Trump Trade Chief Soliciting Private Payments via Substack
The White House told me Peter Navarro's only making money off old writing, but that's not what his Substack says
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White House Senior Counselor for Trade and Manufacturing Peter Navarro — the leading advocate for Pres. Donald Trump’s tariffs — is soliciting and apparently receiving money via his Substack newsletter.
When I informed the White House that Navarro’s Substack solicits revenue with potentially no upper bound — from sources that could remain anonymous even to Navarro, a spokesperson suggested Navarro’s doing nothing wrong.
“All administration officials will comply with conflict of interest requirements,” Principal Deputy Press Secretary Harrison Fields said in a statement.
Former White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter didn’t see it that way, and told me that Navarro’s arrangement is prohibited. Navarro’s track record includes a criminal conviction and ethics scandals.
His Substack launched in 2023. Since his return to the White House, its content has consisted largely of serializing his past work and providing links to transcripts and videos of his media appearances.
Substack reports that Navarro has 29,000+ subscribers and that “thousands” — anything greater than 1,000 — are paying Navarro.
The White House suggested that the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) has signed off on Navarro’s Substack. According to the White House, “Peter may be appropriately compensated for writings prior to his government service, as have many other employees across administrations. He may also make his previous writings available on Substack as part of a subscription service, if he so chooses.”
Navarro doesn’t charge for his new work on Substack, or new writing anywhere else, the White House said. “Paid subscribers receive access to his previous writings, while unpaid subscribers can view material that is reposted from other publicly available websites.”
That’s all true. It also doesn’t account for how Substack works.
It’s not as if Navarro’s old articles come with price tags, and you can buy a PDF for a designated amount. Substack’s subscription structure means that you can just give Navarro however high an amount of money you want. For whatever motive.
That’ll add you to the list of people who can access his old articles, but you might never do that. In other words, paid subscriptions are a way for subscribers to send Navarro money, without even having to disclose their identities in the transaction.
Which doesn’t mean they can’t identify themselves to Navarro later. And Navarro’s position at the center of Trump’s tariffs policies attaches extraordinary value to being in his favor.
His Substack allows anyone to upgrade to a paid subscription in an amount of their own choosing, by using the “founding member” tier. Subscribers can enter amounts starting at $240 and going as high as they want.
Navarro’s own plan descriptions offer benefits that the White House itself suggests would be unethical, including new content such as “early access to videos, the podcast, and other posts.” Paying Navarro also comes with the ability to post comments. The White House, remember, said that payments were for “previous writings.”
The Substack’s language suggests that it predates Navarro’s return to public office. Meaning, he may have set it up this way while in the private sector and simply neglected to update it to conform with governmental ethics and legal requirements.
Which, of course, doesn’t mean he’s not out of compliance. And his new posts continue to solicit paid subscriptions with no mention of access to his old writing. (His author bio also appears not to have been updated, identifying him as “Harvard-trained economist, [and] political prisoner.”)
Navarro’s most recent post sharing an interview he did ends with this pitch for existing subscribers to upgrade to paid, and it’s not for accessing previous writings:
No mention of getting old articles to join “thousands” of paid subscribers to “President Trump’s Chief China Hawk and trade czar.”
Navarro’s pinned post, meaning it’s the first one displayed on his home page even though it’s a year old, is by a contributor other than Navarro, but it includes an upgrade pitch that’s also by no means about accessing old content.
It wouldn’t have posed any legal issues when it was posted last year, but now it’s soliciting support explicitly for Navarro’s political activity:
“If you want to support Peter in his fight on behalf of our Constitution, unpaid subscribers can convert to paid and paid subscribers can always try to share his posts with friends.”
As recently as April, Navarro was listed on Substack’s Leaderboard of top 100 bestselling political newsletters, as I noted on my other, NSFW Substack at the time. That list tracks not total subscribers, but paid subscribers. In late April, Navarro was #97.
I also noted that Navarro was posting at the time about how to make money in the stock market based on news and “other market-moving events.” His post didn’t mention that the book he was serializing is two decades old.
Readers who found Navarro’s April 16, 2025, post only would have known that, just a couple weeks after Liberation Day and the tariff-inspired cardiac event for Wall Street, Trump’s top tariff advocate was selling advice (albeit with a seven-day free trial) for how to get stock returns off the news.
Neither the Trump White House ethics office nor the media shop responded to my request for Navarro’s financial-disclosure form, which should have listed his Substack revenue and, in theory, where it was coming from. (Unless Substack paid Navarro to post on the platform, his only Substack revenue would originate from his subscribers.)
But Painter, former ethics attorney for the Pres. George W. Bush White House, told me he believes Navarro’s position makes him subject to the ethics rules that require senior officials to submit financial-disclosure forms.
“Sources of outside earned income need to be disclosed on the form,” Painter said. “This also may be a violation of restrictions on outside earned income of presidential appointees,” he added, citing federal regulations that apply to some non-career employees.
“The reason full time appointees of the president are prohibited from receiving any outside earned income per the regulation is that it is too easy for people to pay bribes, gifts and other inducements via outside earned income,” Painter said. “Substack subscriptions would be one of many examples. So it's just prohibited.”
And this is hardly Navarro’s brush with the laws, let alone ethics.
He famously lied in his book about tariffs, creating a fictitious source, Ron Vara, by creating an anagram of his own last name.
Navarro literally did time just last year, a fact he used to solicit paid subscriptions on Substack.
He served four months for refusing to comply with a lawful subpoena from Congress requiring his cooperation with the investigation of the 2020-2021 attempt to oust Congress and usurp the presidency.
In a separate case, the Justice Department sued him in 2022 for having circumvented official records laws during the first Trump administration by using a private email account for government business and retaining government records. Now answering to Trump, the Justice Department dropped the charges last week without explanation.
And just this morning, Dave Levinthal reported that another Trump appointee, Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, is also profiting off a Substack. (Disclosure: I am quoted in that article addressing similar ethical issues that apply to Navarro.)
I’m a veteran journalist and TV news producer who’s worked at MSNBC — as co-creator of Up w/ Chris Hayes and senior producer for Countdown with Keith Olbermann — CNN, ABCNews, The Daily Show, Air America Radio, and TYT. My original reporting on Substack is made possible by a handful of paid subscribers. Thank you.
I’m gobsmacked by all of this. I followed the links and saw him yesterday talking about the bill and “fake news” on his current Substack. Of course he’s making money and it must be disclosed! Thank you for tracking this grift.
So many ways to launder money - I’ve wondered about some private sellers on Amazon who offer items priced at, say, $2 by everyone else, and they are selling it for $1,500. I thought this was just silliness until just now when the penny finally dropped. Well, duh. What a dandy little fund raiser idea to reach donors in the know.