Peter Navarro - In Trump Time: A Journal of Americas Plague Year

Also by Peter Navarro:

THE COMING CHINA WARS
Where They Will Be Fought, How They Can Be Won

DEATH BY CHINA
Confronting the DragonA Global Call to Action

CROUCHING TIGER
What Chinas Militarism Means for the World

To a helluva broad, Evelyn Littlejohn.
May she rest in peace.

Copyright 2021 by Peter Navarro

Cover design by Timothy Shaner

Jacket and endpaper photography: Official White House photos courtesy of Peter Navarro

Cover copyright 2021 by All Seasons Press

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All Seasons Press
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St. Petersburg, FL 33707

F IRST E DITION: O CTOBER 2021

Interior design by Timothy Shaner

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBNs: 978-1-7374785-0-8 (hardcover), 978-1-7374785-1-5 (ebook)

Printed in Canada

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Trump Timephrasal noun, idiom
/trmp/ /tam/

To implement a government policy or action as quickly as possible
Example:A vaccine to fight the deadly virus from Communist China was developed in Trump Time.

The age of the presidency of Donald Trump
Example:Americas economy was unusually strong during Trump Time.

Its the day before the New Hampshire primary, and the Boss is up in the Granite State trolling the Democrats. The West Wing feels a bit to me like the ballroom on the Titanic as the coronavirus spreads. Theres no question in my mind that this is going to hit hard. Its going to go on for a long time. It will be an existential threat both to the country and to the administration if its not handled properly.

Peter Navarro, journal entry, February 10, 2020

CONTENTS

Its human to lie. Most of the time we cant even be honest with ourselves.

A KIRA K UROSAWA , R ASHOMON

C onventional media wisdom has it that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election because of two simple mistakes. When bad luck and trouble hit America in the form of a deadly virus from Communist China, he failed to manage the pandemic properly. This put a low, hard ceiling on the presidents approval rating.

The media also claimed Americas first Twitter president made a daily habit of alienating just about everybody outside his core deplorables base. So, in a political climate where Americans were already way over their emotional pandemic edge, it was sayonara to suburban soccer moms, adios to Hispanics, and bye-bye birdcage to anyone with their own personal pronouns.

Yet, this kind of CNN, paint-by-the-Never-Trump-numbers quickly falls apart when measured against the stunning closeness of a race that pre-election pollsters billed as a Biden landslide. It is precisely this photo-finish reality of the 2020 election that must lead us to examine a more complex set of reasons that might account for the outcome.

Of those who might conduct such an inquiry, I can modestly lay claim to a unique vantage point within the White House and often within the Oval Office itself. From these twin perches, I was able to see some things better than most and other things that might otherwise never have seen the light of day.

It is also true that you can literally count on three fingers the number of senior White House advisors who were with the president for the entire journeyfrom the winning 2016 campaign all the way to the end. On those three fingers are illegal immigration czar Stephen Miller, tweetmeister Dan Scavino, and yours trulyassistant to the president and director of the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy.

That I survived five long and tumultuous years at the presidents side is, in and of itself, an unlikely outcome. The deadpool on Peter Navarro when I first entered the White House was that I was an ivory tower rube unschooled in the ways of the Washington swamp who would last less than a month and be the first to go. Yet somehow, despite a surfeit of powerful enemies, I outlasted all who were out to get me.

In seeking a more textured view of history, my promise to you is this: I will hold nothing back and speak only the truth as I have seen it, at times as an active participant, at times simply as an observer.

In support of this promise I will rely heavily on a pour mmoire journal that I began keeping early in the administration on a daily basis. As a key witness to what I knew would be one of the most important historical periods of our time, I wanted to get that history exactly right. And the deeper I got into the fight, I also wanted accountability.

Historyand the American peopledeserve no less. So, as that great tower of a man I used to call the Boss might say, Lets go!

We are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply.

T HE D OOLITTLE R EPORT , 1954

J anuary 15, 2020, would be an unseasonably warm day in Washington, DC. It would also turn out to be both the beginning of the end of Donald J. Trumps presidency and Americas Third Day of Infamy.

On this fateful day, President Trump is surrounded on a stage in the East Wing of the White House by a high-ranking delegation of Chinese Communist Party officials, several members of his own trade team, and a Brutus who will betray this American Caesar almost exactly a year later, Vice President Michael Richard Pence. The president is on this stage to co-sign with Chinese vice premier Liu He in what is being billed, at least on the American side, as a historic phase one trade deal.

At this seemingly triumphant time for Donald Trumps America, a second term for the greatest jobs president, trade negotiator, and populist economic nationalist in White House history appears a near certainty. One key reason: on the growth-inducing policy wings of tax cuts, deregulation, strategic domination of the energy sector, increased defense spending, and a parade of new trade agreements, Americas forty-fifth president has built the strongest American economy in the last fifty years.

In this vibrant Trump economy, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is moving rapidly toward breaking the 30,000 barrier.

Best of all, politically, real wages are rising disproportionately for lower-income workers, and those benefitting include many of the very same factory workers who have been so important to tipping the scales for the president across the Rust Belt and its Blue Wall states in the 2016 election. It had been these Trump Democrats who had told their union bosses to go pound sand when they had been urged to vote for Crooked Hillary.