Rachel Maddow Explains the ‘Ridiculous’ True Story That Inspired Trump’s Tariffs Plan | Video

To say the origins of Trump’s sweeping international tariffs are dubious is an understatement, Rachel Maddow said on her MSNBC show on Friday night as she outlined exactly how we got here. Trump “came up with the idea” after the circulation of a “fake memo from a fake person with a fake email address,” she explained.

The memo in question was the brainchild of author and economist Peter Navarro — also the senior counselor for trade and manufacturing for the administration — who entered the Trump sphere after Jared Kushner found his book “Death by China” and asked him to join Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign as an economic adviser.

In his books, Maddow continued, Navarro often cited the work of a so-called economics expert named Ron Vara. “V-A-R-A, Ron Vara,” Maddow said. “Vara” shared a memo in Washington D.C. circles after Trump won the presidency

“At one point, Ron Vara wrote in the memo that Trump could, quote, ‘Ride the tariffs to victory,'” Maddow said. 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, this person, Ron Vara, is a made-up person.”

“He is a fictional 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,” she continued. “Who is Ron Vara? Ron Vara is an anagram of Navarro, which is his last name.”

“I mean, my name anagrams to Macho Wattler, but I don’t see myself trying to talk you into doing what Macho Wattler wants, right?” Maddow said.

At the beginning of the segment Maddow pointed to two previous peaks in the VIX index, which measures stock market volatility. The two most recent were in 2008, during the global recession, and in March 2020 at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

There’s a third peak, she continued, that represents the US economy now, and that peak was “not caused by the biggest financial catastrophe since the Great Depression or a global pandemic that’s killing millions of people.”

“That one [was] caused simply by Donald Trump being president again with his great ideas. And the scale of what he’s doing, the scale of the destruction that he has wrought is a little bit hard to get your head around,” Maddow added.

“It is hard to get your head around how much damage this one man can cause. I think it’s even harder to get your head around simultaneously the fact that he can do damage of this magnitude with such a teeny, tiny, teeny, teeny, tiny amount of thought,” she said. “You think it would take like a grand plan and some big brains to figure out how to destroy the economy of the richest nation on earth, but that’s not how it’s working out. Turns out it doesn’t take a big idea or a lot of big brains working together.”

Watch the clip from “The Rachel Maddow Show” in the video above.

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