Trump’s tariff guru is a phantom, says American TV host

KARACHI: In her weekly show on MSNBC, American TV host and political commentator Rachel Maddow revealed last week that the origins of Trump’s recent tariffs is his dependence on his trade consultant Peter Navarro who used a fake economic expert to push his tariffs agenda.

Maddow first started off by explaining -- reminding, in fact -- where Trump “got the tariff thing from in the first place”. Saying that it was in his first campaign for president, Maddow revealed that Trump asked his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to find him an economic adviser after giving him “some vague ideas of what his thoughts were on economic issues....You know, some something something, make me look tough, China bad, something something”

Amusingly, Jared apparently went on to Amazon.com, “browsed’ books and then found a book title “ he thought was so cool. The title was ‘Death by China’. Oh my god. That’s so cool”. The book was written by Peter Navarro who got a cold call from Jared and agreed to join Trump’s team as an economic adviser.

Apparently, Navarro was the one who advocated for an aggressive pro-tariff policy. According to Maddow, Navarro got his idea from an expert he had cited in half a dozen books.

That expert, Maddow said, was someone called Ron Vara. Per Maddow, when Trump won the presidency and entered the White House, “this Ron Vara started circulating a memo around Washington in support of Trump using tariffs and trade policy. According to the New York Times, the memo had been ‘sent from an email address purportedly belonging to Ron Vara’.

And then Maddow dropped the bombshell: “The problem is Ron Vara doesn’t exist. He never has. The economics expert that Peter Navarro has long cited to explain why he’s so gung-ho on tariffs is a made-up person.... Peter Navarro invented Ron Vara as his expert source so he could quote this expert source over and over and over again in his crackpot books”.

In an even more bizarre twist, Ron Vara is an anagram of Navarro. Rachel Maddow concluded with this pointed note: “That’s where Trump came up with the tariff idea. Circulating a fake memo from a fake person with a fake email address in order to make it look like this was a serious issue being debated by real experts. That is the intellectual basis on which Donald Trump today wiped $6,000,000,000,000 of wealth out of existence and crashed America’s markets and brought America and the world to the brink of a self-inflicted on-purpose global great depression along the lines of what we had in 02/2008 and what the pandemic inflicted upon us in 2020. This time, the global disaster is Donald Trump’s big brain.”