In this episode, we sit down with Peter Navarro, Assistant to President Trump and Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy.
We discuss the United States trade policy with China, U.S. entities acting as what Navarro describes as “useful idiots” for the Chinese regime, Wall Street investment there, and growing allegations about the Biden family’s business dealings.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I’m Jan Jekielek.
Jan Jekielek: Peter Navarro, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Peter Navarro: Great to be with you. I want to salute The Epoch Times. It’s really doing some cutting edge work on exposing communist China’s infection of the world with the deadly virus that it’s inflicted upon. The timeline, you all have constructed, the coverage has been spot on, and it’s really important that the world sees that.
Mr. Jekielek: Then let’s start there. Actually, I was going to ask you a bit about GDP growth, and we’ll definitely get back to that. But let’s talk a little bit about communist China to start with. Actually, you had an op-ed recently titled, “China’s US patsies, from Antifa to the NBA.” There seems to be American business that’s really playing ball with the Chinese Communist Party right now. Tell me about that.
Mr. Navarro: There’s an unholy alliance right now between the Democratic Party and the Chinese Communist Party to defeat Donald J. Trump on election day. The Democrats obviously want to gain power for their agenda, but it’s unfortunate that in the process of campaigning against the president, the Democratic Party is feeding—they become “useful idiots” for the Chinese Communist Party.
That’s a term that Marx and Lenin used to use for unwitting fools within the state who advanced the state’s goals without understanding the far-reaching implications. In that New York Post op-ed and the speech that it was based on at the Hudson Institute, I talked about how just a number of actors within the United States are feeding the Chinese Communist Party beast.
Let me give you an example: the National Basketball Association. I will never ever watch an NBA game again after what I’ve seen. What they do is they shut up and dribble [while] over in China, they have the sweatshops in China, make all the sneakers for their stars. They sell it back to American kids, and they really turn an unconscionable blind eye to the abuses in Xinjiang Province, the concentration camps, the abuses of the Falun Gong with the organ harvesting of live Falun Gong people that they then kill, the takeover, brutally, of Hong Kong.
These NBA players, not only do they ignore that, but then they have the temerity to get on their soapbox and sound self-righteous about what they see as a repressive America. It’s just disgusting but the bigger problem is they feed this narrative that somehow China’s authoritarian government and socialist-communist economic system is superior to ours.
Another set of useful idiots: the Antifa-BLM looters and arsonists who are coming into our cities, whether it’s Portland, or Seattle, or Kenosha, armed with mace, and frozen water bottles, and all manner of weaponry, destabilizing the cities, burning down and looting businesses—the world’s watching. The world is watching and the Chinese Communist Party is just loving every minute of it because what they do is to say, “See! Democracy leads to chaos. Our authoritarian system leads to stability.”
Hollywood is another useful idiot, airbrushing things out of films so that they can sell to China. Silicon Valley and Wall Street, pumping money into companies in China that are the ones that make the weapons that are aiming to kill Americans. So I look at this spectacle and it’s unfortunate that this election wasn’t more about that, particularly in light of the astonishing revelations that have come off the laptop of Hunter Biden.
Yes, it is his laptop that’s been confirmed. Yes, the documents on there are real. But no, the mainstream media won’t cover it. But what we have is clearly a crime syndicate family. This is the “Godfather Part IV” with Joe Biden playing the “godfather” role, James Biden being the mastermind of monetizing the Biden name internationally, against the law, I might add, and Hunter Biden basically is the witless bagman who collects money for daddy and then kicks back some of that so daddy can go buy another house somewhere.
This is what that speech at the Hudson Institute was about, this is what that op-ed was about, and it’s unfortunate that the mainstream media won’t write about the worst presidential scandal. The other thing I’ll tell you about this, my prediction is that within a year, Joe Biden will be gone, either because of health problems or because he gets impeached.
I think the progressives within his party can’t wait to go after him like piranhas if he wins. It’s their dream come true. They can point to this treasure trove of indicting material and get Biden out of there, and then we’ll have just something that you can’t even make up, President Kamala Harris, somebody with literally no foreign policy experience, little experience economically, but that would be the Chinese Communist Party’s best dream, as well as the far left that controls the Democratic Party.
