Director of Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy
In April 2017, the National Trade Council became part of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, of which Navarro was appointed Director. By September 2017, the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy had been folded into the National Economic Council by Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, which meant that Navarro would report to NEC director Gary Cohn. This was seen as a demotion for Navarro, as he was known to have strongly clashed with Cohn and his views on trade; Navarro later described him as "one of the worst and most treacherous misfits of the entire Trump administration".
In February 2018, several media outlets reported that Navarro's influence in the administration was rising again and that he would likely be promoted from the secondary billet of Deputy Assistant to the President to Assistant to the President, giving Navarro parity with the NEC director. Josh Rogin, writing for The Washington Post, reported that Navarro had used his prior time of lower influence to lead several low-profile policy items, such as working to increase military funding, drafting Executive Order 13806, and leading the effort to solve a dispute between the United States and Qatar over the Open Skies Agreement between the two countries. In March 2018, Cohn left the Trump administration, further solidifying Navarro's influence.
During the campaign, Navarro, together with Wilbur Ross, who became Trump's commerce secretary, designed a $1 trillion infrastructure development plan for Trump's presidential campaign. The plan called for $137 billion in tax credits to private business to induce them to finance the bulk of infrastructure spending. Economists across the political spectrum derided the proposal. Trump released a $1.5 trillion version of this plan in February 2018 but the Republican-controlled Congress showed little enthusiasm for the proposal, with The Hill reporting, "President Trump's infrastructure plan appears to have crashed and burned in Congress".
In June 2018, Navarro said that there was "a special place in hell" for Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, after Trudeau said that Canada would respond to U.S. tariffs against Canada with retaliatory tariffs. Trudeau's remarks and Canada's response to these tariffs were already public and well known when Navarro made this comment. Navarro later apologized. In 2018, Navarro supported the United States Fair and Reciprocal Tariff Act, which would have given the President sweeping powers over trade policy. He lobbied heavily in the United States Congress for the bill and its successor called the United States Reciprocal Trade Act, though the act ultimately did not pass. In May 2019, Navarro said that Trump's decision to place tariffs on Mexico unless Mexico stopped illegal immigration to the United States was "a brilliant move".
In February 2020, it was reported that Navarro was conducting his own investigation into the identity of the author of an anonymous op-ed in The New York Times criticizing the Trump Administration. The United States Office of Special Counsel ruled in December 2020 that Navarro repeatedly violated the Hatch Act by using his official capacity to influence elections in speaking against Trump's opponent Joe Biden during the presidential campaign.
According to Chaos Under Heaven, a book by Josh Rogin, Navarro was part of a group of officials that wanted Trump to "speed the downfall" of the Chinese Communist Party and that "believed in economic nationalism, the return of manufacturing from abroad, and the protection of domestic industries, even at the expense of free trade". In his 2021 book In Trump Time, Navarro wrote that he urged Trump to go "full Sudden Zen" and start an all-out trade war against China. He also described himself as 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". In 2018, Navarro was influential in pushing the Trump administration to initiate the China–United States trade war. After the start of the trade war, Navarro argued that no countries would retaliate against U.S. tariffs "for the simple reason that we are the most lucrative and biggest market in the world". Shortly after the implementation of the tariffs, other countries did implement retaliatory tariffs against the United States, and the World Trade Organization rejected the U.S. tariffs.
Navarro clashed frequently with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who had a more moderate stance on trade with China; Navarro accused Mnuchin without evidence of having "made millions from Communist China." In May 2018, during a visit to China for trade talks, Navarro and Mnuchin started screaming and cursing at each other on the lawn in front of the Chinese government building where the talks were held after Navarro confronted Mnuchin because he believed that he had been excluded from certain meetings with Chinese officials. During the trip, which was his second ever to China, Navarro was described as having "acted strangely", including by insisting on keeping his luggage with him at all times, wanting to sleep inside the U.S. embassy because he feared hotel surveillance and having "rudely refused to eat the food served to him in official functions".
In October 2018, Navarro supported a proposal by Stephen Miller to stop providing student visas to Chinese nationals, making it impossible for Chinese citizens to study in the United States. In August 2019, Navarro asserted the tariffs of the ongoing China–United States trade war were not hurting Americans. Citing extensive evidence to the contrary, PolitiFact rated Navarro's assertion "Pants on Fire." In September 2019, after Trump tasked him with combatting China's usage of international mail rates to more cheaply ship products into the US, Navarro successfully led a diplomatic effort to the Third Extraordinary Congress of the Universal Postal Union, where it agreed member countries could opt-in to self-declare their rates starting in July 2020. This agreement arose following repeated threats from the Trump administration to leave the UPU unless global postage rates were changed; at the summit, Navarro claimed that countries like China were unfairly benefitting from international delivery prices, particularly regarding e-commerce deliveries.
In October 2019, Navarro defended the trade war with China, saying that the United States was "dealing with a strategic rival – and they are trying to buckle our knees". Navarro continued to advocate for trade restrictionist policies even while the administration was trying to reach a compromise in trade negotiations with China. Navarro worked with the DHS to initiate a crackdown on counterfeited and pirated e-commerce goods from overseas, and he promoted the administration's actions on the matter. Trump signed an executive order on the matter on January 31, 2020. In August 2020, Mnuchin and Navarro started a shouting match in the Oval Office in front of Trump about the fate of TikTok in what was described by The Washington Post as a "knockdown, drag-out brawl". Mnuchin began arguing that TikTok should be sold to a U.S. company, while Navarro demanded an outright ban on the app.
On January 20, 2021, the Chinese government imposed sanctions against Navarro and 27 other Trump administration officials who "planned, promoted and executed a series of crazy moves, gravely interfered in China's internal affairs, undermined China's interests, offended the Chinese people, and seriously disrupted China-U.S. relations". The sanctions ban them from entering China, including Hong Kong and Macau, and restrict companies and institutions associated with them from doing business in China.
