GRtak
Forum Addict
Trump really knows how to pick his advisors.
https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/20191015-navarro
Trump's 'China Muse' Has an Imaginary Friend
More at the link.
https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/20191015-navarro
Trump's 'China Muse' Has an Imaginary Friend
So who is Ron Vara? He didn’t seem to exist except in the work of Peter Navarro. The most information Morris-Suzuki could find came from Navarro’s 2001 book, If It’s Raining in Brazil, Buy Starbucks (McGraw-Hill). In that book, which lays out Navarro’s plan for how to profit by paying attention to bad news, the reader learns that Vara was a “struggling doctoral student in economics” at Harvard in the mid-1980s, slogging away on a thesis about utilities regulation.
Morris-Suzuki, now in full detective mode, sent emails to some colleagues at Harvard, but no one could turn up any record of Vara.
While Ron Vara appears not to have attended Harvard in the 1980s, Navarro did. He was a doctoral student in economics who published research on, as it happens, utilities regulation. Not all of Vara’s biography lines up with Navarro’s (Ron Vara, for example, was a military reservist during the first Gulf War, back when Navarro was a 40-something economics professor), but there was enough overlap to arouse suspicion.
And there was another tip-off: “Ron Vara” is an anagram of “Navarro.”
More at the link.