Trump taps Peter Navarro as top trade advisor

Washington — President-elect Donald Trump is bringing Peter Navarro, a former adviser who served prison time related to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, back to the White House for his second administration.

Navarro will serve as a senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, Trump announced on Truth Social, his social media website.

Trump wrote that the position “leverages Peter’s broad range of White House experience, while harnessing his extensive Policy analytic and Media skills.”

Navarro, a trade adviser during Trump's first term, was held in contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the House committee that investigated Jan. 6. Sentenced to four months in prison, he described his conviction as the “partisan weaponization of the judicial system.”

Shortly after being released, Navarro spoke on stage at the Republican National Convention in July, where he told the crowd that “I went to prison so you won’t have to."

Navarro, 75, has been a longtime critic of trade arrangements with China. After earning an economics doctorate from Harvard University, he worked as an economics and public policy professor at the University of California, Irvine. He ran for mayor of San Diego in 1992 and lost, only to launch other unsuccessful campaign efforts including a 1996 race for Congress as the Democratic nominee.

During Trump’s initial term, Navarro pushed aggressively for tariffs, while also playing down the risks of triggering a broader trade war. He also focused on counterfeited imports and even helped to assemble an infrastructure plan for Trump that never came to fruition.

Navarro often used fiery language that upset U.S. allies. In 2018, after a dispute between Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Navarro said “there’s a special place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad faith diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump and then tries to stab him in the back on the way out the door.”

Canadians were outraged, and Navarro later apologized.

Trump also announced that he asked Michael Whatley to serve as chairman of the Republican National Committee. Whatley ran the committee during the election along with Lara Trump, the wife of Trump’s son Eric.

Trump chose Daniel Driscoll as Army secretary, Jared Isaacman as NASA administrator and Adam Boehler as special presidential envoy for hostage affairs.

Isaacson, 41, is a tech billionaire who bought a series of spaceflights from Elon Musk’s SpaceX and conducted the first private spacewalk.

He has also reserved two more flights with SpaceX, including as the commander of the first crew that will ride SpaceX’s mega rocket Starship, still in test flights out of Texas.

Isaacman said he was honored to be nominated.

“Having been fortunate to see our amazing planet from space, I am passionate about America leading the most incredible adventure in human history,” he said via X.

NASA’s current administrator, Bill Nelson, 82, a former U.S. Senator from Florida, also has spaceflight experience. He was on the space shuttle flight right before the Challenger accident in January 1986, flying as a congressman. President Joe Biden appointed Nelson to the space agency’s top job in 2021.

Copyright Associated Press