There may be a “60-seat swing” to the GOP in the midterm elections; populist economic nationalism has arrived as a movement; the United States “should stop doing any kind of business” with China “until they cease their economic aggression.”
That’s according to Peter Navarro, a senior official during the Trump administration, who spoke to The Epoch Times in an exclusive interview.
“If the [midterm] elections were held today, there’s no question that the Republicans will take the House,” Navarro said.
“Depending on how redistricting goes around the country, that [swing of seats to Republicans] could go as high as 80 and as low as 30 or 40,” he added, referring to the decennial redrawing of Congressional district maps currently taking place.
Arguably the Trump administration’s toughest China hawk and known to be a strong advocate for American workers, Navarro served as the White House director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy from 2017 to 2021, and was one of only a few senior officials to serve through the entirety of President Donald Trump’s term in office.
Navarro, who earned a doctorate in economics from Harvard University and has served as a professor of economics at the University of California, Irvine, is a principal architect of the Trump administration’s trade policies, which saw Washington launch a trade war against the Chinese regime in response to Beijing’s long-running trade abuses and theft of American intellectual property.
During the interview, Navarro discussed his forthcoming book, the upcoming midterm elections, his insistence on maintaining executive privilege in the face of subpoenas by the House Jan. 6 committee, and U.S. policy on China.
‘Taking Back Trump’s America’
Speaking about “Taking Back Trump’s America,” Navarro said, “The book itself is a very candid and frank discussion of both the history of the White House and the history that will be made going forward into the congressional elections and the 2024 presidential election.”He added, “I think what’s going to be important about the book is, it’s a lengthy analysis of what Trumpism means,” noting that the book discusses populism and nationalism and these ideologies’ battle with globalist views commonly held by many of today’s political elites. He said that the book describes how “populist economic nationalism has arrived as a movement and why we need to embrace it.”
“The New York Times in its cancel culture, virtue signaling, fascist world, did not put it on the list,” Navarro told The Epoch Times. “And that had a material harm to the sales of the book because people use that New York Times bestseller list as what we call in economics a ‘signal’ as to whether a book is worthy of purchase. So there was a great grassroots performance by the book itself. But my judgment, if we weren’t in a cancel culture world, we probably would have sold a million copies of that book.”
In response to Navarro’s allegations, Nicole Taylor, a communications director at The New York Times, told The Epoch Times in an email that the publication’s best-seller lists are “based on a detailed analysis of book sales from a wide range of retailers who provide us with specific and confidential context of their sales each week.”
The New York Times representative added that “sales data from our confidential panel of reporting stores is separate from what is reported to Bookscan or other entities” and that publication’s “Best Sellers department has reviewed the data they received for the sales week of November 21, 2021 and is confident in the accuracy of the Best-Seller Lists for that week.”
Navarro, in an email response, called The New York Times’ statement a “misdirection,” saying that “In Trump Time” sold over 30,000 books during the week in question. “We sold twice as many books or more as half of the titles that appeared on the list,” he said.
The former official announced “Taking Back Trump’s America,” which is scheduled for release in September, while guest-hosting Stephen K. Bannon’s “War Room” podcast on April 15, and said “hands down the ‘War Room’ is the most powerful platform to sell thoughtful books to the American public. It really astonishes people, authors, publishers, when they go on the road and see how lettered the audience is.”
“I’m counting also on publications like The Epoch Times,” he said. “My hope is that avid readers of The Epoch Times will embrace ‘Taking Back Trump’s America.’”
Navarro revealed that The Epoch Times will be included in the book, saying, “I talk about The Epoch Times in glowing terms in the ‘Taking Back Trump’s America’ book with respect to how it’s grown rapidly from what was a niche publication to one of the most important international newspapers in the world.”
Midterms
The former official projected large gains for the Republicans in November’s midterms, driven by growing dissatisfaction with what he described as increasingly radical Democratic policies.“I think a safe bet is a 60-seat swing [in favor of the Republican Party], which is similar to what happened to Obama with the Tea Party [movement] and when [Newt] Gingrich came along [in the 1994 midterm elections], but depending on how redistricting goes around the country, that could go as high as 80 and as low as 30 or 40,” Navarro said.
“I think a large portion of the country now is united against the Democrat Party,” he added, describing its performance as showing that “it’s a radical political party.”
“It’s really out of touch in the center of this country.”
Despite Republican Party advantages heading into the midterms, Navarro noted that there are struggles between globalists and nationalists happening within the party.
“It’s also true that there’s an important war going on now within the Republican Party between the party of Davos, Wall Street, multinational corporations that offshore our jobs versus the Trump Republicans who embrace secure borders, embrace fair rather than simply so-called free trade,” he said. “If we simply have a Republican majority with the current leadership in charge, Mitch McConnell in the Senate, Kevin McCarthy in the House, we’re going to have basically the status quo ante, and it will not serve the center of this country.”
Navarro emphasized the distinction between “RINO,” an acronym for “Republican in Name Only,” and “Trump” Republicans.
“The Karl Rove faction, the Wall Street faction, the Liz Cheney faction … Mitch McConnell, [Kevin] McCarthy, they’re all supporting RINO Republicans rather than Trump Republicans,” he said, adding that the Republican primaries will serve as a critical test to determine which camp prevails.
A primary race that Navarro is particularly interested in is the Republican primary race in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District between Trump-endorsed Katie Arrington and first-term incumbent Nancy Mace. Following the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and in what was her first speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, Mace, who had worked on the 2016 Trump campaign, blamed the president for the breach of the Capitol. A story was also posted to her official Congressional website that included “Mace Condemns President Trump” in the headline.
