Trump’s Karma Just Hit All At Once…

When the Trump administration’s senior economic advisor, Peter Navarro, held a press conference and berated a young CBS reporter for asking about diesel prices—telling her not to be a “sock puppet for your liberal producers”—he wasn’t just being rude. According to economist Justin Wolfers, he was revealing something deeper: the White House has abandoned free-market principles for a command-and-control approach, and the people running it are the least qualified economic team in modern American history. The result is a perfect storm of self-inflicted crises.

The Crisis of Competence

Wolfers, a professor and founder of Platypus Economics, argues that the central problem isn’t ideology but sheer incompetence. Past administrations, both Republican and Democratic, could call on Nobel laureates and the best minds in the country to serve. This White House, by contrast, staffed its economic team with people like Navarro—a “third-rate economist” whose work Wolfers had never encountered before. The story goes that Jared Kushner found Navarro’s book on Amazon because it was the only one defending the president’s trade views. The result is a team that doesn’t understand basic economics: they don’t grasp how bond yields work, how crude oil gets refined into diesel, or why tariffs on penguin-inhabited islands like the Heard and McDonald Islands are absurd. Wolfers points to a “British t