How Peter Navarro, Trump’s Tariff Cheerleader, Became the Ultimate Yes-Man – The New Yorker

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Peter Navarro, Trump’s Ultimate Yes-Man

The tariff cheerleader established the template of sycophancy for Trump Administration officials.

By Ian Parker, December 22, 2025

As an economist, Navarro wrote that retaliatory tariffs are how “trade wars are born.” He now backs Trump’s trade wars. Illustration by Barry Blitt

In March, 2016, Peter Navarro introduced himself to students in Managing Geopolitical Risk in an Age of a Rising China, a new undergraduate course at the University of California, Irvine. Donald Trump was then a month away from becoming the presumptive Republican nominee for President. Navarro, who had tenure at the business school, was an academic oddity: he worked at a research university, but he’d done little serious research since finishing his doctorate in economics, at Harvard, thirty years earlier. And he didn’t seem to enjoy contact with students. A former friend of his, an economist, recently said, “I don’t think he liked teaching that much—he liked talking.” Navarro had secured a life of privilege and frustration. He lived in a big house in Laguna Beach with an ocean view and a pool surrounded by statuary. But he plainly yearned to be somewhere, or someone, else.

Professors often develop side hustles. But Navarro had long sought to trade his academic status for a more dazzling form of power—mayor of San Diego, stock guru, Democratic congressman, television host. He’d largely failed in these ambitions, thanks in part to traits he recognized in himself: he was arrogant, abrasive, and disdainful. “The problem was my personality,” Navarro wrote, in an account of his struggles as a political candidate. Although he once compared his charisma to Barack Obama’s, he knew that many who met him regarded him as an asshole. He was always getting into spats. Shortly before Navarro’s new course began, he sent an e-mail to John Graham, another U.C. Irvine professor, asking, “Are you frigging deaf, dumb, and blind?”

Navarro had first pitched his class in a mass e-mail to thirty thousand students. That spring, only seventeen had enrolled. The room could have held a hundred. “He was not a prominent professor,” one of the students who’d chosen to take the course recently recalled.

She remembers him as skinny and “a little bit on the shorter side.” Navarro, who is about five feet seven, was an avid cyclist, bodysurfer, and cold-bath plunger. Then as now, he resembled an agitated basketball coach: rolled-up sleeves, graying hair combed straight back from a tanned and taut face. Long drawn to language aimed at making mundane tasks sound muscular or militaristic, he instructed students to bring “laptop capability.”

Navarro had just published “Crouching Tiger,” his third book to describe China as an ugly threat to America and the world. The previous two, from 2006 and 2011, had portrayed China as an amoral economic force; the new one emphasized the country’s rising military ambitions. It was bluntly polemical—Chinese missiles were “designed to literally ram American satellites out of the sky”; a submarine base was “right out of a James Bond novel”—and it contained no evidence that Navarro could speak Chinese or had even visited China. Footnotes frequently cited op-eds and Wikipedia. The book was largely ignored. A “Crouching Tiger” account on Twitter attracted only a few dozen followers. When Navarro was challenged about his expertise in a testy Ask Me Anything thread on Reddit, he replied, “Many of my experts . . . get much of their source material directly from the Chinese.” When comments dried up, Navarro asked, “any body out there????”

Yet, as Navarro’s student discovered, the class was the book. Each week, students discussed either “Crouching Tiger” or episodes of an accompanying documentary series that Navarro clearly hadn’t quite finished assembling. “We would watch these weird videos,” the student said. In addition to talking-head interviews, “there would be, like, ‘INSERT ANIMATION HERE’ ”; Navarro appeared in front of an unaltered green screen. The student wondered if she was enrolled in a book-marketing focus group. Not long after, the videos began to appear on YouTube.

Navarro’s teaching assistant, Ben Leffel, who had lived and worked in China, didn’t share Navarro’s geopolitical views. (Leffel, who now teaches at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, told me that he always saw Navarro as a charlatan drawn to “performative warmongering.”) Leffel tried to be a moderating influence—particularly on the many occasions when Navarro did not come to class—but the course remained yoked to “Crouching Tiger.” The student said that the class’s message was simple: “We have to be afraid of China.”

The final exam was held in early June, around the time that Navarro had what he has called a “surreal” experience. One morning, he has written, he walked down the hill from his home to Victoria Beach—“hallowed ground from where I would launch my paddle board and cruise out among the seals and dolphins.” He was expecting a call. Stephen Miller, who was then a thirty-year-old speechwriter for Trump and who now oversees the federal government’s effort to terrorize people perceived to be undocumented immigrants, wanted to talk. Navarro wrote, “As I sat down in the sand hoping that my cell phone reception would hold, the key thing that kept popping into my mind was how close I was to power—yet, in tiny Laguna Beach, so far away.”

Navarro likes to say that he was one of only three senior advisers to serve Trump from his first campaign to the end of his first term. The others he identifies are Miller and Dan Scavino, who is now a deputy chief of staff. In the taxonomy of political sidekicks, Navarro, who advises on trade, isn’t a carrier of darkly destructive principles, like Miller. Nor is he a natural political fixer. And he can’t be described as a persuasive orator. His frequent TV appearances—where he tends to be uninterruptible, while gesturing with his index and pinkie fingers extended, like Paulie Walnuts on “The Sopranos”—can be off-putting even to allies. His friend Stephen Bannon, the former White House adviser turned broadcaster, once cut off Navarro’s microphone to break his flow.

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