Do you remember like when and why and how we started talking about tariffs in the first place?

It was in his first campaign for president. Trump didn't really have any formal economic advisors. So he told his son-in-law, Jared, to find him an economic advisor. Trump reportedly gave Jared some vague ideas of what his thoughts were on economic issues. You know, something, something, "make me look tough," "China bad," something, something.

Um, Jared then decided to find his father-in-law a financial advisor for his presidential campaign by going on the amazon.com website and starting to browse books. Not like reading the books, because you can't do that on the Amazon website. He was just looking at the covers, looking at the titles. And he found a book title that he thought was so cool. The title was Death by China. "Oh my god, that's so cool. That's so awesome." And that apparently was it.

Death by China, co-authored by a man named Peter Navarro. Jared then cold-called Navarro, a well-known trade deficit hawk who agreed to join the team as an economic adviser. Navarro was a major advocate for an aggressive pro-tariff policy. Where did Peter Navarro get his idea that tariffs would be a good policy for America? What was his like backup for that conviction? Well, he did have backup from a "real expert" who he cited in at least a half dozen of his books, including the one that Jared found on Amazon that fateful day.

In all of his books, Peter Navarro has cited an economics expert to justify his views. And the economics expert he cites is somebody named Ron Vara, V-A-R-A, Ron Vara.

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 in trade policy. According to The New York Times, the memo had been quote "sent from an email address purportedly belonging to Ron Vara". At one point, Ron Vara wrote in the memo that Trump could quote "ride the tariffs to victory". 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.

Who is Ron Vara? Ron Vara is an anagram of Navarro, which is his last name.

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 six trillion dollars 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 2008 and what the pandemic inflicted upon us in 2020. This time, the global disaster is Donald Trump's big brain.