'Doesn’t exist!’ Maddow exposes Trump ally who invented expert — using anagram of his name

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow walked her viewers on Friday through the origin story of how President Donald Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, joined the MAGA team during his first presidential run – and brought a phantom source with him to Washington, D.C.

“You’d think it would take like a grand plan and some big brains to figure out how to destroy the economy of the richest nation on Earth, but that's not how it's working out,” the primetime host told viewers during her show’s opening monologue. “Turns out, it doesn't take a big idea or a lot of big brains working together.”

Maddow noted that Trump tasked son-in-law Jared Kushner with finding him an economic adviser, a search that led Kushner to Amazon, where he landed on one of Navarro’s books. That’s when things took a turn for Maddow, who said Friday that Navarro wasn’t the only figure who helped craft Trump’s tariff policy.

“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,” who, Maddow added, sent out a memo around Washington at the start of Trump’s first administration touting the benefits of a tariff policy.

“The problem is, Ron Vara doesn't exist, he never has,” Maddow said. “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. Peter Navarro invented Ron Vara as his expert source, so he could quote this expert source over and over and over again in his crackpot books.”

ALSO READ: 'We’ve made a mistake': Trump’s trade war sends GOP into frenzy

Maddow then answered the pressing question at hand: Who is Ron Vara?

“Ron Vara is an anagram of Navarro, which is his last name,” an exasperated Maddow said. “I mean, my name anagrams to ‘Macho Wadler,’ but I don't see myself trying to talk you into doing what Macho Wadler wants, right?”

She concluded to viewers that Trump’s tariff plan came to pass through “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 $6 trillion 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,” she said. “This time, the global disaster is Donald Trump's big brain.”

Watch the video below via MSNBC or at this link: