Peter Navarro
WASHINGTON: President Trump’s top advisor on trade and manufacturing policy railed against “globalist billionaires” and Wall Street executives during a forceful, hour-long speech in Washington on Friday. Peter Navarro accused US business leaders of being “unregistered foreign agents” working for Beijing trying to pressure President Donald Trump into a trade deal with China.
“When these unpaid foreign agents engage in this kind of diplomacy, so-called diplomacy, all they do is weaken this president and his negotiating position. No good can come of this,” Navarro said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “If there is a deal, if and when there is a deal, it will be on President Donald J. Trump’s terms, not Wall Street terms.”
The conspiracy to undermine the president outlined by Navarro is spearheaded by executives from Goldman Sachs along with unnamed “globalist elites” and a “self-appointed group of Wall Street bankers and hedge fund managers” — all of whom are “part of a Chinese government influenced operation” to pressure the Trump administration into a deal, Navarro alleged.
His comments came during a speech that veered between his attacks on Chinese trade practices and a new report he spearheaded about the health of the US defense industrial base. The report, helmed by the Pentagon’s head weapons buyer Ellen Lord and deputy assistant secretary for Industrial Policy Eric Chewning, identifies 300 areas where the US government needs to take action to support the supply chain.
One of the big concerns in the White House’s defense industrial base report is Chinese trade practices that might make things difficult for US defense firms.
In particular, the study calls out China for “predatory practices including state-sponsored dumping, public subsidies, and intellectual property theft are destroying commercial product lines and markets of domestic DoD suppliers.”
A cannon barrel in the forge at Watervliet Arsenal, NY, the US Army’s only source of heavy gun tubes.
Navarro, a long time China hawk, praises Trump for having “the courage and wisdom to stand up to the globalist elites, to stand up to the countries of the world that are engaging in unfair trade practices.”
