Opinion | Elon Musk isn’t the Trump adviser Canadians should fear the most. This man is March 1, 2025 https://www.thestar.com/opinion/con...cle_c2727610-f48b-11ef-8e1f-4b8dcefa5d62.html Peter Navarro speaks before Republican then-presidential nominee Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Greensboro, N.C. in Oct. 2024. Julia Demaree Nikhinson AP By Justin Ling Contributing Columnist Justin Ling is an independent investigative journalist based in Montreal and a contributing columnist for the Star. Reach him by email: hello@justinling.ca A month of escalating threats emanating from the White House has left Canada shocked. From President Donald Trump’s initial vow to impose stiff across-the-board tariffs to the menacing invitations that Canada surrender its sovereignty altogether, Canadians have been caught off guard. But if you’re familiar with the work of Peter Navarro, none of this should have been a surprise. Though hardly a household name, Navarro is arguably the most important person in Trump’s White House, the president excepted. While the media has obsessed over the destructive antics of billionaire Elon Musk, Navarro’s position is both more permanent and influential. He has been by the president’s side since the beginning of Trump’s political career, and he is the driving force behind Trump’s efforts to wreck America’s trade, security, and diplomatic alliances. I’ve followed Navarro’s rise at the heart of the Make America Great Again movement since the first Trump administration, and I’ve pored over his interviews, reports, and numerous books. Canada, and the rest of the world, needs to look past his innocuous title — senior counsellor for trade and manufacturing — and recognize Navarro for what he is: A quack economist dead-set on shaking down the world. If Canadians do recognize Navarro’s weathered face and gravelly voice, they would be forgiven for mistaking him for a low-rent TV pundit. Or they perhaps heard that Navarro has been, according to the Financial Times, pushing to boot Canada from the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partnership. After the story was published, Navarro rushed to a microphone to insist that the story was inaccurate, insisting “we would never ever jeopardize our national security … with allies like Canada.” On Thursday, The Telegraph reported that Navarro floated unilaterally redrawing the U.S-Canada border. Sources told the British paper that Canadian negotiators had pulled out of talks until Trump’s other economic and trade appointees are settled into their jobs. But those kinds of threats are exactly Navarro’s modus operandi. Navarro has spent more than a decade growing increasingly certain that nothing is off the table in the name of lowering America’s trade deficit. Writing in 2022, Navarro even counselled the president that he should “never sacrifice America’s trade policy and the factories of Ohio or Michigan or Pennsylvania on the altar of national security goals.” Navarro’s path to becoming one of the most trusted and influential advisers to the president — not just his chief protectionist, but a hawk on broader policy, personnel, and politics — is a fairly simple story. When Trump was first running for office in 2016, his team was searching far and wide for advisers. According to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and erstwhile consigliere, he discovered Navarro’s books while searching for anti-China texts on Amazon, and came across Navarro’s Death by China. Navarro joined the Trump campaign, and then the administration. Before Trump was even inaugurated in 2016, Navarro began secret talks with Mexico to sketch out a new continental trade deal. This new Free Trade Agreement would mandate that a huge amount of manufacturing must take place in America. He planned to surprise Canada with this new deal. If Ottawa refused to sign, he wanted Trump to make “the very real, credible threat that we would simply withdraw from NAFTA entirely,” Navarro wrote in his book “Taking Back Trump’s America.” Navarro was, luckily, marginalized in those negotiations in favour of more moderate figures who wanted to get a real deal signed. Still, it’s illustrative of his approach to international affairs. A former Canadian official who dealt with Navarro, speaking on background, warns of his influence and intent, calling him “a zealot” who “knows how to please Trump with non-stop flattery and aggression against anyone who disagrees with him in public and private.” Navarro came away from the ordeal unimpressed with Canada, writing: “The only diplomats who were more treacherous and disingenuous than the Canadians were the Communist Chinese.” It was Navarro who wrote the executive order slapping tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum in 2018 — and he wanted to keep those tariffs in place even after the USMCA deal was signed. The “sacrifice of the steel and aluminum tariffs,” Navarro