From the Kitchen Table: The Duffys - Peter Navarro: A Change Of Direction In The Conservative Moment
Episode Date: November 6, 2021This week, Sean & Rachel bring former Assistant to the President and Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy under the Trump Administration, Peter Navarro, to the Kitchen Table to... discuss his new book, In Trump Time, A Journal of America’s Plague Year. Peter reveals why he believes China is America's biggest threat, and having a stable economy is the only way to fight that threat. Later, he shares who the key players were in the Trump Administration and why he remained one of only three White House officials by the President's side from the 2016 campaign to the end of his first term in office. Follow Sean and Rachel on Twitter: @SeanDuffyWI & @RCamposDuffy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Hey, everyone. Welcome to From the Kitchen Table. I'm your host, Sean Duffy, along with
my co-host of the podcast and my partner in life, Rachel Campos Duffy.
Thank you, Sean. I'm really excited about our podcast today because someone's joining us at the kitchen
table that we know well, but better yet, America knows well.
He's got a little bit behind the scenes doing a little magic, but it's Peter Navarro.
Peter Navarro holds a PhD in economics from Harvard University.
As you know, Sean, he was also-
I like to say it's Harvard.
He went to Harvard.
He's a Harvard guy.
He's a doctor.
Did you know, Sean, he was also- I like to say it's Harvard.
He went to Harvard.
He's a Harvard guy.
He's a doctor.
He's a professor emeritus of economics and public policy at the University of California,
Irvine.
He knows a lot about China.
He's written three books on China and the threat from China.
And of course, we all know that he was a very close personal advisor to the Trump administration.
And after that time, he now is just coming out with a book about in Trump time, a Journal of America's Plague Year. And I don't think anyone knows better what
was happening inside the Trump White House, knowing all the players and in almost all the
conversations than Peter Navarro. So, Peter, welcome to From the Kitchen Table. Thank you
for joining us on our podcast. So honored. My two favorite MAGA folks from the
great state of Wisconsin. You folks are awesome. And Sean, by the way, you have a nice cameo
in the In Trump Time book that refers to our trials and travails on the Reciprocal Trade Act.
That's right. We saw that. Yeah, we did.
We did great work when you were still in D.C., Sean.
And I'm so, so proud of Rachel for the Fox and Friends that she's doing.
And I always love her appearances on primetime.
A little jolt of Java in the evening.
My favorite time hosting primetime was when I had you on, Peter.
It really is.
How'd that go?
We'll just talk about that because actually you've been vindicated from that appearance that the liberals tried to attack both you and I on.
And we'll get to that because I first want to talk about the title of your book
in Trump time, because, boy, we could use some Trump time with supply chain, some Trump time
on dealing with the border, on dealing with inflation, crime, crime, everything.
If we could do things in Trump time during the Biden administration, things would be going better. I actually told on Fox and Friends, I told the viewers, I wish everybody would go on paternity leave
in that administration. And I actually said this, Peter. I said, let's put Peter and Trump
and the whole team back together, put the band back together. We'd solve all these problems.
And so the question I want to ask you, Peter, is because I saw this and you saw this working inside of government. Government is not business. It works at a
completely different speed with the bureaucracy and the deep state and the naysayers where business
decisions can be made and things can happen fast. So tell us about the title In Trump Time and what
that means and what the book is about. Well, Sean, Rachel, it's a term I coined
early in the administration. I am one of only, think about this, I'm one of only three senior
White House officials who actually was with the president all the way from the campaign,
where I was the economic advisor all the way to the end, right? So, you know, I come into the administration early in
2017 and start trying to implement the boss's agenda primarily through executive orders. And
I find myself chairing these meetings with a bunch of career bureaucrats from all these different
agencies. And they're telling me this and that, and it's going to take us, no, no, no, no, no,
no. And just pops out of my mouth. We're doing it in Trump
time, which is to say as fast as possible. So get it done. So that became the culture
and ethos of the administration. And by the time it was really important, particularly in the plague
year, the subtitle of the In Trump Time book is my journal of the plague year. And so when I got thrust into the role from from trade advisors who effectively the quartermaster in the war against the pandemic, we had to move things really fast.
Ventilators, testing equipment. There's a great story in the book.
I call it you remember the movie, The Italian Job.
Well, I had the Italian swab job where we were able to actually move a million swabs that were stuck in Italy back to the U.S. in 72 hours using a combination of Pentagon planes and FedEx.
