Cohn, like most of Trump’s policy aides, didn’t share the president’s affinity for protectionism. This resulted in shouting matches with Navarro. “During their showdowns, Mr. Cohn at times accused Mr. Navarro of lying to the president about the effect of his proposals and often laced his accusations with a colorful round of expletives, said White House officials who witnessed their debates,” the Wall Street Journal reported. Navarro hit back by questioning the motives of Cohn and other “Wall Street globalists” who, he said, opposed tariffs because of the effects on their own financial holdings.

Despite being outnumbered and outgunned in the White House, Navarro turned out to have the only ally who mattered: Trump himself. Cohn and the free traders may have won the battle for a time, but Navarro’s presence served to confirm Trump’s gut beliefs about the problems with our economy. To his opponents in the West Wing, Navarro brought out the worst in Trump.

Navarro believes himself to be the Trump-whisperer on matters of trade and tariffs—though he puts it differently in public. The tariff proposal “is the president’s vision,” he said on Bloomberg TV on March 7. “My function, really, as an economist is to try to provide the underlying analytics that confirm his intuition. And his intuition is always right in these matters.”