During his final year in the first Trump administration, Navarro was involved in the administration's COVID-19 response. On January 29, 2020, Navarro issued a memo warning that novel coronavirus could "evolv[e] into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans" and that the "risk of a worst-case pandemic scenario should not be overlooked". He argued for restrictions on travel from China. Navarro wrote another memo on February 23, 2020, arguing that the disease "could infect as many as 100 million Americans, with a loss of life of as many as 1–2 million souls" and calling for an "immediate supplemental appropriation of at least $3 billion." At the same time that Navarro issued these private warnings, he publicly stated that the American people had "nothing to worry about" regarding the coronavirus.
On March 27, 2020, Trump appointed Navarro to coordinate the federal government's Defense Production Act policy response during the coronavirus pandemic. In this position, Navarro promoted domestic production of coronavirus-related supplies in addition to a general nationalist agenda. He advocated for reducing U.S. reliance on foreign supply chains, stating that "never again should we rely on the rest of the world for our essential medicines and countermeasures." Among other statements, he accused China of "profiteering" from the coronavirus and warned of economic disruptions resulting from the virus.
In February 2020, biologist Steven Hatfill became Navarro's advisor with regard to the coronavirus pandemic. Hatfill was a strong promoter of the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID, even though the drug's effectiveness was unproven. By April, Navarro, and the president himself, were touting the drug as a lifesaver. Navarro clashed with Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, over whether the administration should promote the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat the virus. In July 2020, Navarro touted a widely criticized study as showing that hydroxychloroquine was an effective coronavirus treatment; public health experts pointed to limitations with the study and to the fact that multiple randomized controlled trials failed to conclude that hydroxychloroquine was an effective treatment.
In May 2020, Navarro criticized stay-at-home orders, arguing that the COVID-19 lockdowns would kill "many more" people than the coronavirus. He frequently referred to the virus as the "China virus" or the "CCP virus" and, in May 2020, accused the Chinese government of sending Chinese citizens to other countries to "seed" the virus. In July 2020, USA Today published an editorial by Navarro under the headline "Anthony Fauci has been wrong about everything I have interacted with him on", after which White House officials disavowed Navarro's attacks. Under criticism for the editorial, the newspaper later published an apologetic statement that read, in part, "several of Navarro's criticisms of Fauci – on the China travel restrictions, the risk from the coronavirus and falling mortality rates – were misleading or lacked context. As such, Navarro's op-ed did not meet USA Today's fact-checking standards." During a Fox News appearance in March 2021, Navarro echoed a baseless conspiracy theory that Fauci was the "father" of the virus and had used taxpayer money to finance a Chinese laboratory where it was supposedly developed.
In August 2020, administration officials terminated a contract to purchase 42,900 ventilators for use in the pandemic that Navarro had directly negotiated for. A US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) spokesperson said the cancellation was "subject to internal HHS investigation and legal review", as an oversight subcommittee of the US House of Representatives concluded that the government had overpaid for the ventilators by US$500 million. The Washington Post reported in March 2021 that congressional investigators were examining whether Navarro had directed over $1 billion in federal funds for medical supplies to companies of his selection, after President Trump had rejected his recommendations.
In October 2020, two weeks before the presidential elections, Navarro's office in the White House had begun preparing allegations of election fraud. In December 2020, Navarro published a report alleging widespread election fraud. The report repeated discredited conspiracy theories claiming election fraud, including allegations that had been dismissed by the courts and Trump's own election security task force. In the report, Navarro wrote that large initial leads by Trump in battleground states, which turned to leads for Biden as vote counting progressed suggested impropriety, Navarro was actually describing the well-known phenomenon of the "blue shift", caused by the fact that mail-in votes in many states cannot be counted on Election Day itself; those votes tend to lean Democratic, so that an Election Night lead by a Republican candidate can turn into a Democratic lead as the later counts come in. In the report, Navarro cited many biased and unreliable sources of information, such as One America News Network, Newsmax, Steve Bannon's podcast War Room: Pandemic, John Solomon's Just the News, and Raheem Kassam's The National Pulse, because they provided what he termed "alternative coverage".
On January 2, 2021, Navarro, along with Rudy Giuliani and Mark Meadows, participated in a call with Georgia election officials in which Trump urged them to overturn the results of the election. During a January 2, 2021, appearance on Jeanine Pirro's Fox News program, Navarro asserted, "[t]hey stole this and we can prove it," and falsely asserted Joe Biden's inauguration could be postponed to allow for an investigation.
Navarro and Bannon coordinated an effort on January 6, 2021 – called "The Green Bay Sweep" – with more than 100 Republican state legislators. Navarro later stated, "We spent a lot of time lining up over 100 congressmen, including some senators. It started out perfectly. At 1 p.m. [on January 6], Gosar and Cruz did exactly what was expected of them ... My role was to provide the receipts for the 100 congressmen or so who would make their cases… who could rely in part on the body of evidence I'd collected". In the wake of the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Navarro appeared on Fox Business Network's Making Money on January 8, telling host Charles Payne that Trump was not to blame and specifically saying that Lindsey Graham, Nikki Haley, and Mitt Romney "need to shut up". Days later, Navarro reiterated false claims that Trump had won the election.
Later in 2021, Navarro published In Trump Time, a book in which he describes how he, Bannon, and others worked to delay or overturn Congress's counting of the election votes formalizing Biden's victory, in part through a failed scheme to try to get Pence to "reject" electoral votes for Biden, something Pence had no power to do. In December 2021, Navarro was still claiming that his falsehoods were meant "to lay the legal predicate for the actions to be taken", despite no evidence of voting fraud being found.