That's the kind of stuff we would do, like stand up ventilator
factories in 17 days. So but it's also, Sean and Rachel, the in Trump time is also a double
entendre for the literati because it describes America in the age of Trump and more importantly,
Trump ism, which is which which which you and I believe that the middle America is a blue collar manufacturing based America that strives for rising real wages and prosperity for their families and security for the country.
And that, to me, is is in Trump time and in the age of Trump is absolutely.
And it was a big shift, because if you recall, Joe Biden, when he was vice president, as well as Barack Obama, all tried to say, listen, this is the new normal.
We don't produce things here in America. Everything is produced there.
And you guys got to just learn to code and, you know, stop working.
In fact, you know, we can't have factories. We can't, you know, do our own energy.
We have to import everything. This was a new shift and it was it was a new way of looking at things, not just because the Democrats were wrong, but I think a lot of Republicans were believing that about America as well.
long for, you know, when you and Trump and, you know, your team was in power to start seeing the results of that, to start seeing, I mean, we live in a manufacturing town in Wausau, Wisconsin.
When we lived there, I mean, we could see the changes within a couple of years. Jobs were
coming back. People were getting back to work. The economy was getting better. These things did happen quite quickly.
Yeah. And I love it when Obama just made so much fun of this, like Obama in 2016,
when he was stumping for Hillary scoffs, he says, Trump's going to need a magic wand to bring back those manufacturing jobs. And I love it because like they lost, Obama, Biden lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs. And so we created over half a million. So I
just would love to keep saying that over and over that that and Obama's, you know, let them eat
arugula kind of thing was kind of what defined the administration. But you make a great point. See, Obama, Biden, that new normal, people forget about that. That new normal was this like
low growth, stagnant wages reality that we were supposed just supposed to live with. And the whole
Obama Biden economic plan was to double our national debt from 10 trillion to 20 trillion Keynesian spending just
to just to basically tread water and so we come along it's like no no no no we're going to make
all these structural changes it's it's tax cuts to bring investment on shore it's deregulation it's
it's energy independence and most of all yes the the fair trade so that our workers will be defended against the predators like China or competition.
It was it was a beautiful thing. We constantly beat expectations.
that I talk about in the In Trump Time book in chapter one, where we're sitting with the Chinese signing that skinny trade deal. The president was at the height of his game,
and everybody figured he was a lock for reelection. And then from there, things get very,
very complicated quickly with Fauci, who, by the way, belongs in jail with the communist
Chinese, who the book makes the very strong unequivocal case that this was an attack by
the Chinese continues to be an attack. I think that's a really good point. And I want to I know
we're going to talk about Fauci and the pandemic in a second, but the philosophy, which is why I think that Trump had you in the administration from before election to
the very last day, is because you agree with the philosophy is we want to bring jobs back
to America.
We want to create more jobs in America.
We want to make things in America.
And that's one important prong.
But the other important prong is that by doing that, we're fighting and pushing back against China, which is a rising threat. And as we look at the supply chain crises now,
and the fact that I think most Americans see there's so much stuff we don't make in America.
And I don't think they really realize it until we have some medicine shelves that are going empty
and food shelves, grocery store shelves that are going empty,
Christmas presents that you can't get. You can't get furniture because the supply chain is somewhere other than America. And so I guess when you look at the success
of the administration, which by the way, wasn't over. I mean, I think to your point,
we were starting to taste the success of what the administration was doing to push back against China and make things here again until until the Chinese unleashed that virus.
And then until Biden takes over. So can you give me your take on China and jobs and now where Biden is taking us with with his policies and the risks that you see?
risks that you see? Well, besides the phrase in Trump time, I think the other thing that I said,
like over and over again, which was a theme of our administration was economic security is national security. The previous administrations were always willing to sacrifice. Yeah,
they were always willing to sacrifice our jobs and our economic security on the altar of national security.
It was like, no, no, no, James Mattis. No, no, no. Tell us.
And if you if you give up our economic security, you basically give up our national security as well.
So to your point, Sean, it's like you can have one of two worlds.
You can have your manufacturing here.
And if you do that, you'll also have your supply chains here because supply chains have to be close to manufacturing.
If you do that, you have resilient supply chains.
If you instead go with the corporate globalist approach of offshoring our jobs to make a few extra pennies on the slave labor, the sweatshops of Asia and China,
you will then make your supply chains fragile at best and in a pandemic broken at worst.
