... Mar, 2016. As Donald Trump's election campaign begins to pick up steam, Trump asks his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to do some economic policy research on China. So Kushner does what any serious, meritocratically selected special adviser would do: he browsed a few book covers on Amazon, found one with an edgy title ("Death By China,") and cold-called the author, Peter Navarro, inviting him to become the then-sole economic advisor for the Trump campaign.
Navarro, well-known for his protectionist approach to foreign policy, put together a plan that hundreds of economists publicly opposed, with Simon Johnson, a Nobel laureate in Economics, claiming it was "based on assumptions so unrealistic that they seem to have come from a different planet."
May, 2018. Despite writing several books on China, Navarro, now Trump's Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, visits the country for the first time. Navarro is part of a delegation tasked with easing trade tensions between China and the U.S.
It doesn't go well.
Having already imposed tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminium, and assured Americans that trade wars were "good and easy to win," Trump placed further tariffs on Chinese goods, prompting China to hit back with ...
October, 2019. The Chronicle of Higher Education publishes an article about a Harvard-educated economics professor named Ron Vara, who Navarro cites Vara repeatedly in Death by China and several other books. Vara's name even starts popping up on memos in Washington, advocating for further escalation of trade tensions in the form of yet more tariffs.
Yet strangely enough, they can't find any record of Vara at Harvard or anywhere else. And that's because Ron Vara didn't exist. Navarro made him up to make the ideas in his books seem more legitimate and his policy proposals seem more popular than they were.
But hey, I'm sure nothing bad will come of putting America's economic policy in the hands of a guy who lied about his expertise, right? What could possibly go wrong? ...
