Peter
Navarro, an American politician who served in the Donald Trump administration,
is in crosshairs with the United States National Archives and Records
Administration (NARA) after the federal agency wrote a letter to the House
Oversight Committee saying that certain former government members had not
returned records after their departure from the White House.

Who is Peter
Navarro?

Early
life

Peter
Navarro was born on July 15, 1949 in Cambridge, Massachusetts to Albert ‘Al’
Navarro and Evelyn Littlejohn. Albert Navarro was a saxophonist and would also
play the clarinet. Peter Navarro’s parents divorced when he was nine or 10
years old. Peter moved in with his mother and they lived in Florida. When
Navarro was going through his teen years, he, his mother and brother, lived in
a tiny one-room apartment in Bethesda, Maryland.

Peter Navarro
did his schooling from the Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School. He then went on to
study at Tufts University on a scholarship from where he graduated with a Bachelor
of Arts degree. After graduating in 1972, Navarro joined the US Peace Corps and
served in Thailand. He later went on to do a Masters in Public Administration
from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, graduating in
1979. He subsequently pursued a PhD in economics at Harvard under the supervision
of Richard E. Caves.

Career

Peter Navarro
worked at Harvard University’s Energy and Environmental Policy Center from 1981
to 1985. He subsequently taught at the University of California, San Diego for
three years. In 1989, he joined the University of California, Irvine as a
professor of economics and public policy. Navarro’s PhD dissertation was titled
The Policy Game: How Special Interests and Ideologues Are Stealing America. The
dissertation called for better workers’ wages and protection from foreign
competition.

Navarro has
written a dozen books on economics, public policy and international relations.

Politics

While
Navarro’s ideas on trade have sometimes been described by more mainstream
economists as fringe, he has flipflopped easily across the political divide. In
1996, Peter Navarro ran for the 49th Congressional District on a
Democratic Party ticket but lost to Republican Brian Bilbray. During his time
in Harvard, Navarro was a registered Democrat. But upon moving to California,
he first turned non-partisan and then registered himself as a Republican.

Association
with Donald Trump

In 2016,
Peter Navarro joined Donald Trump’s election campaign as an advisor on economic
policy. As an advisor, he was firmly on the side of protectionist and isolationist
policies that Trump adopted and couched in the America First rhetoric. Navarro
along with Wilbur Ross, a private equity investor, came up with an economic
policy for the Trump administration.

The policy
was described by Simon Johnson, an MIT economist, as “based on assumptions so
unrealistic that they seem to have come from a different planet. If the United
States really did adopt Trump’s plan, the result would be an immediate and
unmitigated disaster.”