Peter Navarro’s net worth: From academic to Trump’s trade policy adviser

Peter Navarro went from a relatively obscure professor of economics at a state business school to getting his big break as a trade adviser to President Trump in 2017. Now, as a senior trade adviser to Trump in the second administration, he’s played a key role in drafting trade policies for the 47th president, despite having no real-life experience in exporting or importing goods.

Here’s how much Navarro is worth and how his life catapulted from a career in academia to the White House.

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What is Peter Navarro’s net worth?

Navarro likely has a net worth of a few million dollars.

In 2021, he sold a Laguna Beach home for almost $3 million, according to The Orange County Register. He will have received royalties from the many books he’s authored. His 2017 financial disclosure to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics obtained by Politico showed that he held rental properties in Troy, New York but also had mortgages on them.

Fortune magazine put Navarro’s net worth at more than $1 million in 2017.

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How much does Peter Navarro make as a senior trade adviser?

Navarro is probably paid about $200,000 or more. Glassdoor, which provides job listings and compiles salaries, listed the average annual salary of a senior adviser to the president at $203,150, and estimated top pay at $280,534.

In 2017, Navarro’s salary as a professor was $240,000.

Who is Peter Navarro?

Peter Navarro was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on July 15, 1949. He grew up in Florida and Maryland, and he was raised by his mother, a secretary, after her divorce from his father, a musician, according to Time magazine.

Education and career

Navarro attended Tufts University on an academic scholarship and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1972. After graduation, he served for three years in the Peace Corps in Thailand, where — his alma mater’s student newspaper The Tufts Daily wrote in an article — “he discovered his passion for public policy.”

Navarro then returned to the U.S. and enrolled at Harvard Kennedy School, where he received a master’s degree in public administration in 1979. He continued his postgraduate studies at Harvard and earned a Ph.D. in economics.

After receiving his Ph.D., Navarro worked at the University of California, Irvine, where he was an economics and public policy professor at the Paul Merage School of Business, and he was eventually promoted to professor emeritus.

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Books and subsequent political career

Navarro is the author of numerous books relating to economics. He wrote “The Coming China Wars” in 2006 and “Death by China” in 2011, both of which focused on concerns of China’s growing global economic and political influence and how that could affect the U.S.

Navarro’s anti-China views caught the attention of Trump, and Trump used China as a focal point in his take on the unfair and disadvantageous trade practices of countries with the U.S.

In 2016, Trump picked Navarro to serve in his first administration and lead the newly created Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy (OTMP). As director, Navarro advised Trump on policies to increase economic growth and to strengthen the country’s manufacturing and defense industrial bases. He pushed for protectionist trade policies, and a particular target of this agenda was China, with which the U.S. had a trade deficit.

Navarro’s White House bio said that he “helped to reform the conventional arms transfer and unmanned aerial systems policies of the United States, and to expand foreign military sales to our Nation’s partners and allies.”

After the end of Trump’s first term, Navarro retreated into private life. In 2024, Navarro was ordered to pay a $9,500 fine and served four months in prison for contempt for refusing to appear before Congress to give testimony and produce documents as required by a subpoena as part of an investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The investigating committee believed that, based on his public statements, he had relevant information on the attack.

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In Trump’s second term, Navarro returned to public service and was named White House Senior Counselor for Trade and Manufacturing to help with devising tariffs in a bid to protect American trade. Trump focused on a protectionist agenda and went further than his first term by being aggressive on trade policies with the imposition of high tariffs on China and other countries, including America’s allies.

The New York Times reported that Navarro was among the authors behind Project 2025, an initiative undertaken by Trump to reshape the federal government. Navarro’s writing focused on trade.

In early April 2025, Tesla (TSLA)  CEO and White House adviser Elon Musk said in separate posts on his social media platform X that Navarro was “truly a moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks” in response to Navarro’s comments that Tesla was more of a car assembler than a car manufacturer because some important parts, such as batteries and electronics, were imported from Japan, China and Taiwan. Navarro replied that he has been called worse.

What is Peter Navarro’s political affiliation?

In the 1990s, Navarro aspired to be a politician and made unsuccessful attempts at public office. In 1996, Navarro lost a run for the Democratic Party’s nomination for the 49th Congressional District, which covers an area including San Diego and other coastal Californian towns and cities.

Navarro’s political affiliation has vacillated since he was eligible to vote. From the time before 1986 he was a Democrat and then switched to the Republican Party in 1989, according to a compilation by uspresidentialhistory.com, a website that gathers data on presidential staff, past and present. In 1991, he became an independent and then registered as a Democrat from 1994 to 2018. In 2018, he returned to the Republican Party.

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