Navarro’s account explains how to fight the Chinese regime

Peter Navarro’s exceptional new book, “Taking Back Trump’s America: Why We Lost the White House and How We’ll Win It Back,” is a major contribution to understanding what went right during the Trump administration—and what went wrong.

The work is an essential read for anyone who seeks to understand the essence of Trumpism, the “Make America Great Again” movement, populist economic nationalism, and the failures that led to Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020.

The book is also valuable due to its clear explication of the threat posed by the Chinese regime and how the Trump administration—the first administration to understand the threat from the regime—labored to counter it. In this regard, Navarro’s rightful focus is on the mistakes made by the administration in its efforts to fight China.

The book’s deep contribution is Navarro’s argument that most of the errors made by Trump resulted from bad personnel choices. Navarro is frank: bad personnel choices make bad policy, which makes bad politics. The work is not shy concerning who the bad personnel choices were and the mistakes that were made.

Navarro points out five “strategic failures.” First, and most significantly, was to make China the most important issue of the 2020 campaign. Second, Trump’s failure to govern as a populist economic nationalist and run on this in 2020, which would have likely allowed him to win once again Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Third, the failure of the Trump campaign itself, which was, in his assessment, the most mismanaged in modern history. Fourth, the incompetence of two key advisers—Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows—to bring the phase four stimulus and relief bill, which would have provided payments to tens of millions of Americans before election day. Finally, the inability of the White House communications team to fight back against the Never Trump and Orange Man Bad media.

The great value of the work regarding the threat from China is that the administration was hamstrung in the fight against the Chinese regime, often by its own members. Senior adviser Jared Kushner, Secretary Mnuchin, and National Economic Policy Director Gary Cohn sought to sustain a globalist agenda that would, in essence, sustain the status quo on China, permitting trade and access to capital markets and so foster China’s growth as had occurred under each president since Bill Clinton.

Time and again, Navarro recounts how Kushner, Mnuchin, Meadows, and others were able to negate or weaken Navarro’s efforts to hold the Chinese regime accountable over many issues. This included the Muslim genocide in Xinjiang and other human rights abuses. In one example of many, Navarro discusses how his administration opponents attempted to limit the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection Work Release Orders (WROs) on products made by forced labor in Xinjiang.

Read more.