Rachel Maddow shares bizarre story about what inspired Donald Trump's 'great idea' of tariff hikes
WASHINGTON, DC: President Donald Trump recently made waves with his momentous announcement of reciprocal tariff plans during his "Liberation Day" speech on Wednesday, April 2.
Following the 78-year-old president’s announcement on tariffs, the stock market ended up having a free fall, with Dow Jones dropping 2,275 points (-5.53 percent) in just two days.
While several Americans have since then wondered about the inspiration behind Trump’s financial policies, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow revealed that Trump “came up with the idea” following the circulation of a “fake memo from a fake person with a fake email address,” reported The Wrap.
Rachel Maddow claimed idea behind Donald Trump’s tariff rules came from fictional person
During the Friday edition of her MSNBC show, Rachel Maddow claimed that Donald Trump came up with the idea of his tariff rules after he found a “memo.”
Maddow revealed that the said memo was the brainchild of the economist and Trump administration’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, Peter Navarro.
Navarro has been a staple by Trump’s side ever since the 78-year-old president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner found his book ‘Death by China’ and asked him to join Trump’s 2016 election campaign as economic adviser.
Maddow shared during the program that Navarro, who is an economist and author, often cites the work of an economics expert named Ron Vara, who shared a memo in Washington, DC, circles after the MAGA spearhead’s election win.
Emphasizing the name of ‘Ron Vara’, Maddow continued, “At one point, Ron Vara wrote in the memo that Trump could, quote, ‘Ride the tariffs to victory.’”
However, the MSNBC anchor shared that this Ron Vara doesn’t exist in real life, and that he is a made-up person. “The economics expert that Peter Navarro has long cited to explain why he’s so gung-ho on tariffs, this person, Ron Vara, is a made-up person,” shared Maddow in her fiery speech.
She continued, “He is a fictional person. Peter Navarro invented Ron Vara as his expert source, so he could quote this expert source over and over and over again in his crackpot books,” before asking, “Who is Ron Vara? Ron Vara is an anagram of Navarro, which is his last name.”
She then went on to give an example through her name, saying, “I mean, my name anagrams to Macho Wattler, but I don’t see myself trying to talk you into doing what Macho Wattler wants, right?”
Rachel Maddow slams Donald Trump for his ‘great ideas’
Rachel Maddow’s blunt criticism of Peter Navarro came after the segment where she discussed the two previous peaks of the VIX index that measures stock market volatility.
After pointing out that the past two peaks happened in 2008 during the global recession and in March 2020 at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Maddow shared that there is a third peak representing the current US economy.
She, however, further shared that this peak was “not caused by the biggest financial catastrophe since the Great Depression or a global pandemic that’s killing millions of people.”
Rather, it was “caused simply by Donald Trump being president again with his great ideas,” said Maddow, before adding, “And the scale of what he’s doing, the scale of the destruction that he has wrought is a little bit hard to get your head around.”
She noted, “It is hard to get your head around how much damage this one man can cause. I think it’s even harder to get your head around simultaneously the fact that he can do damage of this magnitude with such a teeny, tiny, teeny, teeny, tiny amount of thought.”
“You think it would take like a grand plan and some big brains to figure out how to destroy the economy of the richest nation on earth, but that’s not how it’s working out. Turns out it doesn’t take a big idea or a lot of big brains working together,” added the journalist.
