PETER NAVARRO'S NO-GOOD ECONOMIC NATIONALISM

PETER NAVARRO IS a loser. Literally.

- ERIC BOEHM

He has run for office five times and never won. He has never gained approval from the Senate to occupy an official cabinet post. He started a trade war that may not technically be lost yet, but it hasn’t been a roaring success by any account.

And yet, somehow, he’s become one of the most powerful people on the planet.

In a presidential administration that quickly jettisoned the few serious economists who signed on to help steer it away from catastrophe, Navarro has been the perfect fit. He’s a tough-talking Democrat-turned-Republican who maintains a set of deeply held beliefs that influence his policy choices and who refuses to be compelled by expert opinion or facts. He has no governing experience and recognizes a few of the practical or institutional limits on governmental behavior. In many ways, he is a magic mirror for President Donald Trump: He reflects Trump’s ethos and ideas but adds enhancements and policy details that would likely otherwise elude the president.

By anointing Navarro as, effectively, the czar of a new “economic nationalism” project that disdains free trade and delivers corporate handouts to favored firms, the Trump administration—and, by extension, the GOP—hasn’t found a new formula for winning elections or countering China. Instead, Republicans have embraced a warmed-over variant of what they once would have recognized and denounced as the losing economic policies of the political left.