Many of us make the assumption, a dangerous one, that everyone in the Trump White House was as moronic as Trump, Ivanka, and Jared, where the truth is much more complex. It is almost certain that one layer below the Jareds, Meadows, Millers, and McEnanys, there are some brilliant and effective people.

Peter Navarro, a Trump White House Economics adviser is not and was not brilliant. Navarro was hired on the basis of his hatred for China. But it is very likely that the White House economic advisor had a brilliant staff, some of which, helped put together the single most prescient document we’ve heard about COVID, one that had been buried until leaked to Axios. If only someone had the strength to work off the predictions in this document…

In late January, President Trump’s economic adviser Peter Navarro warned his White House colleagues the novel coronavirus could take more than half a million American lives and cost close to $6 trillion, according to memos obtained by Axios.

By late February, Navarro was even more alarmed, and he warned his colleagues, in another memo, that up to 2 million Americans could die of the virus.

It was on the basis of this memo that Trump restricted (but did not block) travel from China. Trump was correct to have made the move and he was criticized by some on the left (not this site) for making the move. It turned out to be one of his few truly effective measures.

One senior administration official who received Navarro’s memos said at the time they were skeptical of his motives and thus his warnings: “The January travel memo struck me as an alarmist attempt to bring attention to Peter’s anti-China agenda while presenting an artificially limited range of policy options.”

“The supplemental memo lacked any basis for its projections, which led some staff to worry that it could needlessly rattle markets and may not direct funding where it was truly needed.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong. The medical community was making the very same predictions, the CDC’s numbers matched those numbers almost exactly (note possible communication between Navarro and staff with the CDC). It is true that Navarro always had an anti-China bent. It is true that such a prediction would help with that anti-China agenda. That doesn’t make the memo wrong, and talented people are supposed to be able to evaluate a memo or white paper’s value based upon the information inside without regard to motives.

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon defended Navarro’s motives, calling the memos “prophetic” and saying Navarro was forced to put his concerns in writing because “there was total blockage to get these facts in front of the President of the United States.”

Bannon is a buffoon. But he is a Goldman Sachs alum who had likely seen many of these types of memos forecasting the impact of certain actions or development. It is not surprising that Bannon would be one who would defend Navarro (Bannon was long since gone from the White House, he’s commenting now).

If only the federal government had taken COVID seriously enough to act urgently in January to prevent the 500,000 deaths… Navarro was, in the end, too conservative.

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