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Donald Trump has nominated Peter Navarro, a former aide jailed in contempt of Congress for the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, to be a senior White House economic adviser.
On his social media platform Truth Social, the president-elect announced that he would make Navarro his senior adviser on trade and manufacturing to help “truly make American manufacturing great again.”
Navarroa prominent China hawk, he was a central White House adviser on Washington’s trade conflicts with Beijing during Trump’s first term.
During this time, the US distanced itself from further attacks trade jobs abroad and instead focused on measures designed to restore manufacturing and protect American workers.
“During my first term, few have been more effective or persistent than Peter in enforcing my two sacred rules, Buy American, Hire American,” Trump wrote on Wednesday.
“He helped me renegotiate unfair trade deals like Nafta and the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement (KORUS), and got all my customs and trade actions up and running FAST.”
Trump said Navarro’s mission in his new role “will be to help successfully advance and communicate Trump’s manufacturing, tariff and trade plans.”
Navarro spent four months in a federal prison in Miami after being convicted of refusing to comply with a congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol.
During the 2023 trial, prosecutors said Navarro “chose loyalty” to Trump over obeying the lawmaker’s court order. His lawyers argued that the state failed to prove that the former trade adviser “willfully” ignored the subpoena.
Even after Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, Navarro remained a staunch public defender of Trump as he continued to claim that the vote was rigged and that his victory was stolen.
Trump also wrote Wednesday that Navarro was “treated horribly by the Deep State, or whatever else you want to call it.”
Among a number of other nominations announced Wednesday, the president-elect said he is picking Michael Faulkender to be deputy treasury secretary.
Faulkender served in the Treasury Department during Trump’s first administration, and the president-elect said in an announcement that the University of Maryland professor “will help Treasury Secretary nominee Scott Bessent usher in a new golden age for the United States by delivering a great economic boom for all Americans.”
