Exclusive: Peter Navarro Exposes the China Apologists Inside The Trump Administration
Navarro explains how Jared Kushner & Steven Mnuchin went soft on China
Emerald Robinson
Sep 5
Note: Peter Navarro served as the Assistant to the President for Trade and Manufacturing Policy in the Trump White House. This article is adapted from his new book Taking Back Trump’s America: Why We Lost the White House and How We’ll Win It Back (Bombardier).
It is not like Jared Kushner is hiding what he did. He openly boasts about how he — and a coterie of unregistered foreign lobbyists from Wall Street — effectively scuttled successful trade negotiations with Communist China.
In Kushner’s view, the compromise “Phase One” trade deal signed by President Trump with Communist China in January 2020 in the East Wing of the White House was a “massive victory” for America. In fact, this deal — which very quickly and derisively became known as the “Skinny Deal” — was a pale shadow of the one the United States Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and I had worked so hard on. And, as I sternly warned at that time, even with this Skinny Deal, the Communist Chinese would never meet their obligations — and they never did.
The problem that Lighthizer and I always faced in the West Wing trying to take a tough trade position — whether on China or NAFTA or whatever — was the back channeling of both Jared Kushner and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. The Kushner-Mnuchin backchanneling was (in part) with their Wall Street handlers like Steve Schwarzman and John Thornton. And with Communist China, both Kushner and Mnuchin would directly contact the Chinese negotiators themselves, often without disclosing their communications in a timely way to Lighthizer, myself, or the other member of the West Wing’s trade team, Wilbur Ross.
The practical result of this Kushner-Mnuchin backchanneling was to severely weaken our negotiating positions. This was true whether it was with the Chinese on tariffs, or with the Mexicans or Canadians on NAFTA or steel tariffs.
To be clear here, the Trump White House had only one Trade Representative confirmed by the Senate — and only one Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy in the White House. Trade was our turf, and Lighthizer should have been both the unquestioned czar and quarterback leading the Trump show. Yet Mnuchin and Kushner not only constantly intruded on the trade issue — they both thought they had more authority on this issue than either Lighthizer or myself, as well as Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross.
Just think about such Kushner-Mnuchin backchanneling for a minute: a rug merchant like BlackRock’s Steve Schwarzman (who they regularly used as an intermediary) stood to gain tens of billions of dollars with his company’s investments in Communist China if he could simply stop Donald Trump from imposing tough tariffs on the Chinese.
Yet, this is one of the main guys that Kushner and Mnuchin relied on.
In fact, such backchanneling is obscene on his face. What these Wall Street “go-betweens” did seems to be the very definition of foreign lobbying. Yet I have never seen people like Steve Schwartzman or Larry Fink or John Thorton register as foreign lobbyists as the law would seemingly dictate.
Just why were Mnuchin and Kushner so adamant about blocking a tough China policy? After battling these two Wall Street Transactionalists for four full years in the White House, and then seeing each of them cash in on their connections after their government service (and I use the term “service” loosely) it is pretty damn clear these New York liberals were simply building their own networks of potential foreign investors for the next stages of their entrepreneurial lives — and doing so by selling out American jobs.
The other thing that was so unsettling about Kushner was his naïve bromance with Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State for Richard Nixon. Kushner openly confesses that he “leaned on [the] wisdom, knowledge, and graciousness” of Kissinger who was, in truth, a senile old man who long ago sold his soul to the Chinese Communist devil — and who sold out American workers and American national security interests in the process.
History needs to be clear about this: after helping Nixon open Communist China during the Nixon years (while abandoning South Vietnam), Kissinger proceeded to make a large fortune helping the Communists gain footholds and inroads into the US economy and political system. Perhaps that is the most important lesson Kushner took away from Kissinger — how to successfully grift after government life.
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Why We Lost the White House’: Former Trump Adviser Peter Navarro ‘Pulls No Punches’ in New Book
By Frank Fang and Steve Lance September 8, 2022 Updated: September 8, 2022biggersmaller Print
Former White House aide Peter Navarro said bad personnel choices doomed the Trump administration.
“I call it the Achilles’ heel of the boss. I love the boss despite these bad personnel. He’s the best president we’ve ever had,” Navarro said, referring to Donald Trump, during a recent interview on the “Capitol Report” program on NTD News, a sister media outlet of The Epoch Times.
