President Trump is getting two trade advisers for the price of one.
On paper, Trump's top trade adviser is Peter Navarro, an unapologetic defender of Trump and critic of China. But inside Navarro's own brain is Ron Vara, an untraceable economist frequently quoted in Navarro's books whose name happens to be an anagram of Navarro, The Chronicle of Higher Education reports.
Vara has made appearances across Navarro's economic books for at least 20 years, often authoring an epigraph before Navarro's chapters. They've contained fun Vara-branded aphorisms like "don't play checkers in a chess world" and questionable ones such as "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." A 2001 book revealed the most detail about Vara, saying he was a "struggling doctoral student in economics" at Harvard in the mid-1980s. The Chronicle found no record of Vara at Harvard at that time, though that is when Navarro attended the school.
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Navarro, in a statement, admitted that Vara is a "whimsical device and pen name I've used throughout the years" and said it was "refreshing" that someone finally figured it out. After all, even Navarro's one-time co-author Glenn Hubbard, when asked by the Chronicle, said he had no idea Vara was fictional. Read more about Navarro's alter ego at The Chronicle of Higher Education.