“Mace is a poster child for the RINO, Rove, corporate media effort to stop the Trump movement,” Navarro told The Epoch Times. Trump endorsed primary challenger Katie Arrington in February, calling Mace “an absolutely terrible candidate” who “has been very disloyal to the Republican Party.”
When reached for comment, Austin McCubbin, manager for Rep. Mace’s congressional campaign wrote in an e-mailed statement, “Conservative organizations all score Mace as having a near perfect voting record, because she doesn’t sacrifice her principles.”
Navarro, in response, said in an email, “I was in the trenches with Katie Arrington in the Trump administration when we were fighting to save millions of lives at the start of the pandemic and she was a warrior.”
“The only thing you need to know about Mace is she supported the Democrats effort to steal the election from Donald Trump,” he added.
Executive Privilege
Navarro described how he is protecting executive privilege in the face of intense pressure from the Democrat-majority House committee investigating the events of Jan. 6.The Trump aide refused to comply with a subpoena from the House committee, citing executive privilege. In a highly partisan vote this month, the House of Representatives voted to formally ask the Justice Department to prosecute Navarro and another top Trump adviser on criminal contempt charges for not complying with the subpoena.
After the November 2020 presidential election when Trump and allies, including Navarro, alleged largescale election irregularities and fraud, Navarro coordinated what he calls the “Green Bay Sweep” strategy with Trump and Stephen Bannon, who previously served as Trump’s chief White House strategist. The Green Bay Sweep Strategy, named after a football play made famous by the Green Bay Packers, involved members of Congress formally contesting election results in six battleground states before the certification of presidential election results on Jan. 6.
Navarro writes in his book “In Trump Time” regarding Jan. 6, “The political and legal beauty of the strategy was this: by law, both the House of Representatives and the Senate must spend up to two hours of debate per state on each requested challenge. For the six battleground states, that would add up to as much as twenty-four hours of nationally televised hearings across the two chambers of Congress. Through these televised proceedings, we would finally be able to short-circuit the crushing censorship of the anti-Trump media and take our case directly to the American people.”
He also writes of the event, “The goal is not to get the election overturned today. The goal is to subject the ballots—the legal votes of American citizens along with what we believe to be a flood of illegal ballots—to careful scrutiny and investigation.”
Navarro explained his reasons for maintaining privilege during the House committee proceedings, and suggested that the matter may ultimately have to be resolved by the Supreme Court.
“President Trump has asserted executive privilege, number one,” Navarro told The Epoch Times. “Number two, I informed the [House January 6] committee very clearly that it was not my privilege to waive, therefore I could not comply with their subpoena. And I directed them—and this is equally important—I directed them to negotiate directly with [Trump] and his attorneys for any partial or full waiver of the privilege, and then I would be happy to comply if President Trump himself or his attorneys negotiated something with them. It’s not my privilege to waive.”
He added, “Subsequent to that, the committee colluded either explicitly or tacitly with the Biden White House to do an end run around that direction, and they chose to have Biden take the legal step of waiving President Trump’s privilege in this matter. And that’s where things stand. So, there’s going to be ongoing legal activities related to that … But this is a Supreme Court decision waiting to happen, because the [House Jan. 6] committee itself is acting in an illegal manner.”
The White House and the House Jan. 6 committee did not respond to requests for comment.
“The central premise of the Jan. 6 committee is that the election was fair. And they simply assert that there was no fraud or irregularities,” Navarro said. “The problem with that is that there is abundant evidence to the contrary, starting with a very extensive and extensively referenced three-volume report I did that explains what that fraud and what those irregularities were, and how and why the Democrats were able to pull off essentially what was a stolen election.”
Navarro also pointed to corporate media turning a blind eye to the Navarro Report and the substantial evidence of fraud in the 2020 presidential election that it details.
“Just as the corporate media ignored purposefully the “In Trump Time” book, which arguably is the best history to date of the Trump White House, they have ignored any reference to the three-volume Navarro Report … The report’s been out there well prior to January 6, and nobody has ever discredited it.”
Defending Against China
The former official described the Biden administration’s handling of its relationship with the Chinese regime as “total appeasement.”“I’m very, very concerned that the weakness that Biden showed Putin has resulted in the invasion of Ukraine. The weakness that Biden is showing Xi Jinping may result in an invasion of Taiwan,” he said.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
In the Trump White House, Navarro identified the Chinese Communist Party’s “seven deadly sins” of economic aggression, including cyber hacking to steal trade secrets, intellectual property theft, forced technology transfer, below-cost dumping of products into American markets, the use of heavily subsidized state-owned enterprises that employ predatory pricing, currency manipulation, and the flooding of American communities with fentanyl and other opioids.
When asked about what the United States should do now to continue to defend against totalitarian China’s aggression, Navarro stated, “We were ready in a second [Trump administration] term to really up the tariffs.”
He continued, “I think something that would be a perfect complement to tariffs would be a complete cutting off of capital flows from America to China. It’s crazy that our pension funds, for example, are supporting companies in China that make weapons, for example. We tried to stop that.”
In November 2020, Trump issued an executive order prohibiting purchases by American investors of stocks in companies determined by the US Defense Department to be owned or controlled by the Chinese military. In June 2021, the Biden administration replaced this order with a revised version that in some ways expanded upon the original, including by widening the scope of Chinese companies that could be sanctioned.
Navarro said that “China is an existential threat to the country,” and added, “My view is and has long been that we should stop doing any kind of business with them until they cease their economic aggressions. Geopolitical, revanchist, and imperialist aggression.”
