trade, the Joe Biden administration also bought into his anti-China talking points, an indicator of the salience of these arguments in U.S. politics. Also, the clamour for reshoring and friendshoring of manufacturing sounded more reasonable against the backdrop of the COVID pandemic.
Mr. Navarro conjures up a glorious past of the American economy and attributes it to the country’s goods manufacturing sectors, which apparently existed in the golden old days. If Mr. Miller’s arguments and policy centre around cultural, demographic challenges in the U.S., Mr. Navarro articulates the economic worldview of the MAGA nation in the U.S.
In recent days, Mr. Navarro’s ire is directed at an unlikely target: India and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He has repeatedly accused India of serving as an “oil money laundromat for the Kremlin”, hinted at “Indian profiteers” benefiting from Russian oil purchases, referred to the Russia-Ukraine conflict as “Modi’s war”, and even argued that the “road to peace runs at least partly right through New Delhi”.
‘Strategic freeloading’
He said India’s foreign policy was “strategic freeloading” and accused it of “getting in bed with authoritarians” such as Russia and China. Mr. Navarro posted an image of Mr. Modi meditating in a saffron robe, which was found offensive by many who thought it was an attempt to insult Hindu faith itself. “A 50% tariff —25% for unfair trade and 25% for national security — is a direct response,” he wrote in the post. “If India, the world’s largest democracy, wants to be treated like a strategic partner of the U.S., it needs to act like one.”
The road to peace in Ukraine runs through New Delhi, claimed Mr. Navarro.
Since there is no publicly known reason for this misplaced antagonism towards India, one can only make some assumptions. For one, Mr. Navarro’s anti-China arguments have suddenly lost steam as his boss began accommodating Beijing and is looking for a deal with it. With Russia, even at the cost of displeasing European countries, Mr. Trump is looking for a new era of peace.
All this leaves India as the wrong tree to bark up at.
Published – August 31, 2025 01:33 am IST
