‘Take Down the CCP and Raise Up the American Worker’: Trump Adviser Peter Navarro Outlines His Mission in New Book

‘Take Down the CCP and Raise Up the American Worker’: Trump Adviser Peter Navarro Outlines His Mission in New Book
Peter Navarro, then-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
Adam Michael Molon
Updated:
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Donald J. Trump is “the Boss” and the Chinese Communist Party is a “brutal regime that needs to be taken down,” Trump administration senior official Peter Navarro told The Epoch Times in an exclusive and wide-ranging interview before the Nov. 2 release of his new book, “In Trump Time: A Journal of America’s Plague Year.”

Navarro served as the White House Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy from 2017 to 2021 under President Trump, and was one of only a few senior officials to serve through the entirety of the president’s term. Navarro, who earned a doctorate in economics from Harvard University and has served as a professor of economics at the University of California, Irvine, kept a daily journal while serving in the administration.

In his new book, he gives readers an inside view of the Trump White House and firsthand insight into numerous topics, including U.S. policy on China, the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 presidential election, and his extensive documentation of evidence allegedly pointing to election fraud and irregularities, as well as the events of Jan. 6.

Navarro told The Epoch Times that “In Trump Time,” already a bestseller on Amazon, has been “kept under tight wraps” prior to publication to prevent leaks. But, he said, “The demand, according to our distributors, is an astonishing more than 200,000 copies before the book is even available to the public.” The reasons for this, Navarro believes, is due to “a tremendous hunger from the American public about what really happened in the Trump administration” and “a high level of trust in what I will be saying, just based on my performance in the White House for industry and for blue-collar workers.”

Known as a steadfast champion of American workers and an unwavering hawk against the aggression of totalitarian China, Navarro said that his tough and direct style contributed to his longevity serving under Trump, whom he refers to with a sense of respect as “the Boss.”

President Donald Trump and White House Trade Adviser Peter Navarro check out the new Endurance all-electric pickup truck on the south lawn of the White House on Sept. 28, 2020 in Washington. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
President Donald Trump and White House Trade Adviser Peter Navarro check out the new Endurance all-electric pickup truck on the south lawn of the White House on Sept. 28, 2020 in Washington. Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

“From day one, I was always on the same wavelength as the President on economic and trade issues,” Navarro said. “I never pulled any punches with [Trump]. I always told him what I thought and I never cared about being employed the next day. I never ever tried to shade the truth to protect my job, I just told him like it was and, interestingly enough, that turned out to be a quality that led to my being around. The Boss doesn’t like people to blow smoke, lie to him, hold back. I think he saw me as somebody who was tough and honest and loyal. And there wasn’t a lot of that going around in the White House, unfortunately.”

Trump, Navarro recalled, “literally said I was his ‘tough guy’ right in front of the Chinese. So [Chinese regime officials] understood that.”

True to form, Navarro pulled no punches in the interview. He said that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is a “brutal regime that needs to be taken down.”

He also accused the Biden administration of being in the CCP’s “back pocket.”

“The CCP is going to likely make a move on Taiwan because of Biden’s weakness,” Navarro said. “Biden has appointed all sorts of CCP sympathizers within his government, and it’s never been a more dangerous time for Taiwan, the lovers of freedom, and the American people who have to worry about both the military threat and the economic attacks and cyberattacks of the Chinese Communist Party.”

According to Navarro, one of the key missions of his book is “to get to the bottom of what happened on Nov. 3,” the date of the 2020 presidential election.

“I believe this book is a book that will put Donald Trump back in the White House, I’m just not sure when that’s going to happen. But if justice is to be done, it should happen sooner rather than later,” he said. Citing a recent poll by Politico and Morning Consult, Navarro added, “I note, in that regard, we already have 35 percent of the American public [who] want the [2020 presidential] election overturned.”

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

The following are highlights from The Epoch Times’ exclusive interview with Navarro.

