Former Trump Official Navarro Explains the ‘Make America Great Again’ Movement

Peter Navarro, Director of the White House National Trade Council, at the CPAC convention in National Harbor, Md., on March 1, 2019. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times

Former Trump administration senior official Peter Navarro is a man on a mission, and he provided detail on how he is working to accomplish it in an exclusive interview with The Epoch Times.

“My primary mission right now is to help Donald Trump get back to the White House in the 2024 election,” said Navarro, who served as the White House Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy from 2017 to 2021. “To execute that mission, I believe that the single most important thing we have to begin to do is to explain to the American people what MAGA [Make America Great Again] is, what it represents, what it means, and who we are.”

Navarro, who was one of only a few senior officials to serve through the entirety of the Trump administration, was a chief architect of U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods, and author of the books “Taking Back Trump’s America” and “In Trump Time.” He spoke to The Epoch Times about his new six-part podcast documentary miniseries, published via Apple and Google podcasts.

Explaining the ‘Make America Great Again’ Movement

Episodes one through four of Navarro’s new podcast include discussions of Democrats’ efforts to turn “MAGA into a four-letter word,” Trump’s understanding of the importance of fair and reciprocal trade for American workers, and how the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, and the elimination of the military draft in the early 1970s led to “the American populist economic nationalist MAGA movement.”

In episode five, Navarro discusses the three policy legs of “the iron MAGA triangle of populist economic nationalism,” which he defines as strengthening American manufacturing, securing U.S. borders, and ending America’s “endless wars.”

In the sixth and final episode, Navarro sounds a cautionary note that Democrats should not be allowed to make the 2024 election about social or “culture war” issues rather than economic issues and “delivering peace and prosperity to the American people and to American families.”

In the podcast series, Navarro describes Trump’s base of American workers as “a very different kind of Rainbow Coalition base that brings together working-class Americans of all colors who seek a good job at a decent wage and an end to being sacrificial lambs in America’s globalist offshoring ventures and foreign war adventures.”

“Elections are going to be determined by how many independents flock to the MAGA banner, as well as—and Trump has tracked a lot of these—the Reagan Democrats and Trump Democrats,” Navarro told The Epoch Times.

The 2024 Republican Field

With respect to the current state of the 2024 presidential race, Navarro said, “My dream scenario is for Trump to have [Ron] DeSantis as his vice president candidate,” adding that “it would guarantee [DeSantis] 12 years in the White House, and he’d have four years of training.”

When asked if perceived tensions between Trump and DeSantis might preclude a Trump-DeSantis ticket, Navarro said, “Not at all. I’ve seen this … Donald Trump can reach a deal overnight, so it wouldn’t surprise me at all to see the two of them smiling and shaking hands and agreeing that that’s the ticket for 2024.”

“If Trump and DeSantis shook hands tomorrow and agreed that they were going to run as a ticket, that would end the race. No Nikki [Haley], no [Mike] Pence, nobody, it would be over, and it would be a good ticket. And I don’t see any other vice presidential candidates right now that are up to that job,” Navarro said.

When pressed with a question regarding his own potential role in a future Trump administration and whether Navarro himself might be considered a top candidate for vice president alongside Trump in 2024, Navarro referred to an answer he provided in a previous interview in which he said, “There’s a Buddhist saying, which I learned when I was very young, ‘desire is suffering.’”

“I think it’s the same answer. I don’t do this for a job. I do this for love of the country. And the worst thing you can do in politics is to do something for a job. I’ve just seen too much of that up close and personal. As soon as you want something, you start to compromise your principles and you do things that you might not otherwise do.”

Right now, Navarro’s focus is bringing Trump back to the White House. “That’s all I’m thinking about,” he said.

The 2024 Democrat Field

Regarding the Democrat field, Navarro said that he sees California Gov. Gavin Newsom as the Democrats’ current “lead candidate” beyond Joe Biden, and does not think that Biden will be the Democrats’ presidential nominee in 2024, as Democrats “don’t want him.”

“I think that they’re going to sacrifice [Biden]… they’re going to let him, I think, get engulfed by the Hunter Biden ‘laptop from hell’ scandal and the investigations that the Republicans in the House are going to do, and he’ll have to bow out,” Navarro said.

“Here’s a prediction for you: one of Biden’s last acts will be to pardon his son [Hunter Biden].”

Navarro noted that Democrats have worked to change voting laws and policies in some states to favor ballot harvesting, and said that Republicans need to adjust in order to counter this.

“This is really important,” Navarro said. “The Republicans need to get off their ass and adopt the same kind of get-out-the-vote strategy as the Democrats were [in 2020 and 2022] 40 to 60 days out. They harvest their ballots. They don’t wait until ‘game day.’ Those days are over.”

Conflict with Communist China

Navarro believes that the United States is “hurtling towards conflict with communist China,” adding that part of the reason for this “is the weakness and compromise of Joe Biden.”

“I think that when push comes to shove this will be more of an unrestricted war. I don’t see necessarily nukes flying unless they take out an aircraft carrier in the Taiwan Strait,” Navarro said. “But what I do see is [China] taking our satellites out, attacking our infrastructure with cyberweapons, possibly another bioweapon, because the original Chinese Communist Party virus [COVID-19], that’s a bioweapon.”

Navarro stated that Trump’s strength against China’s aggression is “one of the key reasons why Trump needs to be back in the White House.”

“[Trump] projects strength and, therefore, peace through strength, and we wouldn’t be having the problems we’re having now with Russia if he had been there,” Navarro said. “And we will do far better holding off communist China, and [keeping] their jackals in the Communist Party at bay if he’s in office. And they are jackals.”

The Epoch Times has reached out to the White House for comment.