On 16 December 1773, the Boston Tea Party (a protest against de facto tariffs on imports) marked the start of the American colonies’ liberation from British rule._

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In the White House Rose Garden on 2 April 2025, it was something more like a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party that marked the Trump administration’s “ Liberation Day”.

The event unfolded before an audience decked out in an array of slogan-decorated hard-hats (to demonstrate the billionaire president’s organic connection to the working man). The band struck up, the crowd cheered, and the president’s arrival was greeted by a sea of mobile phone cameras, almost (but not quite) concealing a smattering of fascist salutes.

In the 48-minute diatribe that followed, Donald Trump told his audience that ‘for decades our country has been looted, raped, pillaged and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe’, before adding, “in many cases, the friend is worse than the foe”. Condemning his favourite targets — among them “foreign scavengers” and “radical left judges” who want to import “killer gangs” into America — he went on to announce the dawn of the Golden Age of America, to be ushered in by his new tariff policy.

This policy, Trump explained, was one of “reciprocal tariffs”, based on research contained in a hefty 397-page 2025 National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers, which he brandished enthusiastically before his audience. But the US, he added — briefly revealing a large clipboard bearing a long list of countries — would generously be imposing tariffs at only half the rate of the tariffs inflicted on it by its trading partners.

As the details of the policy emerged, amidst the rumble of stock markets tumbling worldwide, it quickly became clear that Trump’s plan bore no resemblance to the content of the National Trade Estimate Report. That report is a relatively sober and detailed document summarising barriers imposed on US goods and services by America’s 90 main trading partners.

By contrast, the chaotically-arranged list unveiled on 2 April imposed tariffs on more than 180 countries and territories, among them (notoriously) places like the Heard and McDonald Islands, a group of Antarctic islets administered by Australia and inhabited by seals and penguins. Far from mandating a “generous” version of reciprocal tariffs, Trump’s policy in fact calculates tariff rates using a crude equation based on a guesstimate of each country’s trade surplus with the US.

Countries like Australia which have a trade deficit with the US get slapped with tariffs anyhow. Some independent nations which trade with the US (Palau, Seychelles, Burkina Faso etc.) are not on the list, apparently because the US administration has forgotten they exist. Meanwhile, poor Lesotho (an enclave within South Africa described by Trump as a place “nobody has ever heard of”) suffers the highest tariff rate of all, probably because most of its imports from the US arrive via its larger neighbour and are recorded as US trade with South Africa, while its exports are labelled as “Made in Lesotho”.

But if Trump’s “Liberation Day” plan is not based on the National Trade Estimate Report, what then is the origin of this economically and geographically illiterate policy? Within days of Trump’s policy announcement, economic experts were pointing the finger at the president’s senior adviser on Trade and Manufacturing, Peter Navarro; but in the Mad Hatter world of Trump’s America, it is not unreasonable to suggest that the real author of the current global crisis is a man who never was.

During the first Trump administration, Navarro, a former university professor, was appointed to the role of the president’s chief China adviser. His qualification for the job was his series of sensationalist books on China, with titles such as Death by China, and including statements like “you’ve got be nuts to eat Chinese food” and “only the Chinese can turn a leather sofa into an acid bath, a baby crib into a lethal weapon, and a cell-phone battery into heart-piercing shrapnel”.

Fevered rhetoric, though, was not the most startling thing about Navarro’s academic career. A researcher focusing on energy economics, in the early 2000s Navarro abruptly remade himself as a China expert, despite his lack of background. What he lacked in China experience, he made up for by quoting other experts, notably a man named Ron Vara, who (according to Navarro) was a “brilliant stock trader” with a Harvard PhD. As well as being Navarro’s source of provocative statements about China (including the ones quoted above), in 2019, at the height of a policy debate about tariffs against Brazil and Argentina, Vara circulated a memo to Washington media and decision-makers, pressing the case for higher tariffs.

The problem was that Vara never existed. As I revealed at the time in Pearls and Irritations, he was a fictional character invented by Navarro, using an anagram of his own surname to give credibility to his own extreme views. Confronted with proof of his subterfuge, Navarro laughed it off as an “inside joke”, but not many others were laughing.

Navarro and his alter ego revived the century-old language of the “Yellow Peril”; now Trump has expanded this into a “Rest-of-the-World Peril”, where friends and foes alike “loot, rape, pillage and plunder” the US. The strident language and the slapdash disregard for facts and proper research in Trump’s tariff policy are powerful evidence of Navarro’s hand – or perhaps we should call it the phantom hand of Ron Vara.

The plunge into a new global disorder cannot be countered by individual national leaders pleading for clemency from Trump. The response must be a concerted one which brings together the nations of the Pacific, Asia and beyond to cooperate in restoring some sanity to the system. Navarro’s “inside joke” and his role in the tariff debacle are symptoms of the current US administration’s worldview, best summed up by a remark Trump made on 2 April, which might go down as his presidential slogan: “If you can get away with it, that’s OK”. It is the task of the rest of the world, as well as US citizens, to determine how much he can get away with.