How Trump's tariff expert Peter Navarro made up a fake expert for his book 'Death by China'

In the crowded theatre of Trump-era political performance, few characters are as darkly comedic—or as instructive—as Ron Vara, a fictional anti-China "expert" invented by Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade adviser. Vara, an anagram of Navarro, appears in several of Navarro’s books, including Death by China, offering dire warnings about Chinese economic tactics. But Ron Vara doesn’t exist. He never did.

The reveal came in 2019, when researchers trying to track down the credentials of this mysterious expert found nothing. No academic records, no institutional affiliations, no Google footprint. Just a name Navarro had fabricated to lend weight to his arguments. When confronted, Navarro admitted the ruse and brushed it off as a harmless literary device. His publisher, however, quietly added a disclaimer to later editions acknowledging that Vara was entirely made up.

This might sound like an absurd footnote, but it’s a revealing one. Navarro wasn’t just writing books—he was shaping policy at the highest level. As Trump’s trade war architect, he pushed for sweeping tariffs on Chinese goods, championed "Buy American" provisions, and railed against global supply chains. Ron Vara, in this context, wasn’t a joke. He was a rhetorical crutch for a worldview Navarro was actively enshrining into policy.

Navarro’s influence over Trump’s trade war was vast. He lobbied hard for tariffs as economic weapons, framing them as tools of national security rather than mere trade levers. Under his guidance, the US imposed tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of Chinese goods, targeting everything from steel and aluminium to electronics and machinery. China retaliated in kind, sparking a drawn-out economic tit-for-tat that roiled markets and disrupted global supply chains.

He also pushed the idea of "reciprocal tariffs"—matching other countries’ import taxes with equal US tariffs—which became a cornerstone of Trump’s protectionist playbook. It wasn’t just about China. Navarro supported tariffs on allies like Canada and Mexico, using trade penalties to leverage policy changes on immigration, drug enforcement, and labor.

Inside the White House, Navarro was often an outlier. He clashed with economic advisers like Gary Cohn and Steven Mnuchin, who favoured more traditional free-market approaches. But Trump liked his style—aggressive, theatrical, zero-sum. Navarro gave him not just arguments, but enemies. And when actual economists questioned the foundation of his policies, Navarro could always count on Ron Vara, his invented expert, to back him up.

In that light, Ron Vara isn’t just Navarro’s alter ego—he’s the ghostwriter of an economic fantasy. A made-up ally conjured to echo Navarro’s views at a time when those views were shaping real-world decisions with real-world consequences.