Peter Navarro’s speech on the third night of the Republican National Convention immediately cleared up one thing: Anger is overtaking unity.
Navarro, who served as former President Donald Trump’s director of the U.S. Office of Trade and Manufacturing, joined the convention just hours after being released from prison, drawing sustained and fervent applause from the crowd. He’d been sentenced to four months after being held in contempt of Congress for refusing to honor a subpoena for records related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
He began his speech seething with anger for what he described as being “locked up for disagreeing with the government.”
“This morning, I did walk out of federal prison in Miami,” he exclaimed as the crowd cheered. “Joe Biden and his department of injustice put me there.”
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Republicans from the Trump campaign down had pleaded for national unity since this past weekend, lamenting that extreme polarization among voters had contributed to the attempted assassination of Trump. Since the RNC kicked off on Monday, speakers who graced the main stage in prime time focused on Trump’s vision for a possible second stretch in the Oval Office and criticized Biden’s policies. But Navarro leaned in on an acerbic delivery, shooting barb after barb at the president and name-dropping other top Democrats, such as Vice President Kamala Harris, former Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Attorney General Merrick Garland.
“If they can come for me, if they can come for Donald Trump,” he said, “be careful: They can come for you.”
Navarro blamed Biden and the Democrats for his time behind bars — a result of his failure to comply with a subpoena from the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6 insurrection. During the investigation, committee members had sought documents and testimony from the former White House official connected to his conduct after the 2020 election and efforts to delay the certification of Electoral College votes.
In his speech, Navarro suggested that no one would be safe if Republicans didn’t “control all three branches of our government.”
“Their government will put some of us, like me and Steve Bannon, in prison and control the rest of us,” he said to cheers from the crowd punctuated with whistles. “Your favorite Democrat Nancy Pelosi created your favorite committee, the sham Jan. 6 committee, which demanded that I violate executive privilege. What did I do? I refused. The J6 committee demanded that I betray Donald John Trump to say my own skin. I refused.”
Navarro’s remarks weren’t just a show of bitterness toward Democrats. They drew out what Republicans have long alleged is a weaponization of the justice system by Democrats against them — even though in Navarro’s and Trump’s convictions, the most prominent so far, jurors found the evidence showed they were at fault.
Navarro went beyond just his own legal troubles, painting a vision of a Biden administration that has intentionally brought destruction to America.
“Joe and Kamala, they threw out the woke blue carpet across the Rio Grande, opened our borders to what? Murderers and rapists,” he said. “When Donald Trump said ‘murderers’ and ‘rapists’ in 2016, they go, ‘Oh, racist.’ Whatever. We read the papers, it’s murderers and rapists. Murderers and rapists, drug cartels, human traffickers, terrorists, Chinese spies and a whole army of illiterate illegal aliens stealing the jobs of Black, brown and blue-collar Americans. They put them right on your front doorstep.”
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Tinashe Chingarande is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
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