WASHINGTON — From inventing a fake economist for his nonfiction books to pushing a fake COVID cure to serving time in prison for refusing to tell Congress about his plan to steal the 2020 election for his boss, Peter Navarro may have reached the pinnacle of his career: coming up with the tariff scheme that was on its way to tanking the American economy until it was throttled back.
As the majority of mainstream economists ridicule President Donald Trump’s system of taxing imports from other nations based on their trade deficits, Navarro, 75, defends it under his belief that it is bad for the United States to import more from a country than Americans export to it.
In fact, he said he is so convinced of the soundness of his analysis that he predicts that markets roiled by trade wars will soon soar beyond anyone’s expectations.
“Dow: 50,000. I guarantee that, and I guarantee no recession,” he said Monday on Fox News — two days before Trump abruptly put a 90-day pause on the most aggressive of the tariffs.
Tessa Morris-Suzuki, the retired Australian National University professor of East Asian studies who first brought to light Navarro’s invented quotes from an invented economist — “Ron Vara,” an anagram of Navarro — in his supposedly nonfiction books, said she has been monitoring Navarro/Vara’s charge into the abyss from afar.
“I have been watching the Ron Vara plan for the U.S. and global economy with much interest,” she told HuffPost. “This policy has all the trademark traits of Peter Navarro’s earlier work: Slap a few dramatic thought-bubbles together and try to make it look as though they are based on serious research.”
Peter Navarro speaks after President Donald Trump announced “reciprocal” tariffs in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 13, 2025. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images
Fortunately for Navarro, he does not need to persuade other economists that he is correct — only Trump, who already shares those same views. Indeed, Navarro was recruited to work for Trump’s first presidential run in 2016 by son-in-law Jared Kushner, who found Navarro’s name by searching for anti-China books on Amazon’s website.
Navarro then moved to the White House as a trade policy adviser during Trump’s first term, but in those years was countered and often blocked out by other aides with more orthodox views, such as former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and former National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn.
This time around, Navarro has encountered little pushback from Trump’s top economic advisers against his tariff regime, as current NEC Director Kevin Hassett and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, considered relatively mainstream voices, both publicly support it.
The only opposition Navarro has seen is from Trump’s biggest campaign benefactor, billionaire Elon Musk, who has — thus far with little success — advocated for eliminating tariffs entirely among trading partners.
And when Navarro went on cable TV to claim that Musk’s electric vehicle company Tesla was not so much a car “manufacturer” as it was a car “assembler” using lots of foreign parts, Musk unleashed a tirade on social media, calling Navarro a “moron,” “dumber than a sack of bricks,” and “Peter Retarrdo.”
Navarro did not respond to queries from HuffPost.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump is not bothered by the disagreement. “Boys will be boys,” she said at a briefing on Tuesday, telling Americans they should be “grateful” that Trump’s administration is so “transparent” that it holds arguments in public.
Navarro began in academia after getting his doctorate in economics from Harvard University, teaching at the University of California, San Diego and then the University of San Diego before settling in at the University of California, Irvine as a business professor. Along the way, he ran unsuccessful political campaigns for San Diego mayor, San Diego city council and the U.S. House of Representatives.
It was at Irvine that Navarro invented Ron Vara, supposedly an economist and military veteran prone to pithy quips about whatever topic Navarro happened to be writing about in his most recent book.
“Ride the stock market cycle — or be run over,” Vara told Navarro for his book, “When the Market Moves, Will You Be Ready,” which came out in 2003.
In later years, as Navarro started writing about China as America’s greatest threat, it turned out Vara had strong views about that, too. “Only the Chinese can turn a leather sofa into an acid bath, a baby crib into a lethal weapon, and a cellphone battery into heart-piercing shrapnel,” Vara warned in Navarro’s 2011 book, “Death by China.”
Navarro laughed off his fabulism when he was finally confronted with the fabrication six years ago after Morris-Suzuki deduced what he had done. Navarro’s willingness to play loose with facts, though, in coming years endangered American lives and then American democracy itself.
As the COVID pandemic struck in 2020, Navarro became a proponent of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment, even getting into public arguments with actual medical experts who found that it was not effective against the disease. Navarro was not alone in the Trump administration pushing it — Trump himself did so — and the resulting confusion likely contributed to the United States having one of the highest COVID death rates among wealthy industrialized countries.
And by the end of that year, Navarro was energetically pushing another pro-Trump conspiracy theory: that Trump had actually won the 2020 election but was cheated out of his victory by Democrats. Navarro went on to promote his “Green Bay Sweep” plan to have Congress send back the election certifications from six key states won by Democrat Joe Biden in an attempt to overturn the election.
Navarro then refused to testify about those efforts before the House Jan. 6 committee, resulting in a congressional contempt finding and, ultimately, four months in federal prison.
But just as his fictional book source did not hurt his academic career and reckless COVID advice did not harm his standing in the Trump White House, the felony conviction and prison sentence did not stop him from returning as a top trade adviser to Trump ― a fellow felon and liar who decades ago would call gossip columnists pretending to a top Trump aide named John Barron to plant positive news items about his “boss.”
“I can’t help remembering that Navarro described his expert source Ron Vara in ‘If It’s Raining In Brazil, Buy Starbucks,’ as a ‘Dark Prince of Disaster’ who has ‘made a very large fortune’ profiting from the consequences of natural and human-made catastrophes,” Morris-Suzuki said. “Looking at what’s happening in the U.S. and the rest of the world at the moment, I guess Peter Navarro’s imaginary friend is laughing all the way to the bank.”