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Donald Trump has nominated Peter Navarro, a former aide who was jailed for contempt of Congress for storming the Capitol on January 6, to be a senior White House economic adviser.
President-elect on his social media platform, Truth Social announced that he would make Navarro his senior trade and manufacturing adviser to help “truly make American manufacturing great again.”
Navarro, a known China hawk, was a key White House adviser on Washington’s trade standoff with Beijing during Trump’s first presidency.
During this period, the US moved away from new trade deals to expand business abroad and instead focused on measures to bolster manufacturing and protect American workers.
“During my first term, few have been more effective and persistent than Peter in upholding two of my sacred rules: Buy American, Hire American,” Trump wrote on Wednesday.
“He helped me renegotiate unfair trade deals like Nafta and the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement (KORUS) and moved all my tariff and trade actions FAST…”
Trump said Navarro’s mission in his new role will be to “help successfully advance and communicate Trump’s manufacturing, tariff and trade agendas.”
Navarro spent four months in a federal prison in Miami after being convicted of refusing to comply with a subpoena from a congressional committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol.
During the 2023 trial, prosecutors said Navarro “chose loyalty” to Trump rather than obeying a subpoena from lawmakers. Navarro’s attorneys argued the state failed to prove the sales adviser “willfully” ignored the subpoena.
Even after Biden won the 2020 presidential election, Navarro remained a staunch public defender of Trump, continuing to claim that the vote was rigged and the victory stolen from him.
On Wednesday, Trump wrote that Navarro was “horribly treated by the deep state, or whatever you want to call it.”
