Peter Navarro Bio – What Are the Notable Accomplishments of Peter Navarro?

By David Hill On Mar 20, 2024

Peter Kent Navarro is an American economist who held the positions of Assistant to the President and Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy in the new Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy and National Defense Production Act policy coordinator during his tenure in the Trump administration.

Previously, he served as Deputy Assistant to the President and director of the short-lived White House National Trade Council. He is an author of, among other works, Death by China, and an emeritus professor of economics and public policy at the Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine. Five times, Navarro ran unsuccessfully for office in San Diego, California.

Early Life and Education of Peter Navarro

On July 15, 1949, Navarro was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Saxophonist and clarinetist Albert “Al” Navarro, his father, was the leader of a house band that spent its summers in New Hampshire and its winters in Florida. He lived in Palm Beach, Florida, with his mother Evelyn Littlejohn, a Saks Fifth Avenue secretary, following the divorce of his parents when he was nine or ten years old. He shared a one-bedroom apartment with his mother and brother in Bethesda, Maryland while he was a teenager. Navarro was a student at Chevy Chase High School in Bethesda.

Navarro received a scholarship to study at Tufts University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1972. After that, he served in Thailand for three years with the US Peace Corps. In 1979, he graduated with a Master of Public Administration from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. In 1986, he worked with Richard E. Caves to get a PhD in economics from Harvard.

Notable Accomplishments of Peter Navarro

Navarro, being the sole academic advisor to Trump, lacked practical experience in the realm of government and encountered limited electoral triumphs. He unsuccessfully sought the position of mayor of San Diego in 1992 and the House of Representatives in 1994. Navarro has been featured on 60 Minutes, the BBC, CNN, and CNBC, among other prominent news organizations.

Additionally, Navarro authored several volumes of business, management, and the markets, including The Well-Timed Strategy and When the Market Moves, Will You Be Prepared? in addition to What the Top MBAs Know.

Navarro advocated for a proactive approach in confronting China’s unethical trade practices, encompassing infringements of intellectual property legislation, currency manipulation, and labor exploitation. Since then, he has authored numerous works on China.

In 2015, he published Crouching Tiger: What China’s Militarism Means for the World. Death by China: Confronting the Dragon—A Global Call to Action has garnered the most attention among his other works on China and has even been adapted into a documentary.

China, according to Navarro, is “waging an economic war” by manipulating its currency, providing export subsidies, and imposing import restrictions. The New York Times reports that one of Mr. Trump’s favored books at the time was The Coming China Wars by Navarro, and that the views expressed in the book resonated with the then-candidate Trump.