A dumbass is going to prison
On February 9, 2022, the January 6 House Select Committee issued two subpoenas to Peter Navarro, demanding he provide documents and testimony relevant to the Capitol insurrection. He ignored both of them. Next Tuesday, Navarro must start serving four months in a federal pen for his crimes.
It did not have to be this way. Navarro should have shown up to Congress and professed to have forgotten everything he had done. He could have promised a sincere attempt to track down the paperwork the Committee was looking for - and then waited for the anticipated GOP takeover of the House in the midterms.
But Navarro is so deluded by self-regard that he thinks he is above the law. A grand jury indicted him. A jury found him guilty of contempt of Congress. And a judge sentenced him to prison. I suspect that reality may not have yet completely sunk in. Even on Navarro's last weekend as a free man, the author of the Green Bay Sweep probably thinks his Hail Mary Supreme Court appeal will keep him out of the hoosegow.
It could not have happened to a nastier guy.
An A-list shit
It was hard to stand out as a complete shit in a Trump White House oozing egotistical fanatics. Navarro did it — in spades. The man is a classic bully. He targets the powerless. His favorite victims were young female staffers.
He has not been shy to advertise his misogyny. In 2022, Cassidy Hutchinson, then 25, testified before the J6 Committee with quiet aplomb belying her youth. A year later, her book “Enough” came out. The 70-something Navarro was enraged by her promotional efforts. He tweeted:
“Watched Hutchinson in West Wing suck candy daily outside Meadows office doing NOTHING. Pimping new "book" with White House loser alyssa farah. Hutchinson sold soul to J6 witch hunt. This her next 15 minutes of fame. @RudyGiuliani hero, Cassidy trash.”
I bet Navarro enjoyed spying on the young female staffers. I can only imagine his reputation among them. He may well have Jeffrey Toobin-ed himself back in his office.
Then, in case anyone had failed to grasp Navarro’s sexism, he retweeted his effluence with a clarifying comment.
“Why would White House men - prez, vp, senior aide - EVER hire a woman after watching book pimps Cassiday Hutchinson, Alyssa Farah, Stephanie Grisham, Kayleigh McEnany, Olivia Troye throw mud @realDonaldTrump @RudyGiuliani et. al. Pimp ladies be giving real MAGA WOMEN bad name
Note: If book promotion is the same as marketing commercial sex, Navarro is a well-seasoned practitioner of the art, as he has pimped 32 books.
Misogyny was not a new trick for this old dog. In a Trump administration stocked with bigots, egomaniacs, fanatics, racists, and women-haters, the competition to be the supreme shit on the block was cut-throat. Navarro brought his A-game. He was so profoundly disagreeable that he had to be spanked by former Chief of Staff John Kelly, who in 2018 investigated complaints that Navarro was a world-class asshole. As the Washington Post reported
The trade adviser routinely exploded at his assistants while scheming to undermine other senior White House officials.
Young women appeared to suffer the most verbal abuse. Some female White House employees complained that Navarro, 71, was habitually disrespectful, assigning professional women to act as note takers during policy meetings rather than allowing them to participate.
His behavior was so notorious, Kelly reportedly told Navarro:
“If it’s worse than what I’m hearing, you’re gone. If it’s as bad as what I’m hearing, I don’t know. You may be gone.”
Navarro was fortunate that Trump rewards ass-kissing, not accomplishment. It was Kelly who went.
Bad at his job
To be fair to Navarro, while it is indisputable he is a third-rate human being, we should ask if he was any good at his job. Was he a rara avis in the Trump administration — a MAGA with competence? Unsurprisingly, the answer is “No.”
He was Trump’s trade adviser. The former economics professor described his job responsibility as providing "the underlying analytics that confirm [Trump's] intuition [on trade]. And his intuition is always right in these matters."
Navarro’s economic analysis proved as reliable as Trump’s intuitive blindness. In 2018, the Trump administration erected tariffs. Navarro blithely promised no countries would retaliate against them "for the simple reason that we are the most lucrative and biggest market in the world".
Before the ink was dry, other countries had instituted their own tariffs. And once again, conservative economists proved that in their America First arrogance, they were ignorant of how the world works. Not that Navarro’s boss cared. Trump does not give a damn about “product." His only interest is “marketing.” He sold his and Navarro’s deluded economic policies to the MAGA morons as patriotism. And those sheep enthusiastically applauded the wisdom of it all.
Navarro did not limit his incompetence to his professional bailiwick. He was initially right about the potential dangers of the coronavirus pandemic. But then he remembered where he was. He assumed he knew more than the government’s leading epidemiologist. He presumed to criticize Dr. Anthony Fauci and the CDC’s anti-COVID measures. And, of course, this medical know-nothing promoted hydroxychloroquine as an anti-viral panacea.
Hoist by his own petard
Intelligent criminals do their best to stay out of jail. Post-White House, Navarro has seemingly done everything he can to ensure he gets locked up. And in the federal system, four months is four months. Although Navarro is likely going to a Club Fed, so he will not have to worry about hard time.
Fortunately, for a spell, we will not have to listen to this shvantz advertise his intellectual limitations and boundless bigotry. Unfortunately, others of his kind are ready to step up to the MAGA microphone.
Note: An earlier version of this diary contained a line that two readers took to mean that the author was treating prison rape as joke. The author was not. But to remove all doubt, and to keep the focus on the existential issue — the MAGA’s attempt to overthrow American democracy — I have changed it.