Peter Navarro: Hold Fauci, Chinese Accountable for COVID Roles

(Getty Images/AP)

As one of only three senior advisers to be with President Donald Trump from his candidacy through the end of his first term, Peter Navarro got to see it all. He knows why the decisions were made, who helped, who didn’t, and why.

His position as assistant to the president for trade and manufacturing policy in the Trump White House gives him unique insight to conclude that the coronavirus pandemic was the result of a genetically engineered lab experiment gone wrong in Wuhan, China, and that Dr. Anthony Fauci was culpable in its spread.

He explains it all in his new book, "In Trump Time: A Journal of America’s Plague Year,"(All Seasons Press). In it, he offers a no-holds barred look at some of the personnel within the White House who did so much damage to the Trump presidency, calls for the firing of Fauci, and holding China accountable for the trillions of dollars in damages it has inflicted on the United States while killing more than 700,000 Americans.

He recently sat with Newsmax for a discussion about his time in the Trump White House and his recently released book.

Question: Why did you write "In Trump Time"?

Answer: The book is based on a daily journal I kept from the beginning of the administration. I understood early on that I would be some small or large part of history and wanted to keep an accurate account of events.

As I began to fight far too many people within the White House opposed to the Trump trade and border security agendas, I also wanted to hold those people accountable for the damage they would do both to the presidency and the nation.

Question: How do you account for the success of "In Trump Time"? It has been on the Amazon, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists and by some accounts has sold over 100,000 copies to date.

Answer: It’s interesting that you omit The New York Times in your discussion of the bestseller lists. In fact, "In Trump Time" should have been listed No. 3 on The New York Times bestseller list in the first week the book was released.

However, for no stated reason, the Gray Lady decided to cancel "In Trump Time." This is no small matter as placement on The New York Times bestseller list allows an author to reach a broader audience and significantly boost sales.

As for the success of the book itself to date, there is a tremendous hunger in Trumpland for honest and accurate books about the administration. Far too many of the books — most notably that of the propagandist Bob Woodward — are simply "never-Trump" screeds based on often bogus anonymous sources.

I’ve been able to reach the Trump audience through vehicles such as Newsmax — and I appreciate that — and through an aggressive conservative talk radio outreach.

Question: What is the central message of "In Trump Time"?

Answer: First and foremost, we must hold both Tony Fauci and the Chinese Communist Party accountable for their roles in spawning a deadly pandemic that has killed over 700,000 Americans, inflicted more than $20 trillion in damages upon the American economy, left our supply chains in shambles, and, through the authoritarian measures increasingly adopted by the Biden regime, turned our American democracy into on an authoritarian state.

Question: What do you say those who criticize the Trump administration for not being prepared when the pandemic hit?

Answer: I say read my new book, "In Trump Time." The first third of the book is a first-hand account of how the Trump White House moved literally "in Trump time" — which is to say as quickly as possible — to put in place a five-vector attack strategy that quickly armed the American nation with a wide range of therapeutics and enough ventilators to ensure that every American who needed one had one.

We also moved quickly on the testing, personal protective equipment (PPE), and vaccine fronts. My roughly dozen memos to the White House Coronavirus Task Force in February illustrates beyond any shadow of a doubt that President Trump very early on took the pandemic extremely seriously even as politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Bill de Blasio and bureaucrats like Tony Fauci were ignoring the risks.

Question: Why are American supply chains in such shambles? Is that a legacy of the Trump administration or the fault of the Biden regime?

Answer: The failure of our supply chains leading into the Christmas and Hanukkah holidays is, as President Trump might say, a politician-caused disaster. During the Trump administration — and I was the point man on this — our mission was to bring home our factories; and when the factories come home, the supply chains come home with them.

The Biden regime has adopted no such Buy American policies. Instead, it is taking America back to the globalist status quo prior to the Trump administration. Whether you support the Biden regime’s universal vaccination policy from a healthcare point of view, it is also undeniably true that such a policy is a disaster for the economy.

We are in the middle of the worst labor market distortion and labor shortage I have ever seen in my more than 30 years as a macroeconomist. Sending longshoremen, truckers, pilots, and food processing workers to the unemployment line because of their refusal to take a highly risky experimental mRNA vaccine is simply exacerbating an already severe crisis.

Question: What is your forecast for the economy over 2022 based on what you are seeing in terms of the policies of Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi?

Answer: Cloudy with a significant chance of stagflation. This in and of itself is a tragedy. I am only one of three senior White House officials who was with the president from the 2016 campaign to the end of his first term. During the 2016 campaign, as his top economic adviser, we developed our policy formula for growing an economy with rising real wages for working-class Americans.

That formula included corporate tax cuts to attract new investment, deregulation to increase American competitiveness, strategic energy dominance and an end to oil import dependence, and fair trade deals benefiting blue-collar America. To that we added dramatically increased defense spending and a strong commitment to expanding Buy American rules for government procurement.

It was a winning strategy that help President Trump build the strongest economy in modern history. Since Joe Biden took office, he has reversed every single one of those growth policies so it should not be surprising that the economy is decelerating — that’s the stag part of the stagflation equation.

At the same time, the Biden White House and Pelosi Congress are spending trillions of poorly targeted taxpayer funds that are simply throwing what is now very expensive gasoline on the inflationary fire. This has to end badly — particularly if Congress, with the help of the RINO Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, passes the latest multitrillion dollar bloated legislation now up for grabs.

The two things I can say here are: Joe, it’s harder than it looks. And You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone. No wonder Joe Biden’s approval rating is in the toilet.

Question: Any parting thoughts?

Answer: I would simply ask members of the Newsmax community to go to Amazon right now and buy my "In Trump Time" book and consider gifting the book to your friends and family members, particularly those who might not be fans of President Trump. Without your support, I will be unable to successfully fight the cancel culture of the corporate media and get out what is a critically important message to the American people.

For me, it’s all about the message and the mission; and if "In Trump Time" leads to the firing of Tony Fauci, that would be a great gift to this nation indeed.