A Conversation With the Architect of Trump’s New Trade War (2025)

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From “The New York Times,” I’m Rachel Abrams. This is “The Daily.”

With less than a month in office —

— President Trump has pursued more trade actions against adversaries and allies than all the trade measures he took in his entire first term.

And there’s one man guiding it all.

Today, my colleague Ana Swanson on how Peter Navarro rose to become one of Trump’s key advisors and why he thinks tariffs will usher in a new era of American prosperity.

It’s Tuesday, February 18.

Hi, Ana.

Hey. How are you?

Good. Thank you for being here. I wanted to talk to you because you covered President Trump in his first term, and you focused a ton on international trade. So I figured you would be the right person to talk to and help me understand this key advisor, Peter Navarro, who’s been advising Trump on all of these tariff policies that we’ve been hearing about recently.

So I met Peter Navarro when I was covering trade policy in Trump’s first term. And he’s an interesting person because he had a very unusual journey to the White House. And he had views about trade in China that were considered pretty unconventional and unpopular. But over time, these views have become one of the driving forces of Trump’s trade policy.

So recently, I went to see him again with two colleagues from “The Daily.”

We met him at the Eisenhower Executive Office building, which is just west of the White House.

And we sat down with him in his office to understand how he came to have these ideas about trade and tariffs —

— and now that he’s in the role that he’s in, what his ideas could mean for the country.

So when you started talking, what did you learn?

So he talked about being raised by a single mom, how he was a latchkey kid. He also loved school, and he did well. And he goes on to Tufts University. And after he graduated in the 1970s, he’s thinking he wants to see what the world is like and travel a little bit.

And then one day, randomly, he’s walking around the Berkeley campus, and this guy asks him, hey, want to go to Thailand?

And that guy happened to be recruiting for the Peace Corps.

And so Navarro decides to go.

Peace Corps, I feel like that’s a really unusual stop along your way to becoming tariffs czar.

Yeah he says he wanted to learn about different cultures and got to travel a lot around Asia.

And when he came back, he ended up at Harvard, studying government and economics in the ‘80s. He finished his PhD. He moves out to Southern California, and he starts teaching economics and public policy at UC Irvine. And then he decides to run for mayor of San Diego.

He loses that election. And over the next several years, a couple of huge economic policy shifts happen that really shape his thinking. First in 1994 comes NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement.

And this is a really important moment for the US economy because this was the first time that the US was engaging in a free trade agreement with a developing country, Mexico. And then in 2001, China enters the World Trade Organization, this other big moment in trade that really shifts the politics of trade in America.

So it sounds like you have these two big moments where America is really becoming much more globalized in its manufacturing processes. You’ve got NAFTA, where it’s signing agreements with places like Mexico and opening itself up to other countries. And then you’ve got this moment when China joins the World Trade organization, which really brings China onto the world main stage in a way that it hadn’t been before.

He’s trying to figure out what’s going on. And he lands on something that he calls the China price.

And what’s that?

So he’s observing this strange ability for Chinese firms to offer prices that are so much lower than other competitors.

And he’s saying that is starting to put US manufacturers out of business. So he does a study to try to understand just how they’re getting their prices so low.

So one way companies could get their prices low is by paying their workers lower wages. But Navarro finds that China is doing a lot more than that.

And he’s so troubled by this that he ends up writing three books on China. The first was called “The Coming China Wars.”

That book gets panned.

And then he also creates a documentary, which is narrated by Martin Sheen.

Ana, how would you characterize Navarro’s view of all of this? Is his assessment of what China is doing fair?

He’s right that a lot of people agree now that the Chinese government was not playing by international trade rules. But even if they were, I think the entry of basically a billion people into the global economy would have been a huge shock either way. And it ends up being kind of complicated in terms of who benefited and who lost.

So let’s talk about that. Tell me what some of the benefits are first.

So the first benefit is that you do have a lot of Chinese people lifted out of poverty, so hundreds of millions of Chinese people who are moving out of poverty into the middle class.

And then you have basically the American Standard of living today created. How many people do you know who love Costco, who love to buy inexpensive things off of Amazon? A lot of that is made possible by this China price, by Chinese factories making cheap goods.

But there were definitely a lot of downsides as well. So you have a lot of US factories going out of business because they can no longer compete with the cheap prices that Chinese firms are offering. And you have millions of US manufacturing jobs that were destroyed in that process, economists have found.

And I don’t think they anticipated just how hard the people on the losing end would be hit. There was this assumption that people who lost their jobs to [? day ?] trade could be helped to move, to find other jobs, or go through retraining programs that would give them even better jobs in this new economy.

And they didn’t anticipate, I think, that this transition was a lot more disruptive and painful. And the pain was really localized and vivid and sharp, particularly in the industrial Northeast and Midwest, where people now are really hurting because they don’t have factory employment anymore. And economists have found that then other problems follow, like drug addiction. And these are all things that Peter Navarro is focused on, too, actually.

It really does sound like Peter Navarro is ringing the alarm bell on China, kind of well before a lot of other people are. How does he actually get attached to Donald Trump, though?

So Trump at this point has been complaining about China and its trade practices for a really long time.

At one point, Trump is asked by the “LA times,” what are some of your favorite books on China?

And he mentions one of Peter Navarro’s books. So they start corresponding, and —

Ultimately, then candidate Trump decides to bring Navarro on to his campaign.

