Peter Navaro of yesteryear sounds like many current Demoocrats in here:
http://time.com/5375727/peter-navarro/
"If Peter Navarro ever doubted that he was a Democrat, a look at the other side was enough to convince him. Republicans talked about virtue and prosperity, but they were really a bunch of greedy, intolerant hypocrites, he thought.
The “insufferably bigoted, close-minded, and dangerously well-disciplined storm troopers on the religious right,” he wrote in a 1998 memoir, San Diego Confidential, “wield far too much influence at the ballot box.” The GOP was in thrall to “buffoons, sociopaths, and zealots like Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, and Ralph Reed.” Its economic policies consisted of “tax schemes to further enrich the rich,” and its leaders could not be trusted “to do anything but trash the environment under the phony banner of economic progress.”
Twenty years ago, Navarro was a liberal economist who admired Hillary Clinton, argued for taxing the rich and had run for office as a Democrat four times. Today he is a top economic adviser to a Republican President. As Donald Trump’s director of trade and industrial policy, Navarro is known for his advocacy of tariffs and opposition to trade deals. It is Navarro who has pushed Trump to wage an escalating trade war that pits the U.S. against not only economic adversaries like China but also allies like Canada and the European Union. He is the most powerful person in Washington on the most volatile issue of Trump’s presidency.
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"So what happened to Peter Navarro, liberal warrior? In the ensuing decades, he would make one more unsuccessful run for elected office, losing a 2001 campaign for San Diego city council. He was a supporter of Democratic politicians as recently as 2008, when he backed Hillary Clinton in the presidential primary. In op-eds and newsletters in the past decade, he called for an aggressive climate policy, including a carbon tax and a ban on incandescent bulbs, and supported a stimulus package to combat the financial crisis.
But on trade, his views evolved. In 1998, he had written that he “strongly supported free trade.”
But after China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, he started to notice that his MBA students were losing their jobs despite their sterling qualifications. He concluded that China’s trade practices–including export and production subsidies, currency manipulation and theft of intellectual property–were putting Americans at an unfair disadvantage. In other words, Navarro seemed to see in China a scapegoat for people like himself: well-credentialed Americans denied access to the success they felt they’d earned."
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"The results of Navarro’s influence on trade are evident. China, Canada and members of the E.U. have imposed retaliatory tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of American goods, leading to warehouses full of excess meat and a giant surplus of dairy products. The price of soybeans has plummeted, while the prices of some washing machines are up by 20%. Auto prices could soon follow. The nation’s only major television manufacturer, Element Electronics, announced it would close its factory and lay off 126 workers because of the rising price of Chinese components.
Conservative economists like Moore hope that tariffs are merely a means to an end, giving Trump leverage to negotiate deals that would result in freer markets. “In my discussions with Donald Trump, it’s been about using the tariffs as a bargaining tool,” Moore says. “In the end, he wants to get to zero tariffs.”
But Navarro has a different view. He advocates a permanent regime of tariffs, barriers and quotas to “balance” the trade deficit, discourage imported goods and encourage domestic manufacturing. The Administration’s actions, as opposed to its rhetoric, are moving in that direction."
