The Pretenders

On Sunday morning, 4/8/18, Donald Trump tweeted: “‘The ‘Washington Post’ is far more fiction than fact.  Story after story is made up garbage. More like a poorly written novel than good reporting. Always quoting sources (not named), many of which don’t exist.  Story on John Kelly isn’t true, just another hit job.” Shortly after Trump’s angry outburst, Peter Navarro appeared on “Meet the Press” and like a faithful soldier, fired more shots at the Post : “When you read stuff in ‘The Washington Post,’ frankly, that’s fake news most of the time.”  Both these men know full well what they are doing as they work to cripple the most effective means of holding politicians (especially corrupt ones) accountable to the public. As Dean Baquet, editor of “The New York Times” puts it, Trump and his minions’ relentless attacks on the media, and specifically “The Washington Post” and “The New York Times,” are “out of control” and undermining “the civic life and debate of the country.”

Many reporters and pundits have noticed an irony that would be comical if it weren’t depressing of Trump’s, and now Navarro’s, allegations that the two most prominent and important newspapers are fabricating false stories and presenting those stories are factual and true.  But a reasonably close examination of both these men demonstrates that when one lives in glass houses it’s wise to throw no stones.

Peter Navarro holds a P.h.D in economics from Harvard University.  Unlike Trump, he is a man who appears intellectually curious and scholarly.  However, a brief review of his academic work since his graduate school days tells another story.  Over the years, Navarro has strayed from his initial scholarly expertise to expound obsessively on the trade imbalance with China.  That obsession is what pulled him into Trump’s political orbit. Trump, of course, has no capacity to judge Navarro’s level of “expertise.”  And after reading the titles of several of Navarro’s books on China, one might be fooled into thinking Navarro might have worthwhile insights about the trade imbalance with China.  But such thoughts evaporate quickly when one surveys the field of experts on China and learns that Navarro’s views are generally dismissed as those of a shallow crank.

Melissa Chan, writing in “Foreign Policy,” quoted Kenneth Pomeranz, professor of Chinese history at the University of Chicago, who stated that Navarro “generally avoided people who actually know something about [China].”  Chan also cited James McGregor, former chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, who noted that “Navarro’s books on China ‘have close to zero credibility with people who know the country.’”

Dan Ikenson, expressed a similar view regarding Navarro’s qualifications as an expert on trade with China: “The economic illiteracy that animates Navarro’s policy prescription is startling.”  Furthermore, Ikenson called the selection of Navarro to head Tramp’s trade commision an “assault on the fundamental premise that public policy should be rooted in fact and reason.” (thehill.com) Finally, Ikenson’s colleague at the Cato Institute, Ryan Bourne, outlines Navarro’s deep ignorance of the economics of trade policy with China in his “The Spectacular Economic Ignorance of Peter Navarro.”  WWW.cato.org

With all of these serious indictments of Navarro’s competence, it is rather shocking that someone so lacking in the requisite qualifications for the position of Director of the White House National Trade Council should have been given such a sensitive and important job.  But as the country has witnessed during Trump’s tenure, flattery counts for much more than competence. Navarro’s own words illustrate that those who work for Trump must speak the tongue that Trump speaks, no matter how specious or flat out false:

“This is the president’s vision. My function, really, as an economist is to try to provide the underlying analytics that confirm his intuition. And his intuition is always right in these matters,” Navarro said. For him, Trump is “The owner, the coach, and the quarterback...The rest of us are all interchangeable parts.” Bloomberg, March 7, 2018

Navarro’s function  is to “confirm [Trump’s] intuition?  And Trump’s “intuition is always right”?  Has spending too much time in the Trump echo chamber rendered Navarro deaf?  Surely he must hear the absurd, propagandistic tone of this statement. Can he seriously believe economic policy should be driven by Trump’s economic instincts, which to put mildly, can be described as crude, crass and ignoble?  Perhaps Navarro is more interested in achieving the public “prestige” and “national recognition he believes he’ll garner from working in the Trump administration; sadly, his already dubious reputation is being annihilated in the process.  When all of his specious ideas and writings about China are alloyed with his sycophantic posturing toward Trump, his moaning about “fake news” becomes all the more utterly ridiculous.

On the other hand, Trump’s howling continually over how “fake news” reports are sullying his “good name” has probably done more harm to the civic discourse, beyond any damage the media could have ever inflicted upon his already deservedly tarnished reputation.  Of course, Trump’s complaints are (like Navarro’s) never rooted in “fact and reason,” since the real facts have exposed the many accurate accounts of his salacious behavior and shady business practices. The media has done excellent work in reporting the gaping flaws in Trump’s decision making process since he been in office.  

Many news organizations have documented his lack of any serious, intellectual depth or open-mindedness when selecting advisors or formulating policy.  Indeed, the process by which he selected Peter Navarro depicts what is woefully lacking in this president’s methods. When he wanted someone to serve as an advisor for his National Trade Council he asked son-in-law “Jared Kushner to find some research supporting his protectionist trade views.  Kushner responded by going on Amazon, where he found a book titled ‘Death by China.’ So he cold-called Navarro...who [then] became the campaign’s first economic advisor.” (Paul Krugman, NY Times).

In the film “Apocalypse Now,” Colonel  Kurtz asks Martin Sheen’s character, Captain Willard, “Are my methods unsound?”  To which Willard responds, “I see no method at all.” Well, Trump has a method, but it is that of an overgrown juvenile who lacks discipline and maturity.  His inability to even remotely comprehend all that was exceedingly wrong with the process he used to hire Navarro demonstrates just how juvenile his mind is.  This same juvenile mentality compels him to obsessively watch “Fox and Friends.” Charles Blow of “The New York Times,” in his op-ed essay, “Horror of Being Governed by ‘Fox & Friends,’” (4/8/18) reminds readers that Trump’s main morning ritual is this three hour program.  The show unctuously massages Trump’s ego, with the hosts tripping over each other to lavish him with praise, and sprinkle talking points for him to tweet frenetically throughout the day. Blow’s essay provides links to articles that substantiate the intentional misrepresentations the hosts disseminate (and on another show that purports to be “Fair and Balanced”), as they  perform their role as a propaganda broadcast for Trump.

The real fabricators of fake news, commentary and disinformation are Trump, Navarro, many in the administration and all those on talk shows and radio programs that continue to make alternative narratives of Orwellian proportions.  The deceit these two particular pretenders, Trump and Navarro, have perpetrated on the American public and their unrelenting attacks on the media, necessitate the strong tonic of an unruly and vociferous genuine media to scald this administration with undiluted truth until Trump’s day of reckoning comes, which given some recent development might be sooner than we could have hoped for.