So the genius of Donald Trump going back to the 80s when he was talking about how we lost our auto industry to the Japanese.
He understood that.
He understood that if you had your factories here, not only would that provide good paying jobs for blue collar workers, many of them without the luxury of a college education,
but that we would also be secure in terms of our national security. If those
factories were needed to do, as in World War II, more from autos to tanks, we could do that.
And one of the things I talk about in the interim time book, one of the successes,
I was able to get an executive order signed to bring our essential
medicines back on shore. But the problem is that China has taken so much out of us since 2001,
when it joined the World Trade Organization. It's a relentless journey we have to continue to make
every day to bring our jobs back home. And of course,
the new regime has no intention or clue about why we need to do that.
I agree with all that. Wait right there. We'll have more of this conversation next.
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I want to switch gears here because I want to talk about Fauci.
I'm obsessed.
here because I want to talk about Fauci. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed with how the media tried to build him up as if he was some sort of almost religious figure, Peter, like he was some sort of
saint. And one of the people who was on to Fauci very early was Dr. Navarro. So tell us what you were seeing very early on inside the White House with Fauci,
some of the bad decisions that made you go, maybe he's not the God that they put him on this
pedestal for us to believe. Well, the top line here, a key mission in the In Trump Time book
is to get Fauci in an orange jumpsuit. And let me make the case. The first time I would meet Fauci, I didn't know who he was, right? He was just a guy, right?
So let me take you as I do. You didn't know he was an icon on the left because of his days with
AIDS and all that. No idea. Didn't didn't know him from from from Adam or Eve, right? I just walk into the situation room on
January 28, 2020. I can remember like it was yesterday. President Trump had dispatched me
to the sit room to make the case and bring the task force on side with his decision to pull the flights down from China, right? So this is the
dawn of the pandemic. There's three people in the White House at that point who were taking the
pandemic seriously, the president, myself, and the National Security Advisor, Robert O'Brien.
So I get in there and I know I'm going to get pushed back from Mulvaney at the end of the table, from Pompeo's hack at my left shoulder, from the Orville Redenbacher doppelganger and the bumbling Robert Redfield and from Azar.
I knew that. But like Sean Rachel, within a nanosecond, I'm in a violent argument with this little guy with little round glasses sitting across the table from me.
And like Flo Behr's parrot, he just keeps saying
travel bans don't work. And I'm thinking like Butch the Sundance, like, who is this guy? Right.
And it's like, finally, I say to him, I say, dude, actually said, dude, do him. I said, dude,
you mean if there's 20,000 Chinese nationals flying every day into Kennedy and O'Hare and LAX,
and some of them are lit up like Christmas trees with the Wuhan virus,
you want to let them keep coming in here?
Like, what is wrong with you?
And at that point, I knew two things.
I knew this guy thought he was smarter than he was, which is always dangerous.
But I also knew viscerally that this guy was going to hurt both the country and the president.
But here's the most important thing. Do you think it was because he was compromised? I mean,
what is it? Why would he? He can't possibly do that, Dom. I mean, that's common sense.
They have this virus. Why would we let them come in? I mean, it's just common sense.
Here's I think the most important thing I'll
ever tell you about Fauci. He lied to Congress, lied to Rand Paul. For that alone, he should be
in an orange jumpsuit. But the big lie is the lie of omission that I tell about in the In Trump
Time book. Here's the lie of omission. Let's think about this, Rachel. So what do we know at this
point? We did this on TV at one point. It's like we knew that Fauci knew the virus came from Wuhan. He knew it popped up within yards of the
Wuhan bioweapons lab, right? He knew but didn't tell us that he had funded gain-of-function
experiments at that Wuhan lab, which turned harmless bat viruses into human killers,
Wuhan lab, which turned harmless bat viruses into human killers, right? And he had been told specifically by a scientist, a prominent scientist, that that virus was genetically engineered.
The big lie of omission here was that he did not tell the president, the task force, or me
that that thing likely came from the lab. If he had done that,
Sean and Rachel, everything would have changed. Our entire strategy would have changed. We would
have borne down much harder on China. And so why? What was going on with him? I think he knew
at that point he was in the deepest of trouble. And the only choice he would have would be to
cover up that crime. And it was a crime. And what he did then, instead of telling us, instead of fulfilling his moral and ethical and an American responsibility, he doubled down.