Trump wins the presidency, and Navarro is given a job in the administration working on trade policy. But he’s still kind of an outsider. There are a lot of other more influential advisors in the administration at that point, who are opposed to the idea of imposing broad tariffs on foreign products. And so you come to a point where most of the other advisors are saying to President Trump, we can’t do that. We shouldn’t impose tariffs.

And Navarro prevails. And he helps to draft tariffs on China and on steel and aluminum from countries around the world.

So when Trump and Navarro leave office in 2021, what exactly had they accomplished in terms of the trade relationship with China?

So they had really changed the American terms of trade with the rest of the world. They had imposed a lot of tariffs on things like metals, and washing machines, and over $300 billion of products coming in from China. And they had also signed a trade deal with China and reworked the North American Free Trade Agreement into a new deal.

But then there’s an interesting wrinkle to this story. So Trump’s orbit has changed a lot through the whole first term. New advisors have come in. They get fired. People are in and out very quickly. But Peter Navarro, even though he’s sometimes sidelined, is there the whole time.

And when the January 6 hearing comes, Navarro is called to testify, and he shows his loyalty to Trump by refusing to hand over his notes. And then he is sent to prison for four months for failing to honor the subpoena.

And he gets out of prison on the day of the Republican National Convention, and he flies directly from prison to the RNC to give a speech.

— in Miami.

Joe Biden and his department of injustice put me there.

Wow, that is quite an image. And we know what happens next. Trump, who is somebody who obviously prizes loyalty very much, wins the election, returns to office, and he brings Peter Navarro back with him.

That’s right. And this time, he is even more empowered to totally transform America’s trade relationships.

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We’ll be right back.

So, Ana, now that we understand how Peter Navarro formed his worldview about trade with China, let’s talk about his tools for bringing back manufacturing jobs to the US. And those tools are tariffs. Tell us about how Navarro makes the case for tariffs.

So Peter Navarro believes that tariffs are a very important tool to balance out America’s trading relationships, that, as we talked about, countries like China, have been cheating international rules by making products more cheaply than they should and stealing intellectual property. And basically, they’re putting out goods that American businesses just can’t compete with. And so American businesses need kind of a shield from those products. And that shield is tariffs.

How exactly is it a shield?

Well, a tariff is a charge on a good when it comes over the border. So if companies are making their products outside the United States and they want to sell them inside the United States, they pay that extra fee. So the thinking is, tariffs will incentivize companies to make their products inside the United States so they don’t have to pay that fee.

But what is Navarro say about the criticisms that are often cited of using tariffs, like Trump himself has acknowledged on social media that tariffs could lead to higher prices, for example, for consumers? And in the US, just to point out, we just went through a period of super high inflation. And that was really, really painful for people.

So I asked him about that. And he was pretty clear about his position.

He said that tariffs will not hurt consumers.

I asked him this question a couple of times — aren’t tariffs supposed to increase prices? Because that’s how tariffs work. They make the foreign goods more expensive, so people buy American goods, instead. But Navarro didn’t really give me a direct answer.

Instead, he talked about how Chinese companies would absorb some of the cost of the tariffs to keep prices low.

I also asked him about US manufacturers who are buying parts from abroad and whether tariffs would hurt their business. And he didn’t seem all that concerned with what I’ve been hearing from some American manufacturers. He just kept coming back to the idea that ultimately, tariffs will incentivize both American and foreign companies to build factories in the US —

— which he believes will then lead to higher wages for Americans.

And he said these tariffs aren’t happening in a vacuum.

He argues that if the Trump administration is able to get the price of oil down, if Elon Musk and his team are able to cut government waste and red tape, and if Trump keeps taxes low, all of these moves together would reduce inflation and help the US economy.

But what Navarro said is the most important part of all of this, why he’s so focused on tariffs and bringing manufacturing back to the United States, is that it all comes back to national security.

The sense I’m getting from talking to you about your conversation with Navarro is that we’re talking about these really aggressive, audacious policy tools. And in fact, in some form or fashion, the US has been using them for the past few years.

They obviously started in the first Trump administration. But what’s coming through is that it doesn’t sound like Navarro is actually grappling with what you’re describing as the potential negative consequences of these tariffs?

I don’t think that he believes in those negative consequences. No. He doesn’t believe in what most experts are saying, which is that all of these tariffs could end up really hurting Americans.

He and the president are embarking on imposing tariffs at just a vastly bigger scale than we’ve seen in this country in many decades. And so it is like a grand experiment, really, to see if they’re right about how tariffs will play out for the American economy.

Well, Ana, thank you very much.

Thanks for having me.

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We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today. Four top New York City officials are resigning after the Justice Department moved to dismiss the corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams. The four officials oversee much of the city government, and their departure could further weaken Adams, who’s resisting calls to resign.

Adams was indicted on federal bribery and fraud charges, which the DOJ sought to dismiss, arguing that the prosecution was politically motivated and was impeding Adams’s ability to cooperate with President Trump’s deportation agenda.

And on Monday, a Delta Airlines flight carrying 80 people crashed, flipped over, and injured at least 18 people on board while it was trying to land in Toronto. The accident comes after a series of plane crashes over the last few weeks, have stoked fears in passengers, and raised broader concerns about aviation safety.

Today’s episode was produced by Mary Wilson and Michael Simon Johnson. It was edited by Lisa Chow and Larissa Anderson; fact-checked by Susan Lee; contains original music by Pat McCusker, Diane Wong, Marion Lozano, and Dan Powell; and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

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That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.