Yeah, he had bad ideas — and then it all went wrong

Let’s give credit where credit is due: Elon Musk and Peter Navarro are mostly right — about each other, that is. Their recent round of MAGA-world backstabbing and catfighting offers a textbook example of what happens when talented or intelligent people (suspending our disbelief here) get sucked into the vortex of He Who Demands the Front Page, the would-be dictator and accomplished attention-whore who once again, and to the entire world’s bewilderment, occupies the White House.

Partway through the dizzying and appalling last two weeks of trade wars, courtroom battles, street abductions and social media posturing, these two Trump factotums wound up in a war of words. The administration’s official position seemed to be “Let them fight,” which is certainly on brand.

Musk, whose band of roving nerd-assassins is conducting something like a large-scale Stalinist show trial of the entire federal bureaucracy, called Navarro a “moron” who was “dumber than a sack of bricks.” That came after Navarro — who holds the same ill-defined “trade adviser” position he held in the first Trump administration, making him one of the few 2017 holdovers — derided Musk as a “car assembler” who relies on insidious foreign suppliers and is incapable of understanding the sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs that Navarro may or may not have authored, and which Trump may or may not have recanted.

If that all seems like too much to process, I hear you. If deciding which of those guys you like less seems pointless or impossible, I feel you. I actually do want to make a case that Navarro is not quite as bad as Musk, or at least is more deeply pathetic. It’s a flimsy case, I must admit, and rests in large part on the inarguable fact that it’s hard for anyone to be worse than Elon Musk. It certainly doesn’t imply any endorsement of Navarro’s disastrous trade-war policies, although there’s no telling how far his ideas got hijacked or mistranslated on their way through Donald Trump’s brain.

The larger lesson here, which applies both to the pro-tariff “moron” and the feckless “car assembler,” is a familiar one: People who may at some point — if viewed through the hypothetical long lens of history — have made useful contributions of some kind have thoroughly debased themselves for temporary access to illusory power. More mystifying still, the person before whom they have prostrated themselves — and who now enjoys watching them snarl at each other like caged and tormented animals — is the most blatantly untrustworthy political leader in the recent history of the world, utterly impervious to reason and driven only by his own whims and impulses.

To say that none of this will end well is beyond banal. It didn’t start well either, and at no point on the journey did any of it seem like a good idea. If we ask why Musk and Navarro have played themselves to such an enormous extent — attaching themselves, limpet-style, to someone who is guaranteed to betray them and to an enterprise guaranteed to end in Hindenburg-scale disaster — I’m afraid that the moral blindness associated with outsized male ego is clearly involved. (I know that sounds “woke.” Remind me to erase this article from my history before my next plane trip.)

All three of these people — meaning Musk, Navarro and their malicious puppetmaster — have convinced themselves that they’re right and everyone else is wrong. It’s a relatively common syndrome, but Trump’s flatulent self-confidence is on a different scale than anyone else’s, which may be why he overpowers and absorbs so many lesser egos. Musk and Navarro, deluded as they may be, are self-anointed geniuses in specific areas of commerce, economics and technology. Trump feels certain, in the face of all available evidence, that he’s the ultimate expert in literally everything: aviation, microbiology, flush toilets and, of course, the ecstatic perfection of tariff policy. If those guys have the misplaced confidence of a couple of bright 12-year-olds, Trump has the limitless confidence of a particularly stupid five-year-old.

It’s noteworthy that both Musk and Navarro are, at least nominally, former Democrats who have recently converted — transitioned, we might say! — into MAGA Republicans. The same thing is almost true of Trump himself; he supported abortion rights for decades and donated money to Bill and Hillary Clinton, among other mainstream liberals. But as I’ve suggested, beneath the superficial details these cases are quite different, or at least I believe one of them is.

Trump and Musk are grandiose, self-inflating blimps fueled by massive narcissism and perceived self-interest. Neither of them manifested any perceptible ideology when they supposedly supported liberal candidates or causes, and their right-wing reinvention — while arguably a more natural fit — is in both cases mostly about personal grievance and a lust for power. Their stories, or myths, are well known, deeply unpleasant and at this point largely uninteresting.

Navarro is something else again: He’s highly educated and not especially rich. He lacks any showbiz charisma or personal charm (even of the flesh-crawling Trump-Musk variety) and he doesn’t seem interested in acquiring personal power. He’s a true believer, which may be more dangerous — or at least dangerous in a different way.

My only explanation for how Navarro ended up where he is today — and remember, he has already gone to prison for Trump, something Musk will absolutely never do — is that he’s kind of a crank and probably has no friends. He didn’t make friends when he was approximately identified with the pro-labor center-left, so he switched sides and made exactly the worst kind of new friend, the kind a doomed protagonist makes in a vampire film or a mean-girl high school melodrama.

I encountered Navarro in 2012, when he made a minor splash on the documentary film circuit with “Death by China,” a provocative if overwrought manifesto based on his book of the same title. He was a Harvard-educated economist with a faculty gig at the University of California, Irvine, who had run for Congress three times and lost (as a Democrat) and was building a reputation as an early and strident critic of free trade with China. His film was narrated, believe it or not, by Martin Sheen — yes, President West Wing, or whatever the hell his character was called — and in a number of alarming ways it was well ahead of its time.

“Death by China” and its creator — who struck me in person as disagreeable, stubborn and clearly intelligent — stuck with me for two reasons. On one hand, its narrative was built from unassailable facts and an argument worth taking seriously: A superpower that has outsourced most of its industrial production to a global rival is doomed. On the other hand, Navarro’s attempt to draw analogies between the rising economic power of 2010s China and the industrial buildup of Nazi Germany in the 1930s (!) felt like deranged warmonger propaganda, completely at odds with his modest policy proposals, which were along the lines of renegotiating trade agreements, calling out Chinese human rights abuses and insisting on higher mutual labor standards.

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The whole project felt like a sincere but inelegant effort to build a bridge between Cold War-style hysteria, lib-left rights discourse and Springsteen-style post-industrial lament. I wrote at the time that there was no way U.S. manufacturing could be “restored to its 1975 levels with the stroke of a pen,” never imagining that the filmmaker might find himself in position to try it. Navarro’s interview subjects, I wrote,

largely come from the same unusual left-right coalition that opposed the 1990s wave of neoliberal globalization in the first place (perhaps the only occasion when Pat Buchanan and Jesse Jackson have ever agreed on anything). We see labor leaders, Rust Belt Democrats, right-wing Republicans, Chinese human-rights activists and a somewhat fringey array of economists, all lamenting the fact that most of the stuff we wear and use every day, from shoes and jeans to laptops, iPhones and TV sets, was made in China.

One can reasonably argue, in retrospect, that Democrats should have taken Navarro’s arguments more seriously, while also acknowledging that his message was contaminated with too much paleocon weirdness. In any case, it took him less than four years to gravitate from Martin Sheen to Donald Trump, which suggests the infection was well advanced. He has been a silent but faithful courtier ever since, and his fingerprints are all over Trump’s incoherent trade war, especially the current 145 percent tariff on most Chinese-made products — although, as of this writing, phones, computers and other electronics have been exempted, which seems like yet another helter-skelter retreat.

No good outcome is imaginable from here, and I don’t just mean for him: To posterity, if there is any, Navarro will be the slavish MAGA loyalist who served time as an election denier, helped cause a global economic recession and got publicly pantsed by Elon Musk. I’m not suggesting anyone should feel sorry for him, and if his story has a moral it’s one we’ve all heard before.