One of Donald Trump’s most trusted trade advisers has been so thoroughly frozen out that even people close to the president aren’t sure why he still shows up for work.
Peter Navarro, the White House senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, is the subject of a lengthy New Yorker profile detailing his role in both Trump administrations and portraying him as a “mad-professor hype man” for the president’s economic policies.
However, the article also suggests that Navarro’s stints in the White House—between which he was jailed for four months for contempt of Congress after refusing to comply with a subpoena from the Jan. 6 House select committee—have been marked by “years of large and small humiliations.”
These included being excluded from key meetings during Trump’s first term, left off the central government task force during the COVID-19 pandemic, and frequently having his calls go unanswered.
The humiliation for Navarro—widely seen as the architect of Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, which sent global markets into turmoil—has continued during his second term in the White House.
In April, The Wall Street Journal reported that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick waited until Navarro left the Oval Office before sneaking in to urge Trump to pause most of his reciprocal tariffs for 90 days.
A Trump administration source told The New Yorker that the tariff reversal underscored just how “completely irrelevant” Navarro has become.
“I don’t know why he still goes to work, or if he even knows how boxed out he is. His life is a fiction. He’s not a player at all. He takes meetings about steel, that’s pretty much it,” the source said. “The president blames Peter for the Liberation Day rollout.”
Navarro denied there is any rift between himself, Bessent, Lutnick, and Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, telling the magazine that they “work beautifully together” and that “any disagreements are at the margin, not about direction. One band, one sound.”
He added that anonymous sources have “always sought to marginalize my role.”
In a statement, a White House spokesperson called Navarro “an integral asset to President Trump’s trade and economic team.”
Elsewhere in the profile, Navarro declined to disclose how he calculated the Liberation Day tariffs, which imposed import taxes as high as 97 percent on some of the U.S.’s biggest trading partners.
“What happens in the White House Situation Room stays in the White House Situation Room,” Navarro told The New Yorker.
