Peter Navarro of UC Irvine and the Trump White House Trades in Controversy

You are forgiven if, until only recently, you had forgotten that President Donald Trump’s cabinet includes the UC Irvine Paul Merage School of Business professor emeritus in economics/public policy.

For Peter Navarro, it was not for lack of trying that prevented him from becoming a household name earlier. Within the past two weeks, the 68-year-old was finally able to take victory laps on the cable-news speedway as the protectionist professor was credited with being the bug in Trump’s ear before the president ordered steel and aluminum tariffs on March 8.

There are many critics of the tariffs, some of whom are not only Republicans, but also members of the same Trump administration. Or ex-members, such as Gary Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs who had been Trump’s top economic adviser before resigning March 6 over his differences with the president on trade.

That now leaves an opening for Navarro, who spent a good portion of his recent media appearances downplaying any harm from tariffs to the economy.

For instance, while speaking with FOX Business’ Maria Bartiromo, Navarro estimated the tariffs would result in only a 1-cent rise in the price of a six-pack of beer and $45 more per passenger car. When asked about possible retaliation from countries slapped with tariffs, Navarro sounded much like his boss. “This whole idea that there’s a big downstream effect—it’s just part of the fake news that’s going to be put out to oppose these tariffs,” he told the Mornings With Maria host. “A penny for a six-pack of beer—that’s worth it to put Americans back to work in two industries that we need.”

These heady times for Navarro, like the professor’s nailed landing on the national stage, came out of nowhere. In the 1990s, he ran as a pro-environment, pro-slow-growth Democrat for mayor, city council, county supervisor and Congress (as the “Democrat Newt Gingrich Fears the Most!”)—and lost each race.

As an academic, Navarro was first known for writing investing-advice books, including 2001’s If It’s Raining in Brazil, Buy Starbucks: The Investor’s Guide to Profiting From News and Other Market-Moving Events. He became more prominent with the books he wrote about China’s rise as an America-crushing economic and/or military superpower, such as The Coming China Wars (2006), Death By China (2011, with co-author Greg Autry) and Crouching Tiger: What China’s Militarism Means for the World (2015).

I still recall the NPR interviews with Navarro, first to herald Death By China’s arrival in stores, and then when the same book was spun into a documentary narrated by Martin Sheen.

If we only knew what was to come.

Here is how the legend goes: As Trump was trying to separate his campaign from a laundry list of entrenched Republican politicians, he told Jared Kushner to do some research so the upstart candidate could speak more authoritatively about China. According to a Vanity Fair story by Washington Post reporter Sarah Ellison, Kushner went to Amazon and found the title Death By China. Trump’s son-in-law then called Navarro, who agreed to become the campaign’s sole economic adviser weeks before he ever met the candidate.

At that time and through to Navarro’s appointment in the early days of the administration as deputy director of the White House’s newly created Trade and Manufacturing Policy office, the professor was lambasted—and not just by the usual Trump-bashers. The National Review called Navarro “nutty,” and Forbes claimed he “didn’t know Econ 101 about trade.”

In a 2016 profile, the New Yorker’s Adam Davidson wrote, “Navarro’s views on trade and China are so radical . . . that, even with his assistance, I was unable to find another economist who fully agrees with them.”

His treatment by those in the inner Trump circle wasn’t much better . . . and vice versa. Navarro did have some early successes, getting the president to keep his campaign promises to pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and renegotiate NAFTA, but the academic’s brash style had him clashing with just about every White House senior staffer, Politico reported last summer. That piece portrayed Navarro as frequently stalking the West Wing at night and on weekends for chances to slip into the Oval Office to talk trade with the president. (I imagine him climbing over Omarosa to get there.)

Last fall, Navarro was effectively demoted by Chief of Staff John Kelly, whose reshuffling of the White House economics team made Cohn the protectionist professor’s new superior. The New York Times reported that Navarro soon became a missing man on invite lists for high-level trade meetings as well as Trump’s China trip. Crouching tiger, meet your hidden dragon.

Trump’s then-staff secretary Rob Porter is claimed by the Washington Post to have kept Navarro’s work from reaching the president, while also implying that the departure of the alleged wife beater (times two!) helped Navarro recapture that orange ear.

The Post reports that on Feb. 12, Trump summoned Navarro to the Oval Office to ask why the administration’s trade policy was not more aggressive. The president then called Kelly and had Navarro’s office moved out from under Cohn and restored to independence. As Navarro was being formally promoted from “deputy assistant” to “assistant to the president,” which would have given him the same footing as Cohn, had the latter not resigned, Trump proposed the tariffs, according to the Post.

That brought as much shade, if not more, to Navarro as it did to Trump. “In the stiff-headed Navarro world-view, free-trade talk is globaloney,” stated the Globe and Mail, Canada’s most widely read newspaper. “Canadian officials have long-shuddered at the nativist creed of the wiry and abrasive 68-year-old. And with good reason.”

Even those in lock-step with Trump immediately piled on. Cohn had been trying to get Trump to reconsider the tariffs before submitting his resignation, even arranging for a meeting with top American business executives who fear the move is disastrous. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson privately warned senior trade officials on March 6 that the tariffs could endanger the U.S. national security relationship with allies, the Post reports.

House Speaker Paul Ryan called on the president to reconsider the tariffs and even suggested legislation to block them. It is small wonder considering Harley-Davidson, whose Milwaukee headquarters are within the Wisconsin Republican’s district, has been threatened with retaliatory tariffs. “We are extremely worried about the consequences of a trade war and are urging the White House to not advance with this plan,” explained AshLee Strong, Ryan’s spokeswoman.

“I totally disagreed with that one staffer down there who is, in my opinion, misleading the president,” Senator Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican who chairs the Finance Committee, told reporters. “Navarro should know better.”

At least Breitbart News has Navarro’s back, applauding him for helping Trump stick with another trade-related campaign promise. It was to that right-wing outlet, which until recently had as its chairman Navarro’s former West Wing mate Steve Bannon, that the protectionist professor gave F’s to his critics, attacking the “hair on fire” reaction to the tariffs as the “biggest bunch of horse-puckey that you can imagine.”

One can imagine more horse puckey will come.