In the three tumultuous years that followed, a huge cast of characters has drifted in and out of the orbit of the United States President - winning favour with Trump before eventually being sent into exile. But not Navarro, whom Trump refers to affectionately as "my Peter". He remains in the President's inner sanctum as the administration's director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy. "My function, really, as an economist is to try to provide the underlying analytics that confirm his intuition," Navarro said in an interview with Bloomberg. "And his intuition is always right in these matters." Navarro is Trump's China muse, the voice in his ear egging him on, urging him to trust his instincts and not back down in his conflict with Chinese President Xi Jinping. If his views on China were any more hawkish, he would be covered in feathers and circling the sky with a rat between his teeth. Loading The outcome of the US-China trade war will have profound consequences for countries such as Australia, caught in the middle of two feuding superpowers. And it will depend, in no small part, on how persuasive Navarro proves to be.

If you asked any economist in North America to name the 10,000 best economists in the country, Peter Navarro would not appear on the list. Economist Justin Wolfers It's a situation that terrifies Australian economist Justin Wolfers, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan. He regards Navarro as a dangerous crank. "The policies he is pushing in the White House have zero credibility among professional economists," Wolfers says. "Not just among academic economists but on Wall Street as well. "If you asked any economist in North America to name the 10,000 best economists in the country, Peter Navarro would not appear on the list." When a New Yorker journalist reporting on the 2016 election campaign asked Navarro to identify any economists who agreed with his views, he provided two names. One distanced himself from Navarro's ideas and the other said he did not have an economics degree. Patrick Chovanec, chief strategist at wealth management firm Silvercrest Asset Management, says Navarro's emergence as a China guru came as a shock to experts in the field. "There was a lot of discussion about whether he had ever been to China," says Chovanec, a former professor at Beijing's Tsinghua University. "Even China critics thought the picture he painted in Death By China was cartoonish and not an accurate depiction of reality."

In the opening pages of Death By China, published in 2011, Navarro argued that China was "rapidly turning into the planet’s most efficient assassin". "On the consumer safety front, unscrupulous Chinese entrepreneurs are flooding world markets with a range of bone-crushing, cancer-causing, flammable, poisonous, and otherwise lethal products, foods, and drugs," Navarro and co-author Greg Autry wrote. "Even as thousands literally die from this onslaught of Chinese junk and poison the American economy and its workers are suffering a no-less-painful 'death to the American manufacturing base'." Loading A film version of the book, narrated by actor Martin Sheen, was even more alarmist. The opening scene showed a serrated knife with "Made in China" written on it plunging into a map of the US, causing a massive eruption of blood. The Hollywood Reporter said the film was "so garish in tone it encourages viewers to view it as propaganda". But Navarro's views, once seen as fringe, have now become mainstream in Washington's foreign policy community. China hawks are ascendent in the US capital, where there is growing agreement that China poses a uniquely menacing threat to American power and prosperity.

From this vantage point, Navarro looks less like a crank than a prophet. "At the time Death By China came out it was seen as laughable," Chovanec says. "But now that's where much of the thinking in DC has moved to." Hawk in the chicken coop If Navarro had his way, he would not be serving as a behind-the-scenes adviser to a Republican President. He would be an elected Democratic politician. During his two decades as a professor at the University of California, Irvine, Navarro ran for office five times as a Democrat - including bids to become the mayor of San Diego and a US congressman. He lost every time.

Peter Navarro's 2012 documentary Death by China positions China as a threat to the US economy. Those who worked with Navarro say it was his abrasive personality, rather than his policies, that cost him victory. "He was right about a lot of things," Larry Remer, a San Diego political consultant who managed Navarro’s campaigns, told Time magazine."But he was just an a–hole." Navarro had an eclectic academic career that included publishing several get-rich-quick books before he set his sights on China. He has said that his interest in the topic was sparked by seeing his graduate students struggle to find jobs in a globalised economy. In 2006 he published The Coming China Wars, which argued that "China's breakneck industrialisation is placing it on a collision course with the entire world". Then came Death By China and Crouching Tiger: What China's Militarism Means For The World. Despite joining the Trump campaign early on, Navarro was sidelined during the early months of his presidency. Trump's first chief economic adviser Gary Cohn, a former Goldman Sachs executive and avowed free trader, tried to have Navarro fired and described him as "the source of all the chaos in this building".

When that proved unsuccessful, Cohn teamed up with other White House advisers to limit Navarro's access to the President. "Where the hell is my Peter?" journalist Bob Woodward quotes Trump saying in his book Fear: Trump In The White House. "I haven’t talked to Peter Navarro in two months." But Cohn left the White House last year after clashing with Trump over his tariff policies. His departure allowed Navarro to reassert his influence. Peter Navarro (far right) in the Oval Office in 2017 with (from left) US Vice-President Mike Pence, President Donald Trump and then White House chief of staff Reince Priebus. Credit:New York Times Wolfers says Navarro has provided intellectual ballast for the three main planks of Trumpian economics. The first is the belief that tariffs make the US economy stronger, a view he says "may have had some credibility in the late 1700s". The second is the view that trading relationships are a zero-sum game and that one country can only prosper at the expense of another. Third is a fixation on the loss of traditionally masculine manufacturing jobs, ignoring the rise of jobs in the service sector. Chovanec says the result of the US-China trade war will depend on whether economic nationalists like Navarro carry the day with Trump or more traditional small government Republicans.