Mr. Jekielek: Peter, right at the top of your response, you mentioned an unholy alliance between the Democratic Party and the CCP. What evidence is there to show that? I’m trying to understand what you meant by that.
Mr. Navarro: I’m an economist by training, and my subfield was what we call industrial organization, and one of the ways that collusion takes place is through tacit collusion. If you think about the Democrat Party and the Chinese Communist Party both having the same goal, which is to defeat Donald Trump—the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] because Trump stands up to them, the Democratic Party because they want to control the levers of power—the tacit collusion comes in the form of the Democrat Party refusing, repeatedly, to assign any blame to the Chinese Communist Party for this virus killing Americans.
China has killed over 200,000 Americans. The CCP has put tens of millions of Americans out of work. The CCP has cost this country trillions and trillions of dollars. The Democrat Party does not want to blame China for any of that because if they do blame communist China for that, that means the public won’t blame Donald J. Trump. So that’s how they collude.
They have a self-interest and their behavior reflects this unholy, unspoken alliance. There is also this sad reality that Biden himself, based on the documents from the laptop, Hunter Biden’s laptop, detailed documents show that Joseph Biden has been bought and paid for by the Chinese government. I mean that quite explicitly.
Here’s one example: we see, as Hunter Biden and James Biden, the brother, are basically cutting deals and lining up deals with the Chinese Communist Party, at the same time, Barack Obama as president has assigned Joe Biden the role of the “Pivot to Asia”.
The Pivot to Asia was a Kurt Campbell-Hillary Clinton strategy that was handed over to Joe Biden to implement, and one of the things he was supposed to do was to stop the militarization of the South China Sea. Another thing he was supposed to do was to halt the cyber theft of our business secrets. There was a famous [White House] Rose Garden event where Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of the CCP, signed the document promising not to do that.
Biden was supposed to enforce it, and guess what—he never did. He refused to do that. CCP has had their way with the cyber-hacking, continues to do that, continues to rapidly militarize under Obama-Biden. If you wrote this up as a movie in Hollywood, they’d reject the manuscript because they would say that it was too far-fetched, but the problem is, it’s a sad reality we’re dealing with.
So we have, in some sense, the weakest and frailest presidential candidate in history, and Joe Biden is just mentally not fit for the job, and on top of that, totally compromised by the CCP. That’s terrible. It would be a terrible day for America if Biden were to win this election. I just hope that the people of America are able to learn about this and judge and vote accordingly.
The problem is, the mainstream media, another useful idiot for the CCP, has refused to spread this information to the people. Instead, they’ve censored it, suppressed it. It’s a suppression press, not a free press, as the president has said. On top of all that, you’ve got the oligarchs in Silicon Valley, and Jack Dorsey [CEO of Twitter], and the Facebook guy, [Mark] Zuckerberg [CEO of Facebook]. These guys are so out of touch with reality but doing a tremendous disservice in censoring The New York Post and the American people.
Mr. Jekielek: A number of media, including ourselves, are investigating these allegations. I understand, actually, the Department of Justice has an ongoing investigation into Hunter Biden. Presumably, this is related to this specific issue. Do you have any more intel on that?
Mr. Navarro: No, I don’t. All I know is what you guys know, which is that the FBI sat on this material for over a year and that if they had done their job, we never would have had the impeachment of Donald J. Trump, because this was exculpatory evidence.
It would have blown up the whole thing and instead of the president getting this phony impeachment-sham going, it would have been Joe Biden who would have been indicted, and probably Bernie Sanders or Liz Warren would have been the nominee, and we would have had an honest election on ideology instead of the Godfather Part IV running on the ticket and hiding in his basement.
I understand that these are harsh words. This isn’t rhetoric, this is reality, and the fact that this stuff has been hidden from the American people by the mainstream media, it’s unbelievable. This is like something that would happen in Russia or China, or the Nazi Germany of [Joseph] Goebbels [Reich Minister of Propaganda]—not the United States of America.
