GOLDSBORO — When the Trump/Vance bus stopped in Goldsboro two weeks ago, more than a half dozen Republican politicians and former members of the Trump administration spoke to the assembled crowd, giving brief speeches.
Each speaker was given a three-minute time limit. There was no question-and-answer period.
That didn’t stop one member of the audience from speaking up, however.
As Peter Navarro entered his ninth minute of speaking, and the former deputy assistant to the president was clearly winding down, a MAGA-clad listener shouted from the third row.
“Before you go, can I just ask you one thing?”
Navarro nodded slowly.
“Well, I’m going to answer that,” he said. “I think I know what you’re going to ask me. Because there’s only two things people always say. I spent four years in the White House doing all sorts of stuff — creating jobs. During the pandemic, I was saving lives, and I grew up in public. But the only thing people want to know: Do I have a tattoo, and what’s it like in prison?”
The 75-year-old Navarro is a Harvard-educated economist. While the other passengers on the Trump bus dressed in politician casual — bold-colored polo shirts, jeans and bright smiles — Navarro wore a suit, tie and dour frown. Don’t let the background and wardrobe fool you, though: This is no mild-mannered bean counter.
Navarro served a four-month prison sentence earlier this year for contempt of Congress after he refused to comply with a subpoena to testify in the Jan. 6 investigation. After being released from a federal prison in Miami in July, Navarro hopped a flight to Milwaukee and spoke at the Republican National Convention that night, showing no remorse as he railed against “Biden’s department of injustice”.
Prior to becoming the first senior Trump official to serve time behind bars for the 2021 attack on the Capitol, Navarro had built a reputation as the White House official most willing to mix it up. He was one of the main architects of Trump’s controversial tariffs against Chinese steel and other goods. The plan was decried by many fellow economists during Trump’s administration, but the tariffs remained through Biden’s presidency. Now, Navarro is one of the forces behind Trump’s plans to make much more aggressive use of tariffs if elected again.
“I worked my way through grad school managing a small furniture store,” Navarro said. “And every year, I’d come down to High Point because it was the furniture capital of the world.”
Navarro blamed trade policy and Chinese knockoffs for the damage they did to the High Point furniture market.
“What they did in North Carolina was a sin,” he said. “They took us apart.”
Navarro said that Trump’s tariffs were “the first defense any president had every given this state.”
In addition to the impact of tariffs on the trade war, Navarro pointed out the tariffs also helped with a seemingly unrelated issue — one that has become a main topic of argument during this year’s campaign.
“I was in the Oval Office the day President Trump finally secured the border,” he said. “He tried to build a wall, and Congress got in our way. He tried to shut the border, and liberal Obama judges got in our way. It was tough. My boss calls me in, and I’m sitting there with a White House legal council.”
The question Navarro was posing to the president: “Can we put tariffs on Mexico? Can we threaten them with tariffs if they don’t shut the border?”
“So he does it,” Navarro recalled, “and the next day, everyone’s heads explode. ‘You can’t do that!” But 24 hours later, Mexico sent 20,000 troops to the border, and we cut the deal for the remain in Mexico policy.
“All it takes is a little brass knuckles and a little brains,” he concluded.
Of course, that’s the same combination that had Navarro spending the spring and early summer in a federal facility in South Florida.
Which brings us back to the two questions Peter Navarro always gets.
“Let me be honest,” he said, “if I showed you the tattoo, it would be X-rated, and there are kids here. So I’m not going to do that.”
Then the smile faded from Navarro’s face and the laughter died down in the room. “With respect to what it’s like in prison,” he said, “I want to say something really serious: I don’t want you to find out what prison is like. But if you let those SOBs back in, and you’re a Catholic, pro-life or you’re a parent going to a school board meeting, or you say you don’t want transgender people in women’s sports, and the FBI comes a-callin’ on people like you, then you could wind up in prison. If it happened to me, it can happen to you.”
