Peter Navarro: The Architect of Trumps Tariffs

On a clear day last July in Miami, Peter Navarro emerged from four months in federal prison, where he’d been imprisoned for contempt of Congress.Mr.

Navarro had refused to testify in an investigation of the Jan.6 attack on the Capitol, an action he described as a defense of the Constitution.Just hours after his release from prison, Mr.

Navarro flew to Milwaukee to speak at the Republican National Convention in support of Donald J.Trump’s re-election.“They convicted me, they jailed me.

Guess what? They did not break me,” he said that night, punctuating each word as the crowd roared.It was an exercise in loyalty to Mr.

Trump that seems to have paid off.For much of Mr.Trump’s first term, Mr.

Navarro, a trade adviser, had been sidelined, mocked and minimized by other officials who saw his protectionist views on trade as factually wrong and dangerous for the country.But in the second Trump administration, Mr.Navarro, 75, an economist and trade skeptic, has been newly empowered.

He returned to government more confident in his revanchist vision for the American economy, more dismissive of his critics, and with more than a dozen trade-related executive orders already drafted, many of which the president has since signed.Mr.

Trump also came back to Washington more determined to finally realize the trade views he has held for decades, that an unfair trading system was ripping America off and needed to be radically changed....