Woodward: WH ‘Wall Street Wing’ Kept Navarro from Warning Trump About Threat to Trade Agenda

Peter Navarro drafted a letter to President Donald Trump warning that the administration’s trade agenda was being undermined by a “Wall Street wing” inside the White House.

So the Wall Street wing made sure the president never saw the letter from the chief White House trade adviser.

That is one of several revelations of staffers stymieing Trump in Bob Woodward’s book on the Trump administration, Fear. Woodward also reports that National Economic Council head Gary Cohn bragged about pilfering orders from the president’s desk to prevent Trump from exiting trade agreements.

Woodward’s book reports:

“The Trump trade agenda does indeed remain severely hobbled by political forces within the West Wing,” Peter Navarro, the White House assistant heading the National Trade Council, wrote in an Eyes Only two-page memo to the president and Chief of Staff Prie- bus on March 27, 2017.

Navarro, who agreed with Trump’s view that trade deficits mattered a great deal, was furious. He had been unable to get action in the first two months of the Trump presidency. “

“It is impossible to get a trade action to your desk for consideration in a timely manner,” Navarro wrote.

The problem was that the “Wall Street Wing” of White House advisers and Trump administration officials, led by Cohn, was blocking efforts to take action on trade, Navarro wrote, according to Woodward.

Cohn “has amassed a large power base in the West Wing and his two top aides on trade … are skilled political operatives fundamentally opposed to the Trump trade agenda, “Not reported in the press is that Treasury Secretary Mnuchin is part of Cohn’s ‘Wall Street Wing,’ which has effectively blocked ordelayed every proposed action on trade.”

Navarro identified those fighting against “the Cohn headwinds” as Bannon, Stephen Miller, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and himself.

“Mr. President, are you aware that under pressure from the Cohn faction, I was demoted on Day One from Assistant to Deputy, given zero staff on trade, went almost three weeks without an office and have had no direct access to the Oval Office?”

Using an analogy sure to be understood by Trump, he said, “In golf terminology I have been given only a five iron and a putter and ordered to shoot par on trade-an impossible task.” He proposed that he and the National Trade Council be given more power, staff and access. He included some news articles critical of Cohn and reporting on his increased power.

Navarro handed the memo to Porter to be forwarded to Trump and Priebus. Porter was trying to present himself as the honest broker but he had taught economics at Oxford and was convinced that Navarro’s views were outdated and unsupportable. As far as Porter was concerned Navarro was a member of the Flat Earth Society ontrade deficits, like the president himself.

But staff Secretary Rob Porter was himself squarely a member of the Wall Street Wing, Woodward writes. So instead of delivering the letter to Trump, he shelved it.

“This is a terrible idea,” Porter told then chief of staff Reince Priebus, according to Woodward.”I’m not going to give it[out]. I’m going to keep it on my desk, keep it in my files. Not going anywhere.”

Priebus had no objection to the strategy of keeping the letter from the president, according to Woodward.