He had this guy and I tell all this in the interim time book, this guy, Peter Daszak, who cut out orchestrates this campaign of deception to convince the world that somehow
this thing came from a bat cave and from nature rather than from the bioweapons lab that Fauci
he himself funded and authorized that dangerous research at. And to your point, Rachel,
my read of this guy is that he's both a narcissist and a sociopath.
I told the boss, I told him twice, fire this guy.
And I told him that early.
As soon as I met this guy, I found out who he was.
It's like, get him the hell out of this administration.
I don't blame the boss for not doing that.
And you asked me, like, what was behind the curtain there?
I was fighting everybody else.
Think about this, Sean and Rachel. You had behind Fauci supporting him, you had Azar,
you had Redfield, you had Collins, you had Hahn at the FDA. But here's the thing. I really hold
Mulvaney accountable for this as well, because Mulvaney simply didn't have the stones, as they say,
to take what his press team was telling him would be blowback if you fire St. Fauci.
My attitude was like Winston Churchill with Hitler. It's like strangle that puppy in its crib
because he's going to hurt America. I didn't prevail. The rest is history. But that Fauci belongs in an orange jumpsuit. And Rachel, you you've been all over this.
And we did a great segment on Fox on this. And we had the pioneers and the ones with arrows in their back.
You called him the father of the virus, the father of lies.
What you describe right there to me, that omission
at this really critical time, I mean, this is probably one of the most
important moments in American modern history is when this virus came. That omission is criminal.
But I think what's interesting, this goes back to, I think it was in April when Dr. Navarro said, listen, this guy is the father of the coronavirus or the Wuhan flu. And the media, the left-wing media lost their minds that Dr. Navarro would have said such a horrific thing.
to go out, whether it was the fake Russia collusion, you got to go to a couple of years to get the truth. But now with what you said, Peter, we're six months beyond that. And all of
a sudden, we all see that actually that is what Dr. Fauci did. Oh, yeah, you were over the target.
And that's what they do. And that's why what you said is so important. The press was going to-
Cover, cover, cover. Well, but also the press is going to go after and blame this virus on
Donald Trump, whether he fired Fauci or not.
It would have been better had had had the president taken Dr. Navarro's advice, fired Fauci, take in whatever, you know, lumps would have come with that and and. So you talked about, had Fauci been honest
and a fair player concerned about the health of the American people and the world, as opposed to
his own political hide, had we known that this was genetically modified? I remember you talking
about gain of function. To me, that was the first time I'd heard the phrase gain of function. You
were talking about this early. Had we known that this came from a bat, it was modified at the Wuhan lab, and whether
it was intentional or unintentional, this was spread. Could have our scientists been faster
in trying to contain it or to develop therapeutics to stop more people from dying or to get the
vaccine? Yeah. Could the course of history have been changed
had we known earlier that this was modified
and from the Wuhan lab?
And that the Chinese were responsible.
Yeah, that's exactly the point.
Remember what happened.
Because Fauci gave the Chinese communists cover
by propagating this from nature theory. It gave the Chinese time,
first of all, to bleach the wet market, to wipe out any evidence that you could prove that
it wasn't from there. And then more importantly, they went into the Wuhan lab and shredded all
the documents, removed everything digitally from the internet.
And actually, and this is pure communist Chinese, they actually made a number of the people who
work there who could have shed light on the genome disappear. Those people are either dead
or in a gulag somewhere. My point here is that, yes, if we had had a, we still don't have a precise
read of the original virus, right? If we had had that map at the dawn of the pandemic,
we could have taken a lot different kind of measures and gotten to a better, much better vaccine. I mean, look, the vaccine that
Trump did, and I'll tell you a little story about my role in that. It's February 9th, 2020. I tell
this in the In Trump Time book. I'm sitting in my office. Again, most people are like Pelosi,
de Blasio, Mnuchin in the White House. Nobody's taking this
thing seriously. And I'm sitting there writing memos with this wonderful character in the book,
Doc Hatfield. And I write this memo that says, look, if we act now, today, we can have a vaccine
by October or November. Now think about that. That wasn't a third of the time. That's
truly in Trump time. And we did hit that mark. But the same time I was writing that memo,
I would write a series of a dozen of these. I was saying clearly in the memos that this vaccine
was not the silver bullet. It was one of a suite of things that we would do.