But how can The New York Times ignore this? How can Washington Post ignore this? How can CNN, MSNBC, CBS News, the worst one, PBS NewsHour [ignore this]? If anybody stakes their whole reputation on being fair, honest, objective, it’s the PBS NewsHour, and they pronounced immediately that this couldn’t possibly be true so they weren’t going to cover it. “C’mon, man,” as Joe Biden might say.
Mr. Jekielek: Peter, one of the charges, I guess, leveled against the president is that he’s very, very focused on Wall Street, and the stock market, and so forth. Indeed, there continues to be, even in the realm of people talking about decoupling, even in the realm of talking about bringing back supply chains and so forth, massive investments from Wall Street into communist China as we speak, including into companies that are on the entity lists and so forth. I’m wondering if you could actually speak to that?
Mr. Navarro: Yes, I can. If you look at the history, the arc of history in the Oval Office, no president has ever stood up to China dating back to the days Nixon and Kissinger mistakenly opened up that “communist Frankenstein,” is what Nixon would later call it. The president has a clear track record on being tough.
We’ve got over $325 billion worth of tariffs in place, tough sanctions on Huawei, tough sanctions on the use of slave labor from Xinjiang province, we revoked any separate treatment for Hong Kong, freedom of navigation patrols are robust in the South China Sea. This is a president that took a very firm line in the sand with China and will continue to do so.
So I think that those kind of comments are in some sense misplaced, particularly when you have 47 years of Joe Biden going soft on China and him being in their back pocket. Going forward, we’ve been moving to squeeze out the capital, American capital, from going in, particularly to the military companies of communist China—we’re working hard on that.
I think in his second term, you can certainly expect that the arc of toughness on China will continue, and it should continue because the Chinese Communist Party, who is bad enough, they stole all our factories and jobs, now they’re killing Americans.
My one regret in this campaign is that we were unable to punch through the mainstream media to raise awareness among the American people that this virus did indeed come from the Chinese Communist Party and they’re killing Americans, and there should be more outrage than there is. This issue should be more relevant at the ballot box but there’s still a few days left and anybody who watches this interview, maybe that’ll help a little bit.
Mr. Jekielek: Why do you think Wall Street continues to be so bullish on China, even at this time?
Mr. Navarro: Wall Street as a writ large is a sociopath. They have no ethics, morals, or patriotism. It’s all about the money. So they’ll go where they think investment might be and if they think Joe Biden is going to win, more capital is going to flow into China. But an American pension fund that allows its dollars to go into AVIC, which is China’s Boeing-equivalent that makes all the missiles, they sink American aircraft carriers, that’s just flat out crazy, particularly if they’re pensions of former military officials. That kind of stuff’s got to stop. Wall Street, Silicon Valley, writ large sociopath.
Mr. Jekielek: These entity lists, they do put restrictions on trade, but they don’t seem to put a lot of restrictions on investment. Do you foresee any such restrictions in the future?
Mr. Navarro: We’ve begun to do that. We sent a letter to the SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission] Commissioner on that issue. We asked that the PBGC, Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, stop doing that, so let’s see. It’s moot if Joe Biden comes in. [Then] we’ll see a lot more capital flow there to communist China.
Mr. Jekielek: We got some GDP numbers. I promised we would talk about that in the end. It looks stronger than expected and a lot of it is in the private sector, as far as I can tell. What are you expecting to come in the next quarter?
Mr. Navarro: We’re clear eyed about the challenges ahead. The bounce back that we’ve had is historic. Didn’t happen by accident. It’s because President Donald J. Trump knows how to manage and grow an economy. If you change presidents in midstream right now, I can guarantee you, you’re going to have a great depression like we’ve never seen before with Joe Biden, because everything that we do to grow the economy—tax cuts, deregulation, strategic energy dominance and fracking, fair trade rather than this globalist trade, and increase defense spending—all of that goes away. If it all goes away in the middle of the pandemic and fighting what we’re fighting, that’s the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris great depression.
Jan Jekielek Peter Navarro, such a pleasure to have you on.
Mr. Navarro: Great. Take care of yourself.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
