Trump’s 2020 Campaign Wasn’t Tough Enough on Communist China, Former Top Aid Navarro Says

Former President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign wasn’t tough enough on the Chinese regime, which was the “most consequential and unforgivable mistake,” according to former White House aide Peter Navarro.

“The failure to get as tough on Communist China as we could and should have, I think, was the single biggest of the strategic failures,“ Navarro said in a recent interview on the “China in Focus” program on NTD News.

“That made that election close enough to steal by the Democrats, and I spend a great deal of the book talking about what those failures on China policy were and who basically was responsible for derailing President Trump’s tough on China agenda,” said Navarro referring to his new book, “Taking Back Trump’s America: Why We Lost the White House and How We’ll Win.”

Among the key strategic mistakes, Navarro said, was the failure to hold the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) accountable for the COVID-19 pandemic.

“To this day, I think that it’s important that we hold Communist China accountable, but we let an important opportunity slip by there, because the primary attack on President Trump, leading into the election in 2020, was to blame him for the pandemic,” he said. “Wrongly in my judgment, if we had been able to shift that blame with this executive order to the Communist Chinese and Fauci, I think it would have changed everything.”

President Donald Trump listens to Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases speak at a briefing at the White House, in Washington, on March 21, 2020. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

Navarro attributed the failure in part to “an elaborate cover-up” by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was one of Trump’s chief advisers on the COVID-19 pandemic.

“If we can get more about what Fauci knew, when he knew it,