And we knew that it would be leaky. We actually wrote that there would be mutations.
And my point is that if we had known if Fauci had come clean, we would have been able to develop a better vaccine quicker or as quickly,
as well as taking a lot of different countermeasures, because we would
have known the enemy we were up against. I mean, look, I'll give you one example here. It's like,
come summer, the conventional wisdom of scientists and virologists was this thing was going to
subside, right? It's like, oh, like the flu, right? But it didn't. And it didn't because it was
weaponized. And it was impervious to heat and humidity. And that took everybody by surprise.
So more people died. My point is that Fauci committed the biggest lie of omission in public
health history. He did it to cover his own butt. And a jail cell is too good for this guy.
I agree. And by the way, in China will never be held accountable because even though we all intuitively know.
I mean, I was saying this before, you know, I was like very suspicious about the Chinese and the and the virology lab being right there in Wuhan and everything else was so obvious.
But now the the evidence, as you say, has been wiped clean. And so China can say, well,
there's no evidence. And so therefore, even though we all know it's true, we can't hold
China accountable, or at least the world can't, the way China should be held accountable. That is
pure evil what they did, as evil as what Fauci did,
by not alerting the world about what had happened.
One of the things that got away from me during that last year,
and I talk about it in the Trump Time book,
is the executive order I drafted for the president
that would have created a national commission
like the one for the Kennedy assassination for Pearl Harbor for the BP oil spill.
And that commission would have been charged with a group of experts to determine the origins
of the virus, the costs of the virus, as well as whether China was using the virus to advance its geopolitical and military objectives.
And on that point, just as an aside, there's no question they were able to take Hong Kong because of the virus,
because they locked the protesters up in their apartment buildings rather than be out on the streets.
And that that presidential executive order, a commission, it still should be done today. But I dare say
there's a funny part in the In Trump Time book where I'm trying to sell this thing within the
White House. And Robert O'Brien takes one look at it. He goes, you know, this thing is so good,
I'm going to say it's my own idea. And it was like the ultimate compliment from O'Brien.
But the beauty of it from a political point of view, as I had written into it, that there would be an interim report two weeks out from the election.
And a lot of the theme of the In Trump Time book is how how the whole strategy of the Democrats was to to not blame Trump. And if you blame Trump, you necessarily couldn't blame communist China.
And my whole thing was to jujitsu that and use this executive order to shift the righteous blame
back to where it belonged with communist China. But, you know, there's some villains in this book inside the perimeter.
And two of the biggest ones were, well, one of them, the biggest, I guess, was Mnuchin,
the Treasury Secretary, who just, his M.O. was to go into the Oval Office, say, sir,
yes, sir, to whatever the boss told him to do.
And then as soon as he walked out
to do just the opposite.
And he was violently opposed
to this commission,
didn't want to hold
the Chinese accountable
for fear it would upset
that stupid skinny deal.
We'll be right back
with much more after this.
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Doc, so I know you have to go in a second, but I want to ask you one more question, okay? Because I think that I serve in
Congress. You and I worked the Hill together on the Reciprocal Trade Act. I've never seen anyone
from outside the Hill work the Hill harder than Peter Navarro. And I think we're going to see,
per your teasing, all the villains that you lay out in your book.
I love that you're not holding back. Like a lot of times people hold back.
I think only you and Katie Couric have put out books where you're not holding back names.
But what I think is interesting, Doc, is that, you know.
So what, quickly, I call it whiskey straight no chaser this month.
Rachel calls that straight tequila.
Yeah.
But it's interesting because not only are you kind of telling all, and again, what I saw in government is you want people to serve the interests that you have and the people that you represent.
And sometimes they come in with their own interests, their own agenda, which is not the agenda of the boss.
And I think you lay this out, who was doing what Trump wanted
and who was fighting him. And you were someone who, even if you disagreed, you know who you
worked for. Others did not. And I think that's an important conversation for us to have.
But it does come back to Donald Trump. Why in the hell did he hire some of the people that he did?
I mean, I think he's a great businessman
and he's probably hired great people in business, but he hired some schmucks inside of his
administration, which I think didn't serve him well. And hopefully, I think he's going to run
again. He's told me that number of times. He's probably told you that he's told Rachel that.
I hope he's learned a lesson on how the job is too big.
You need to help.
You need help by a lot of people.
But you want people you can trust that will follow the mission by the man who was elected.
