UCI economist Peter Navarro a key Trump defender

The Orange County Register ^ | August 13, 2016 | MARGOT ROOSEVELT

[Pelham]

In the towering glass and steel lobby of UC Irvine’s Merage School of Business, a small media scrum – two television correspondents, two cameramen, a producer, a newspaper reporter and a photographer – laid in wait last week for Donald Trump’s ubiquitous economic champion.

It had been a crazy few days for 67-year-old UCI professor Peter Navarro, what with nonstop interviews on CNBC, Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, BBC, NPR, “Fox & Friends" and a shouting match with Chris Matthews on “Hardball.”

Was he enjoying the limelight?

“No,” he insisted, as he wound up a three-hour session with “PBS NewsHour,” a 15-minute interview with a local CBS station and a photo shoot on the rooftop terrace of the school.

So why do it?

“Because it matters,” said the man who calls himself “a Reagan Democrat and a Trump Democrat abandoned by my party.”

With a doctorate in economics from Harvard University, Navarro is the only academic on Trump’s 21-member economic advisory council, which is heavy with real estate moguls and Wall Street financiers.

As such, he was tapped to defend the economic speech delivered by the GOP presidential candidate last week in Detroit, at a time when few of Navarro’s economist colleagues endorse Trump’s protectionist views on trade and the candidate’s proposed tax cuts are criticized as benefiting the wealthy.

“I have been predicting a Trump victory for many months,” Navarro said in an interview. “He is running on the trade issue – stopping Mexico and China from cheating. That resonates with voters, even if most academics and policymakers embrace globalization.”

After Hillary Clinton delivered an economic speech in Michigan on Friday, the professor was back on the airwaves declaring, “Under Trump’s plan, everybody gets a tax cut. Under Clinton’s plan,

[EagleUSA]

A tiny ray of hope out of leftist academia....