“The guy I fought the most that day was Fauci,” Navarro told me Sunday. “He was adamantly opposed to the travel ban. All he kept saying was travel restrictions don’t work.”

Navarro pushed back, “ ‘If you stop 20,000 Chinese nationals coming in every day and some are infected, you’re telling me that’s not going to spread the virus?’ It was like talking to a brick wall.”

The next day, Navarro wrote a memo outlining three options: If you do nothing and there’s no danger, that’s OK; if you do the travel ban and there’s no danger, you lose a few million dollars; but if you do nothing and there is danger, the risk is a million American lives and more than $2 trillion in damages.

“I papered everybody in the task force with the memo and . . . it flipped everyone to supporting the president,” Navarro said.

Trump imposed the travel ban on Jan. 31 and Fauci later credited the action with saving lives.

But, says Navarro, “If Biden had been president and Fauci had been the top adviser, we would probably have a million more Americans dead.”