Standing Up for American Workers

“I’ve always been a pragmatist. I came up from a single-family household at the lower income end of the spectrum and identify with working people,” Navarro said, on his motivation to serve the American people.

“I think the thing that’s important to point out that what Donald Trump did, and I was proud to be by his side during it, was turn the Republican Party from a party serving Wall Street and globalist elites who would offshore jobs into a party of America’s working class and a party that put a high value on factory jobs, both for economic and national security reasons. I’m a self-described ‘Trump Republican,’ which is very different from the kind of ‘[Senator] McConnell Republicans’ that would sell our jobs offshore for a few shekels. My mission at the White House for the President was to advance the ‘Buy American, Hire American’ agenda.”

Pointing to the importance of “more resilient supply chains,” Navarro further said that “bringing our jobs back onshore” makes sense for both national and economic security reasons. One of his missions in the Trump administration was to bring back jobs to the United States that “are intrinsically higher value-added, and pay more, and provide those who may not have a college education with the opportunity to lead a middle-class, prosperous life,” he said.

“That’s what I did for the President, and I did it because I believe that’s the best way to have a strong and prosperous country.”

Getting Tough on China

Navarro said that Trump himself was the toughest individual in the administration with respect to getting tough on totalitarian China and defending against its aggression, “but I was right there with him.”
Navarro was one of the chief architects behind the U.S.–China trade war which started in 2018 under the Trump administration in response to the CCP’s long-running theft of American intellectual property and its other trade abuses. Trump slapped nearly $360 billion in tariffs on Chinese goods, which have been maintained by the Biden administration, although the top U.S. trade official has indicated that some tariffs may be rolled back.
(R-L) White House Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Peter Navarro, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and other Trump Administration officials sit down with Chinese Vice Premier Liu He (5th L), Central Bank Governor Yi Gang (6th L) and other Chinese vice ministers and senior officials for negotiations in the Diplomatic Room at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington on Jan. 30, 2019. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
(R-L) White House Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Peter Navarro, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and other Trump Administration officials sit down with Chinese Vice Premier Liu He (5th L), Central Bank Governor Yi Gang (6th L) and other Chinese vice ministers and senior officials for negotiations in the Diplomatic Room at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington on Jan. 30, 2019. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

“The whole journey towards imposing tariffs on China was a long one, and my role in that was to keep the heat on, the pressure on, and I think the most important thing I was able to do was communicate their ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ of economic aggression,” Navarro said.

The CCP’s ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ of economic aggression, which Navarro outlined, include 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.

“I think that the American people, American workers, understand that we need tariff protection against those seven deadly sins,” Navarro said. “But, at this point, my view is that we need to hold China—the Communist Party—accountable, not just for its economic aggression, but for attacking us with that [COVID-19] virus, which they did. They attacked us with that virus. That virus should have been contained.”

Given these developments, Navarro is minded to take an even tougher stance if he were in the White House today.

“I’d be advocating a complete decoupling of the U.S. economy from communist China and doing everything we could to defend ourselves from their aggression, and defend Taiwan and other targets of communist China.”

The Fight for Election Integrity After Nov. 3

Immediately after the 2020 presidential election, Navarro simultaneously fought personal and political battles. On Nov. 9, less than a week after the poll, Navarro’s mother, Evelyn, passed away at age 94. “It was a sorrowful time and she loved Donald Trump,” said Navarro, who dedicated the book to her.
At the same time, Navarro was about to “assume what became the dominant role in investigating election fraud from the White House.” Navarro documented detailed evidence and statistical receipts of alleged election fraud and irregularities in a report that Trump praised as a “great report by Peter” in a Dec. 19, 2020, tweet. The same tweet further said, “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election.”

According to Navarro, the COVID-19 pandemic served as an “accelerant” to a “Grand ‘Stuff the Ballot Box’ Strategy” that had been under formulation for several years.