writes, “likely cost us swing blue-collar votes in several key battleground states where the alleged Biden victory was very narrow.” Navarro, like many Trump acolytes, came to believe that Trump won the 2020 election. He wrote a breathless, and delusional, report alleging that the election was stolen — thanks, in part, to a “shadowy” Toronto-based voting machine company. After adherents to this conspiracy theory tried to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, Navarro was called to testify before a congressional committee studying the attempted coup. Navarro refused, earning him a conviction for contempt of Congress and four months in prison. He was released in July of last year. All of this made him a more loyal devotee to Trump. His 2022 book is rife with direct appeals to Trump, suggesting strategy, policy, and staffing. Trump, in his new administration, heeded much of that advice. Last year, Navarro published “The New MAGA Deal,” a road map for a second Trump administration. The book previews much of the aggressive power plays envisioned in Project 2025, the plan to fire career civil servants and install Trump loyalists in order to carry out a radical agenda to centralize power and remake America in Trump’s image. Navarro translated those ambitious plans into a series of pamphlet-sized chapters about how Trump can make it happen. The foreword of the book, written by Trump whisperer Steve Bannon, lauds Navarro as “the architect of the Trump campaign’s intellectual foundation on trade, manufacturing, and all things China.” Bannon, who maintains enormous influence on Trump’s team from outside the White House, declares in the book that this agenda will happen in “Trump Time — not tomorrow but today, not later but now, not talk but action.” Now that Trump and Navarro are back in the White House, they’re putting those plans into action with gusto. Navarro and Trump have excoriated Canada, baselessly, for letting in a tsunami of drugs, terrorists, and criminals into America. And the solution is, conveniently, those exact tariffs which Navarro believed could have helped Trump win the 2020 election. Trump now declares “tariff” his favourite word in the dictionary. As for Navarro’s most recent threat, it is exceedingly unlikely that America would — or even could — banish Canada from the Five Eyes partnership. Canada is too integral to the intelligence collection, and booting the Communications Security Establishment would mean hobbling all the other four eyes from surveilling threats and monitoring adversaries. A Canadian defence official told me that Navarro’s threats came as a surprise to them. Even if this particular threat is unlikely to come to fruition, we should recognize Navarro as an acute risk to Canada. That means trying to, in equal measure, both win him over and thwart him. We must start by recognizing the grievance which primarily motivates him: China. Navarro has written a slew of books warning of the threat of a rising and bellicose Beijing. Many of those criticisms, as it happens, were quite prescient and perfectly legitimate. Given that Canada has been targeted by Beijing repeatedly, if we are to deal with the problem posed by Navarro’s influence on Trump we can and should show how serious we are about containing the threat of a rising and bellicose Beijing. At the same time, we should try to marginalize Navarro as best we can. Pro-trade Republicans are already trying to dilute his influence on the president, per the Wall Street Journal. Trudeau, on Thursday, confirmed that Canada isn’t even trying to negotiate with Washington right now — good. But all of this will only moderate Navarro’s protectionist influence, not avert it completely. That’s why we need to anticipate where he is likely to go, and prepare for it. We need to target the exact manufacturing industry that Navarro thinks he’s helping. We need to illustrate how cross-border trade helps manufacturing, agriculture, tourism, and everything in-between. We need to push Trump to the negotiating table to brainstorm ideas on how we can boost productivity on both sides of the border — and maybe find a trade equilibrium in the process. And we need to do all of that in conjunction with Mexico, Europe, Japan, and every other nation facing the same beggar-thy-neighbour tactics beloved by Navarro. The old system of American democracy is now functionally in hibernation — perhaps it is dead for good. Congress does not control the purse strings, the courts don’t validate laws, tribunals don’t adjudicate fair trade, and rules do not govern international relations. Geopolitics is now all about the art of the deal — and Canada needs to start dealing seriously.
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MAGA consists of folks that are Traditional Centrists. There is no such thing as a MAGA right. MAGA is pro-American and America First embracing traditional and conservative values.