Did President Donald Trump's economic advisor Peter Navarro once attribute quotations to a supposed expert named "Ron Vara", who turned out to have been invented by Navarro himself? Yes, that's true: Navarro admitted in 2019 to having invented "Ron Vara", which is an anagram of "Navarro". He cited Vara's supposed opinions and quotations in several books dating back to 2001.
The claim appeared in an April 6, 2025, post on X (archived here), which contained a clip of an April 5 segment from Rachel Maddow's MSNBC show. The clip can be watched below:
This is just bonkers. Wtaf. pic.twitter.com/VCgMv2ZeuQ
-- Bricktop_NAFO (@Bricktop_NAFO) April 6, 2025
The claim that Navarro invented, and repeatedly cited, a persona by the name of "Ron Vara", was true. The story was first reported in 2019 by Tom Bartlett in the Chronicle of Higher Education, who wrote of the fictional expert:
Ron Vara has strong opinions. He thinks you've "got to be nuts to eat Chinese food." He doles out little scraps of wisdom, like "Don't play checkers in a chess world." Vara is a military veteran and Harvard-trained economist who made seven figures in the stock market by investing in companies that do well during international crises. His contrarian savvy earned him an ominous-sounding nickname: Dark Prince of Disaster.
Confronted about the fabrication, Navarro told Bartlett that Vara was a "whimsical device and pen name I've used throughout the years for opinions and purely entertainment value, not as a source of fact."
After the fabrication was first brought to light, several publishers added the following note to books in which Navarro had cited or quoted Vara:
In this book various quotes and viewpoints are attributed to a 'Ron Vara'. Ron Vara is not an actual person, but rather an alias created by Peter Navarro in order to present his views and opinions.
Navarro's invention of "Ron Vara" became the focus of renewed scrutiny again in 2025, amid his role as an advisor to Trump on a series of swingeing tariffs placed on trading partners throughout the world.
