Mr Trump has pulled the US out of the TPP but the White House last month announced Mr Quinn would serve on the NEC as a “special assistant to the president” for international trade.
The appointment of Mr Quinn drew a howl of protest from Breitbart, the rightwing web site Mr Bannon used to lead. It labelled the career official an “enemy within” the Trump administration earlier this month.
“[Mr] Quinn’s support for not just the TPP but for multilateralism, in general, is diametrically opposed to the . . . approach [on trade] that helped Donald Trump get elected,” Breitbart wrote.
But his appointment and Mr Navarro’s apparent sidelining have helped ease some foreign officials’ concerns about the prospects of the Trump administration acting on campaign threats to raise tariffs and take other aggressive steps that could lead to a trade war.
Officials from some countries seeking meetings with Mr Navarro have been steered to Mr Cohn’s staff instead. Others have begun speaking directly to Mr Cohn or other senior officials like Jared Kushner, Mr Trump’s son-in-law, on issues such as the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
“The situation is less worrying than it was two months ago because [Mr] Navarro seems to be more and more marginalised,” said one European official. “His influence seems to be diminishing quickly.”
Thea Lee, a top trade official at the AFL-CIO, the US’s largest union, and a member of the president’s recently-appointed manufacturing council, said that Mr Trump appeared to be bending to the growing influence of the administration’s Wall Street veterans and walking away from his campaign promise for a fresh approach to trade.
“At the moment it appears that the Wall Street wing of the Trump administration is winning this battle and the Wall Street wing is in favour of the status quo in terms of US trade policy,” Ms Lee said.
