Donald Trump‘s disastrous tariffs policy, which has managed to tank the global economy, is largely based on a book his son-in-law found on Amazon which includes quotes from completely fabricated experts.
This week has seen stock markets across the world plunge in reaction to Trump’s wide-ranging tariffs on imports to the US.
Monday saw huge losses in European, Asian and American markets. Despite small signs of recovery on Tuesday morning, economists are still warning of huge volatility and fragility in the markets for the coming days and weeks.
And if you’re sat there wondering where Trump got the inspiration for a trade policy widely seen as economic suicide by experts, the answer is stupider than you could possibly imagine.
It all started back during Trump’s first presidential campaign, when he told his son-in-law Jared Kushner – who is married to his daughter Ivanka – to do some research so that he could “speak more substantively” about China, according to a 2017 report in Vanity Fair.
So, Kushner went on Amazon and had his attention grabbed by a book called ‘Death by China’, written by economist Peter Navarro in 2011.
A report by Vox into the book found that it contains claims such as Chinese toys poisoning children, Chinese phones potentially exploding when you use them and pyjamas sewn in China being more likely to catch on fire.
After seeing the book title, Kushner cold-called Navarro and invited him to be an adviser to the Trump 2016 campaign, according to the Vanity Fair report.
Navarro became the only economic adviser on Trump’s team and likely reinforced his convictions about China’s trade policies.
He is now Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing and the architect of the administration’s tariff policy.
The cherry on the cake of this daft story? It was later revealed that one of the ‘experts’ Navarro quoted in Death by China, a certain Ron Vara, had been completely made up by the author.
In the book, Vara is quoted as saying: “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.”
It was revealed by journalist Tom Bartlett in 2019 that Ron Vara is a completely fabricated person, who Navarro came up with because it was an anagram of his own name.
Following this, Navarro’s publisher, Prentice Hall, and its parent company, Pearson, who were both unaware of the fake expert, said they would add a publisher’s note to future additions of the book, alerting readers that Ron Vara is not a real person.
So, to sum up, Donald Trump’s son-in-law saw an anti-China book on Amazon by a person who fabricated quotes from fake experts.
And that’s how more than $9 trillion was wiped off the global stock market.
Related: ‘I wouldn’t be this worried if Bernie Sanders were president’ – Trump donors turn on president