“The election irregularities did not begin when the pandemic began,” Navarro said. “The ‘Grand ‘Stuff the Ballot Box’ Strategy’ of the Democrats began right after President Trump unexpectedly won the [2016 presidential] election. And so, for the three years prior to the pandemic, as I document in the “In Trump Time” book, there were all manner of actions that the Democrats took, which positioned them to be able to steal the election. I liken the pandemic simply as an accelerant to a fire that was already burning.”

Navarro further said, “There’s so many things the Democrats did. But the central problem is that the Democrats’ ‘Grand ‘Stuff the Ballot Box’ Strategy,’ the obvious portion was to stuff the ballot box with absentee and mail-in ballots, many of which they knew would be illegal. The subtle part, the second prong of that, was to take the election cops off the beat so there’d be no way of detecting those illegal votes and ruling them out of the count.”

The Epoch Times has reached out to the Democratic Party for comment.

Jan. 6 ‘Green Bay Sweep’ Strategy 

Navarro described what he calls the “Green Bay Sweep” strategy for Jan. 6 that he coordinated with Trump and Stephen K. Bannon, who previously served as Trump’s chief White House strategist. The strategy is named after the football play famously used by Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers.

“The ‘Green Bay Sweep’ is a football play, the most famous play in NFL history,” Navarro said. “It was our last chance to keep the White House before Biden could claim victory. And the Green Bay Sweep plan was very simple. We had to have peace on Capitol Hill and we had over 100 congressmen signed up for this, they were going to contest the results in six battleground states … and that would lead to 12 hours of televised hearings. And Vice President Pence, based on what were very legitimate claims of fraud and irregularities, his mission as quarterback that day for the Trump team was to seek a delay of certification for at least several weeks until we were able to look more closely at the fraud.”

He added, “By the time we lost the Green Bay Sweep Strategy as a strategy, it was over. There really was nothing more to do in the interval between January 6 and Inauguration Day [January 20].”

But Navarro hasn’t lost hope. “We have pushed forward with what is a very robust and growing ‘November 3 Movement,’ which is aimed at decertifying the election in the key battleground states,” he said. “And my reports that I did, that I documented in ‘In Trump Time,’ are actually being used as the template for forensic audits in these battleground states”

Speaking Truth to Power and the Future

For Navarro, following his service in the White House, rather than sitting on boards of directors at companies, holding positions at universities or think tanks, or contributing to a major news network, he would “prefer to speak truth to power and work with folks like Bannon’s War Room,” referencing Bannon’s daily podcast.

Pointing to suppression in the mainstream media of voices favorable to Trump, Navarro said, “I fully expect as [the book] comes out that the corporate media will try to bury it … but it is what it is. And I do think that too many of our people inside our institutions either hate Donald Trump more than they love this country and want to save lives, or simply hate what Donald Trump stands for and want to make sure that Trumpism is thwarted.”

He noted that the popularity of the book before its release has “really astonished the mainstream kind of elites.”

“They don’t get it. And what they don’t get is that people are tired of being lied to, basically. They’re looking for honest voices and truth,” Navarro said.

When asked about potentially serving during a second Trump presidential term in the future, Navarro replied, “I don’t think in terms of additional government service. That’s not what motivates me.”

“The thing that motivates me is the mission, which is to take down the CCP and raise up the American worker in this country,” he added.

“There’s a Buddhist saying, which I learned when I was very young, ‘desire is suffering.’ And the first time you start thinking about your own welfare when you’re on a mission, you’re doomed. So my mission is to simply get the truth out, and that’s what the ‘In Trump Time’ book does, and to move Trumpism forward as a populist, economic nationalist way of life and thinking. So that’s all I’m focused on.”

Adam Michael Molon
Adam Michael Molon
Author
Adam Michael Molon is an American writer and journalist. He holds a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University and undergraduate degrees in finance and Chinese language from Indiana University-Bloomington.
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