Peter Navarro Invented an Expert for His Books, Based on Himself(2019)

Summary

Peter Navarro, a top White House trade adviser, has developed a reputation in Washington as a Rasputin-like China hawk who whispers anti-China musings in President Trump’s ear.This week, Washington learned about the mysterious anti-China voice that has long whispered in Mr. Navarro’s ear: Ron Vara.Ron Vara has appeared as a cryptic voice of economic wisdom more than a dozen times in five of Mr. Navarro’s 13 books, dispensing musings like “You’ve got to be nuts to eat Chinese food” and “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.”But Ron Vara, it turns out, does not exist. At least not in corporeal form. He is apparently a figment of Mr. Navarro’s imagination — an anagram of Mr. Navarro’s surname that the trade adviser created as a Hitchcockian writing device and stuck with as something of an inside joke with himself. Mr. Navarro’s imaginary source surfaced this week when The Chronicle of Higher Education published some of the findings of Tessa Morris-Suzuki, an emeritus professor at Australian National University. Ms. Morris-Suzuki, concerned about Mr. Navarro’s statements on China, started digging into his earlier work. She unearthed about a dozen instances when Mr. Navarro, previously a business school professor at the University of California, Irvine, had invoked Ron Vara. Curious why she could find no record of such a person, she soon discovered he was not real.“I think it’s a very strange thing for an academic to do in books that he is presenting as factual,” Ms. Morris-Suzuki said in an email. “It might be different if a writer — even a university-based one — were writing something that was obviously lighthearted and comical and in a nonacademic context.”Mr. Navarro holds a doctorate in economics from Harvard University. His interests shifted from utility regulation to investment strategy before he latched on to China, becoming a notorious hawk whose anti-Chi...