In a book due to be published a day before his release from prison this month, the former Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro praises Donald Trump’s Maga movement – and claims to list errors and omissions that led to his four-month sentence for criminal contempt of Congress, for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the House January 6 committee.
But Navarro makes striking errors and omissions of his own, including jarringly misidentifying Ashli Babbitt – the Trump supporter shot dead at the US Capitol who became a martyr to many on the far right – as a US marine corps veteran.
Babbitt served in the US air force.
Navarro’s book, The New Maga Deal: The Unofficial Deplorables Guide to Donald Trump’s 2024 Policy Platform, will be published on 16 July – the day before Navarro’s release from prison. The Guardian obtained a copy.
Considering how he came to sit behind bars, Navarro says the US Department of Justice “played dirty pool”, neglecting its own policies on executive privilege.
He also claims a judge denied him a range of lawful defences; claims his jury was irredeemably biased; and claims jurors were ushered into the presence of anti-Trump protesters shortly before finding him guilty.
“How do you spell ‘mistrial’?” Navarro asks.
But in the same pages, in his account of the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, the culmination of the election subversion attempt in which he played a central role, Navarro makes errors and omissions of his own.
“Much of the ‘J6’ violence,” he writes, “ … was instigated not by Trump supporters, but rather by agent provocateurs – including FBI informants.”
As detailed by sources including Poynter, a nonpartisan, factchecking group, there is no evidence the FBI orchestrated January 6.
Navarro also claims “J6 violence was also apparently facilitated by Capitol Hill police officers, some of whom removed barriers and waved protesters” through.
CNN’s Daniel Dale, a leading factchecker, has written: “The claim the rioters were invited into the Capitol is false … about 140 police officers were assaulted while trying to stop the mob from breaching the Capitol. There were hours-long battles … dozens of officers engaged in hand-to-hand combat with rioters in a desperate effort to keep them out of the building.”
Navarro claims Nancy Pelosi, then House speaker, “rejected the 10,000 national guard troops requested by President Trump leading up to J6”.
As Politico wrote in response to Trump’s version of the claim in his debate against Joe Biden last week: “Trump never made such an offer, and Pelosi never rejected it, as Trump claimed. His military leadership has confirmed that there was no formal offer made, despite some private musings in the days before Jan. 6.”
Navarro then makes two particularly jarring mistakes concerning Trump supporters killed at the Capitol.
After assigning Babbitt to the wrong military branch, Navarro says Rosanne Boyland was “beaten to death by Capitol police”.
Boyland died in a crush. Videos claiming to show police beating her have been debunked.
The New Maga Deal is not Navarro’s first book. His last, Taking Back Trump’s America: Why We Lost the White House and How We’ll Win It Back, was published in 2022.
It was a classic Trump White House tell-all, but Navarro was a controversial figure already. Before entering Trumpworld, he was a Harvard-PhD economist, China hawk, green activist and frustrated political candidate revealed to have published work quoting “Ron Vara”, a supposed expert whose name was an anagram of his own.
That didn’t stand in the way of an appointment to advise Trump. In 2016, Navarro became head of the White House National Trade Council and director of trade and industrial policy.
He achieved greater prominence in 2020, during the chaotic response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and as a key architect of Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat by Biden.
Navarro’s boasts about his efforts to change results in battleground states – notably via a plan he called the “Green Bay sweep” – placed him in the sights of the House January 6 committee.
Claiming his work for Trump was shielded by executive privilege, Navarro refused to comply. A Washington jury disagreed and Navarro was convicted last September. He was sentenced in January; an appeal to the US supreme court was denied in March, and Navarro reported to jail in Florida. As he did so, he touted his new book to reporters. He is due to be released on 17 July.
In The New Maga Deal – named for Trump’s “Make America great again” slogan – Navarro attempts to “clearly articulate what Maga represents”, in his words an “iron triangle of Populist Economic Nationalism” that seeks “only peace, prosperity and national security”.
Outlining what he says should be legislative priorities for Trump’s second term, Navarro includes contributions from Russ Vought, formerly Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, now involved in plans for far-reaching reforms; Mike Davis, widely tipped for US attorney general; and Frank Gaffney, a national security analyst accused of promoting Islamophobic views.
But the introduction may attract the most attention. It is written by Steve Bannon: like Navarro, a Trump White House aide convicted on criminal charges.
Like Navarro, Bannon currently resides in a federal prison, having been convicted of criminal contempt of Congress for his own refusal to cooperate with the January 6 committee. Also sentenced to four months, the former chief White House strategist began his sentence in Connecticut this week.
On the page, Bannon says Navarro’s book offers readers “lessons learned from the rock star of Trump’s first term … exhilarating to read, energising to think about.
“… Bravo, brother Navarro.”