PETER NAVARRO'S NO-GOOD ECONOMIC NATIONALISM

PETER NAVARRO IS a loser. Literally.

- ERIC BOEHM

He has run for office five times and never won. He has never gained approval from the Senate to occupy an official cabinet post. He started a trade war that may not technically be lost yet, but it hasn’t been a roaring success by any account.

And yet, somehow, he’s become one of the most powerful people on the planet.

In a presidential administration that quickly jettisoned the few serious economists who signed on to help steer it away from catastrophe, Navarro has been the perfect fit. He’s a tough-talking Democrat-turned-Republican who maintains a set of deeply held beliefs that influence his policy choices and who refuses to be compelled by expert opinion or facts. He has no governing experience and recognizes a few of the practical or institutional limits on governmental behavior. In many ways, he is a magic mirror for President Donald Trump: He reflects Trump’s ethos and ideas but adds enhancements and policy details that would likely otherwise elude the president.

By anointing Navarro as, effectively, the czar of a new “economic nationalism” project that disdains free trade and delivers corporate handouts to favored firms, the Trump administration—and, by extension, the GOP—hasn’t found a new formula for winning elections or countering China. Instead, Republicans have embraced a warmed-over variant of what they once would have recognized and denounced as the losing economic policies of the political left.

“I DON’T KNOW why so many people in America hate Hillary Clinton; I found her to be one of the most gracious, intelligent, perceptive, and, yes, classy women I have ever met,” wrote Navarro—yes, the same Peter Navarro—in 1999’s