POLI•RANT: Peter Navarro — Arsonist as Fire Chief

The stupidity is staggering.

Make no mistake, Trump is the single wanna-be dictator driving the course of our economy with his idiotic tariff policy whose damage is only just beginning. The idea that one single person could have that much power over the economy is antithetical to everything our Founders believed.

But, since we’ve (at least momentarily) backed away from the cliff of a global economic collapse it’s a good time to bring up the brains behind Trump’s tariff philosophy. You’ve likely heard the name Peter Navarro, but let me refresh your memory and let you know at least one thing that I only learned last week.

I can’t think of anyone that has ever wielded so much economic sway over a POTUS being further outside the economic philosophical mainstream — conservative or liberal. Navarro is a nut job, pure and simple. He was in Trump 1.0 preaching his tariff bullshit, but there were still enough adults in the room to temper him. He was only successful in talking Trump into tariffing China which was an abject failure, wounding American farmers until we all bailed them out.

But, Navarro also took a bullet for Trump — refusing a Congressional subpoena and eventually serving some time in the slammer — the type of mob boss loyalty that might even make Trump’s little mushroom twitch a bit.

Now Navarro’s back and (at any given moment) has the ear of the dude with not so much beyond it.

You might not remember, but the story goes that in Trump 1.0 Jared found Navarro — a once quasi-respected Harvard economist before gave himself a philosophical lobotomy — searching on Amazon. I assume Jared did his due diligence, looking for someone whose ideas might match up with some of his father in law’s scattershot turd notions that Trump has polished into diamonds in his lizard brain over the decades.

I knew the Amazon story before — and it was funny in a pathetic kind of way. Mainly funny because he didn’t have the power he does now. At least until he doesn’t. Who knows, this administration is run on the whims of an idiot.

But, what I missed (back in 2019) was what Navarro wrote in a number of his books. Six of them to be exact. To bolster his nutty theories — and spew racist shit at Asia — Navarro used a supposed doctoral student at Harvard named Ron Vara to agree and chime in with him throughout the books.

The funny thing about Ron Vara is that he’s completely fictional. And these weren’t supposed to be fictional books on trade policy. In fact, Ron Vara is actually an anagram for Navarro.

See, funny!

Navarro claimed this was a “whimsical device” but his publishing company felt the need to put a warning on all future editions.

This is the kind of thing that would get any publishing professor fired and ruin the career of any economist of any note. Now the Amazon dude with the fake source is driving us into a recession.

I guess all you can do just add it to the insane pile of truly unbelievable and inconceivable things that now happen every day.

And Trump probably loved the idea.

He himself made up a Trump spokesperson, John Barron, who would call publicists and try to plant fake stories on how many women he had bedded — including Madonna in her prime — and what an absolute stud he, I mean Mr. Trump, was.