He added that Trump’s 2020 presidential election campaign must not be the “prologue” of a potential 2024 run for the presidency.
Navarro was sharing what he wrote in his new book, “Taking Back Trump’s America: Why We Lost the White House and How We’ll Win,” which is set to be published on Sept. 20.
In his book, Navarro wrote about how Trump, soon after becoming elected, began surrounding himself with “globalists, Never-Trump Republicans, wild-eyed [House] Freedom Caucus nut jobs,” and “Wall Street transactionalists,” who would “come to plant so many poisonous Bad Policy Trees” during his administration.
Navarro, who said he was one of three senior advisers that stayed with Trump from the 2016 campaign until the transition of power, added that he “pulls no punches” in his book when commenting on Trump’s mistakes in personnel choices.
During the interview, Navarro named Rex Tillerson and Jim Mattis, Trump’s first secretary of state and secretary of defense, respectively, as examples of Trump’s “stupid choices” in what would become part of what he called a “Cabinet of Clowns.”
According to his book, Tillerson and Mattis had opposed Trump’s effort to renegotiate a trade deal with South Korea, on the grounds that doing so could upset either “the delicate military calculus” or “diplomatic alliance” between the two nations.
Despite their opposition, Trump and then-Korean President Moon Jae-in signed a revised free trade agreement in September 2018, which was welcomed by U.S. automakers and meat exporters.
Trump had said the old agreement, which was approved by Congress in 2011 and went into effect the following year, was a “horrible deal” made by Hillary Clinton, who promoted the final version of the trade pact as secretary of state under the Obama administration.
According to the U.S. Trade Office, the U.S. trade deficit with South Korea increased from $16.7 billion in 2012 to $27.7 billion in 2016.
China
One of the “Never-Trumpers” Navarro mentioned in his book was Steven Mnuchin, former secretary of the treasury under the Trump administration.
Navarro said Mnuchin and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, “single-handedly destroyed” Trump’s China policy “with their back dealings with Wall Street and the Communist Chinese themselves.”
“They did it for simply to feather their own nests,” Navarro said.
In his book, Navarro wrote that Mnuchin “always refused” when Trump asked his treasury secretary to label China as a currency manipulator. Mnuchin eventually agreed to slap such a label on China on Aug. 5, 2019.
However, Navarro said the timing was too late. He explained in his book that if Mnuchin had agreed to make the designation against China in January 2017, it would “have struck right at the heart of one of the worst abuses of Communist China,” and it would have given U.S. officials “an invaluable bargaining chip for the China trade negotiations.”
The U.S. Treasury Department removed the designation on Jan. 13, 2020, two days before Trump and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He signed a phase-one trade deal.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) didn’t fulfill its promises under the trade deal. According to the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), China bought only 57 percent of the U.S. exports it had promised to buy.
“The reality of that deal was the skinny deal. That’s what it was,” Navarro told NTD. “It was a pale shadow of what it should have done.”
Navarro said Kushner was at fault for the bad trade deal.
“He was double-dealing with Steve Schwarzman on Wall Street and John Thornton, these guys, along with the Chinese Communist Party negotiators, behind the backs of me and [former U.S. Trade Representative Robert] Lighthizer, and even the president to come up with this bad deal,” Navarro said.
Schwarzman is the chief executive officer of U.S.-based investment firm The Blackstone Group, and Thornton is the executive chairman of Canada-based mining company Barrick Gold and a former Goldman Sachs president.
If Trump were to become president again, Navarro suggested the United States should decouple from China.
“I can assure you one of the first things he’s going to do … is lockout tariffs on Communist China,” Navarro said. “We’ll just cut the cord from them because every dollar we pay at Walmart for made-in-China, made-in-Communist-China product, it goes into their military war machine to take out Taiwan.”
“I think it’s really important if we’re going to win back the White House 2024, that we govern over the next four years in a way which gets things done,” Navarro continued. “Time is precious, when you’re in the White House, as we learned, and there were things we left on the table that I wish we hadn’t.”
The Epoch Times has reached out to Mattis, Mnuchin, Kushner, Schwarzman, and Thornton for comment.
