Macomb Today

American manufacturing, like every industry across the county, has been deeply and negatively affected by the economic crisis created by restrictions related to COVID-19, but the question now is where the country will go from here.

Peter Navarro, assistant to President Donald Trump and director of U.S. trade and manufacturing policy, recently spoke with WJR’s "The Paul W. Smith Show" to explain the administration’s approach to rebuilding manufacturing.

Navarro said that his work to rebuild U.S. manufacturing goes back before the pandemic and has been a focus since Trump was elected.

Peter Navarro, assistant to President Trump | WhiteHouse.gov

“My focus, like a laser beam, is manufacturing jobs, manufacturing jobs,” he told Smith. “We were cruising for the first three years, right up to the middle of January.”

Since the coronavirus pandemic began, some of the adaptive measures taken to assist manufacturing have included the repurposing of manufacturing capacity for producing needed items such as ventilators, he told Smith.

“That’s the kind of stuff we’re doing, and at least some good news out of this deadly pandemic from China, at least it’s showing how innovative we are able to be in this country, and how we need to bring our production back home from China,” Navarro told Smith.

Navarro also said that Trump’s past experience has lead the administration to take a more granular approach to stimulating the economy by focusing on specific situations and companies.

“Most presidents don’t understand business; most presidents don’t understand granularity,” Navarro told Smith. “Most presidents, in order to stimulate the economy, do this -- what we call fiscal and monetary policy -- spend a bunch of government money to stimulate and lower interest rates to stimulate.”

In contrast, Trump’s approach has been to look for ways to build back up manufacturing community by community, Navarro said.