Am I wrong on the schmucks?
Why did Trump hire so many bad people?
Let's go back to the.
That was the Sean had the congressional way of asking a question that takes five minutes.
I'm just going to say, why did he hire so many bad people?
Because one of the things he said he could do was, you know, I bring in good people.
I'm going to be surrounded by good people.
So you remember the old Reagan saw that personnel is policy, meaning that who you hire, you get you you get the policy. What I do in the In Trump Time book, to Sean's point in your
lament, Rachel, is refine that where it says bad personnel is bad policy is bad politics.
And the original sin of the administration, as I talk about in the In Trump Time book, was that when when when the Republican Party, which is opposed to Trump is in particular his trade policy.
And we wound up with just a handful immediately, a Pentagon, Kelly, eventually as the chief of staff and master the National Security Council.
I mean, you would think that that that generals above all would understand the importance of the chain of command.
Right. But but they were so disloyal to the president in breaking that.
I'm hoping that the book itself in Trump time will be a path forward.
And it says right in the book that that for future presidents learn from this history.
It's like if you're going to govern properly, you need to hire people who are smart, but they also got to support
you. You can't have like, the worst case is dumb people who don't support you. That would be like
Tillerson. The most dangerous case is smart people that you put in power and they don't support you. And I just, I mean, it was a shock to
me, Sean and Rachel, when I got to the White House, how many people inside the perimeter I had to
fight. And there's a reason why I was only one of three senior officials to stay there the whole
time, 2016 from the campaign to the end, because I was the guy who not only was in tune with the Trump
adjunct, but I was I told I never I never thought about having a job the next day. It was like,
I'm just going to tell the president what I think. And and he appreciated that. And, you know,
he got rid of he kept getting rid of the bad apples, but not before they would do significant damage. And Mnuchin really was the worst of the worst in many ways.
Whose idea was Mnuchin?
Whose idea was it to bring in Mnuchin?
Let me ask you this.
You're going to put Peter in a hard spot next.
No, no, no.
I don't judge him.
If you don't want to answer this, that's fine.
But I know when I sit down and I talk with lots of people about, you know, what went wrong and there were lots of things that went went went great.
And there were lots of things that went wrong in the Trump administration and a lot of dirty tricks that were done both from from the Democrats, but also internally.
A lot of people talk about whether it was a mistake to have his family so close.
Well, that's generally not done.
I mean, generally, that doesn't happen.
Yeah.
But by the way, let me just say this because it speaks to that.
The audio version of In Trump Time is pretty cool, not because I narrated, which I do,
but because I use the voices of actual people who appear in the book,
right? And so the segue here to your point, Rachel, is that there's this Corey Lewandowski
steals the show with this extended riff where he's on Air Force One with Dave Bossy the night
before the election. And Bossy is just ripping the hell out of Jared Kushner, Bill Stepien and Justin Clark,
which was the, the, the, the three stooges who ran the Trump campaign.
And, and Bossy really says, Hey, you're not ready for what's,
what's going to happen to send the other thing. But, but, but Kushner, um,
appears several times in the, in Trump time book He was he did. He was always back channeling and could could be in family.
He could he could basically short circuit process.
He did a really, really onerous thing on Buy American, Hire American.
And Mnuchin, I think, was one of one of Jared's many, many foibles there.
And the guy, I mean, he just was just so disloyal.
And now what is he doing? He's raising billions of dollars from the people that, you know, the Chinese, the Saudi, whoever sold out the president. It's just shameful. And
besides Fauci, I think Mnuchin is the one that, I don't know if Steve belongs in a jail cell,
but he certainly belongs in the hall of shame of government officials.
Well, I'll tell you this, Peter, from my perspective, I've run, I've had a standup
in office, obviously much smaller than the president in Congress, but you make mistakes.
Yeah, when you come in from nothing and it happens.
I made mistakes. I didn't hire the best team, was not my first team. And you learn as you go through the process, especially as a new person in these positions.
I just I think that the president has learned a lot of lessons about staffing and the importance of staffing.
Should he run again and win again? I think this this Trump 2.0 will be a far different machine than Trump 1.0.
Has Trump read your book, Peter? Has he told you that?
You know, I don't know if he's read it yet. He certainly had a copy of it. And one thing on the hiring thing, I got to give kudos to Johnny McAtee, a guy who I met in 2016. He was the president's body man. I met him the first time I met the president in person on Trump won when we were flying around campaigning and stuff like that.
