YES, BOSS

Peter Navarro, a tariff cheerleader, created the template of sycophancy for Trump Administration officials.

- BY IAN PARKER

In March, 2016, Peter Navarro introduced himself to students in Managing Geopolitical Risk in an Age of a Rising China, a new undergraduate course at the University of California, Irvine. Donald Trump was then a month away from becoming the presumptive Republican nominee for President. Navarro, who had tenure at the business school, was an academic oddity: he worked at a research university, but he'd done little serious research since finishing his doctorate in economics, at Harvard, thirty years earlier. And he didn't seem to enjoy contact with students. A former friend of his, an economist, recently said, “I don't think he liked teaching that much—he liked talking.” Navarro had secured a life of privilege and frustration. He lived in a big house in Laguna Beach with an ocean view and a pool surrounded by statuary. But he plainly yearned to be somewhere, or someone, else.

Professors often develop side hustles. But Navarro had long sought to trade his academic status for a more dazzling form of power—mayor of San Diego, stock guru, Democratic congressman, television host. He'd largely failed in these ambitions, thanks in part to traits he recognized in himself: he was arrogant, abrasive, and disdainful. “The problem was my personality,” Navarro wrote, in an account of his struggles as a political candidate. Although he once compared his charisma to Barack Obama's, he knew that many who met him regarded him as an asshole. He was always getting into spats. Shortly before Navarro's new course began, he sent an email to John Graham, another U.C. Irvine professor, asking, “Are you frigging deaf, dumb, and blind?”

Navarro had first pitched his class in a mass email to thirty thousand students. That spring, only seventeen had enrolled. The room could have held a hundred. “He was not a prominent professor,” one of the students who'd chosen to take the course recently recalled.