Former White House trade advisor Peter Navarro, right, attacked former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, center, as “wrong, small, and inexperienced,” in his upcoming memoir.AP
Ex-Trump advisor Peter Navarro takes aim at Trump’s cabinet and chiefs in a grievance-filled memoir.
The Daily Beast obtained an excerpt of Navarro’s forthcoming scorched-earth book.
Navarro said ex-chief of staff Mick Mulvaney was blessed “with an overabundance of both arrogance and hubris.”
Former President Donald Trump’s ex-White House trade advisor Peter Navarro unloads on Trump’s “Cabinet of Clowns” and “Motley Crue” of chiefs of staff in a grievance-filled and scorched-earth forthcoming book.
The often-bombastic former White House advisor takes aim at cabinet officials and all four of Trump’s White House chiefs of staff in his upcoming book, “Taking Back Trump’s America,” due for release on September 20, an excerpt of which was obtained and reported on by the Daily Beast on Tuesday.
“You should normally expect a murderer’s row of highly polished media killers in the cabinet secretary pool,” Navarro wrote in the excerpt obtained by The Beast. “Regrettably, this was just not so in Trump Land.”
Navarro called Alex Azar, Secretary if Health & Human Services “always punctilious” and Adm. Brett Giroir, an assistant Health and Human Services secretary, as “insufferably pompous.”
Navarro tagged Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin as “a media hound” who “spoke like a robot,” describing him in the book as an “uncomfortable cross between cringeworthy and a Wall Street hack.”
Navarro was even less charitable when it came to Trump’s chiefs, criticizing his first chief of staff Reince Priebus as “the wrong, small, and inexperienced man for a very big job” and his second, John Kelly, as “brutally and simply incapable of messaging anything to the press.”
“From a media perspective, this was like recruiting a trucker to drive a Formula One car,” Navarro writes, according to The Beast. “Or maybe like using a chainsaw for open heart surgery.”
Navarro writes he doesn’t “disagree” with presidential historian Chris Whipple’s assessment that Mark Meadows, Trump’s final chief of staff, was the worst chief of staff in US history, according to The Beast, but personally thinks it’s “probably more of a dead heat between Meadows, Mulvaney, and Kelly.”
Navarro reserved particular venom for Mulvaney, who served as acting chief of staff in 2019, saying Mulvaney ‘s “acting” title was a “little dig that the Boss liked to stick into Mick so he never got comfortable in the job.”
“God blessed this smug Mick with an overabundance of both arrogance and hubris,” Navarro writes in the book, accusing Mulvaney of “cashing in on CBS for his Trump celebrity and sticking knives in Trump’s back” in comments to The Beast.
In response to The Beast, Mulvaney said that “no one, including Donald Trump, takes him as a serious commentator on, well, anything,” pointing to Navarro’s use of an imaginary character who is a China hawk and “Prince of Darkness” named “Ron Vara,” in many of his books.
Navarro also reveals that a group of Trump loyalists attempted a “coup d’état” to oust senior advisor (and Trump’s son-in-law) Jared Kushner from Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign and replace him with the outside adviser Steve Bannon, according to excerpts obtained by the Guardian and the Forward.
In the chapter titled “Shabbat Shalom and Sayonara,” Navarro reveals that the group pitched their case to Trump on a Saturday when Kushner, an Orthodox Jew, was completely unplugged and offline observing Shabbat, the Forward reports. But Kushner, despite Trump allies’ strong misgivings, stayed on the campaign.
Navarro will also soon face trial for contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 insurrection. On Monday, Navarro lost a bid in court to publicize government records he believed would prove his prosecution was politically motivated.
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