And Johnny literally got frog marched out of the White House by John Kelly at one point, but he came back and was the personnel director, which is the point. And as long as you put Johnny
McEntee in charge of staffing a second Trump White House, you folks got nothing to worry about.
They'll be fine.
The guy is smart and he gets it.
And he and I would talk a lot about these matters and he understands it.
So as the boss says, let's see what happens.
But I did write the In Trump Time book for history.
And one of the key lessons in there is bad personnel is bad policies, bad politics.
And you damn well ought to hire people who are both loyal to you, but most importantly, loyal to the agenda.
And there were some people in there that were loyal to the president, but not loyal to his agenda.
So it's kind of like like there were a lot of never trumpers that got in there
and the other thing is like in terms of personnel just quickly like a guy like jeff sessions like
jeff sessions would have served admirably if he had just been put in the position that was suited
to his skills if he had been the the department of homeland security secretary he wouldn't serve
for four years and he would have been fine but he he was just way out of his league at the Justice Department.
And the same thing with John Kelly. I mean, Kelly was like a horrendous chief of staff.
He got quickly in bed with the globalists inside the perimeter.
But if he had simply stayed at Homeland Security where he was originally put, he would have said served all four years with the
sanction so personnel is complicated and and uh that's one of the problems we had um and uh second
time will be a charm on that and there's a lot and there's a lot of personnel and there's a lot
of decisions to be made and peter i know we're out of time but i just i would just want to take a
moment and uh i appreciate your friendship uh number one. But I look at those Americans who actually clearly see what's happening in the world.
They clearly see policies that help American men and women who feel like they've been forgotten.
And you're one of the Americans who will take all of your gifts, all of your talents, all of your knowledge and say, I'm going to fight for the future of this country.
And you did that inside of the administration. You've done that with prior books.
When you're on TV, you're a fighter for America. And I couldn't be more proud to call you a brother
and a fellow American, any more like you. And Peter, one of the things I really appreciate
is how clear-eyed you've been about China. And I think that Trump and with you as an advisor
have really redirected, at least on the Republican side,
people are now really aware of the threat.
Now, obviously, China's gotten stronger.
I think the virus has been in their benefit.
But even before the virus,
there was a redirection within the conservative
movement to know that our true enemy, our biggest threat is China. And you were so right when you
say that having a good economy is the best way to fight that threat and to look out for American
workers is a way to make sure that we can stand up to the Chinese. And I'm afraid of where we're
at right now, but I do take heart in knowing that at least on the conservative side, the policies,
the way the base thinks about foreign policy has shifted. And it's in no doubt because of Trump
and people like you that he had around him who could see that threat. And so that's something
that I'm really grateful for.
I think you've changed the direction of the conservative movement and,
and taking it away from the country club types like Mitt Romney and,
and John McCain and all those,
and given it to,
to,
to the working class and the Republican party now is the party of the
working class.
And,
and,
and I think that's,
that's in large part because of you and Donald Trump.
Well, I think one of the great achievements of Donald John Trump historically will be the sea change he created in both the attitudes towards China and the policies.
And I appreciate those words. And I do feel like we're sitting around the kitchen table here.
I appreciate those words. And I do feel like we're sitting around the kitchen table here.
We have great admiration for you guys.
And we've got some significant challenges ahead.
So we'll stay on task on that and on mission.
100%.
I highly recommend your book over Katie Couric's.
But it's just as juicy.
Lots of information.
But you're right.
It's a piece of history.
Doc, you sent it to us early.
I've started to read it and I'm going to finish it.
It is a great read.
Awesome.
And wonderfully insightful as to what was going on behind the scenes and the take of
Peter Navarro of who the players were, who was loyal, who wasn't.
So grab In Trump Time.
It's a great book by a great author and a great American.
Sean, Rachel, you're the best.
Thank you so much for joining us, Peter.
We've enjoyed the conversation with Peter Navarro.
And if you did too, let us know.
Subscribe, rate, review this podcast at boxnewspodcast.com or wherever you download podcasts.
We hope to see you around the kitchen table next week.
Bye-bye.
From the Fox News Podcast Network. I'm Janice Dean, Fox News Senior Meteorologist. Be sure to subscribe to the Janice Dean Podcast at foxnewspodcast.com or wherever you listen to your
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