It is abundantly clear that President Donald Trump likes to put people of questionable intelligence and expertise in charge (as demonstrated recently by the Signal chat leak), in part because of the loyalty they appear to demonstrate. A leader like Trump can take a worse step still and choose to act ually listen to such people – unfortunately their advice is either a product of some fantasy world or tailored to please the ears of the president.  Laura Loomer is one who certainly enjoys her strolls through fantastic lands where mass shootings of children and jihadist terrorists slamming jets into skyscrapers are all staged by evil elites. This highly rational person instructed Trump to fire several members of the National Security Council and he obliged.  Whether or not they were competent or fit for their roles is not important for this column – they can be replaced with competent people (although that’s not likely to happen given Trump’s hiring practices). It is quite concerning though that deranged individuals like Loomer can influence our president’s decisions.  Despite Loomer promoting conspiracy theories about things like 9/11 or about HAARP being used to influence elections by creating snow storms in Iowa, Trump refuses to be discouraged by her apparent lack of credibility. According to Trump, “he listens to everybody,” and, “She always has something to say, usually very constructive … she recommended some people for jobs.” Just on the face of it, it seems absurd that the president of the United States would be taking administrative advice from some conspiracy theory-loving lunatic.  Frankly, it’s difficult to tell whether people like Loomer or Marjorie Taylor Greene genuinely believe the nonsensical things that they tweet about or are instead merely exploiting them for some personal benefit – an answer to this question has no bearing on the fact that our president should be advised by neither simpletons nor manipulative liars.  That’s not Trump’s style though given that he has chosen to enact the trade policies of one of the few economists who flaunt the basic economic principles accepted by his peers. His personal international trade guru, Peter Navarro, has led Trump down this truly bewildering economic plan, which has resulted in exactly what everyone except Trump and Navarro knew it would – yet again we see what happens when Trump places our nation in the hands of people who are arrogant enough to think that their view compares favorably to the consensus.  I’m not one to kick a dog when he’s down but this dog refuses to admit defeat and is instead creating a continuous line of increasingly convoluted trade adjustments that appear to be pointlessly plugging holes in his very leaky tariff boat. Peter Navarro’s vision has been an unmitigated disaster.  Under normal circumstances, a person who listens to competent experts fares significantly better than a person who listens to those who peddle fictions. For example, a person who listens to their doctor and takes their medicine will outlive a person who is skeptical of the doctor’s advice and instead drinks a dirt and mugwort tea brewed by some hippie.  We can now think of our country as an individual that does not listen to the experts, but only to the fringe – by doing so we can appreciate that Trump’s reliance on people like Navarro only increases the likelihood of catastrophe. Economists revealed earlier this month that the tariff calculation methodology used by the Trump administration is complete nonsense – dirt and mugwort tea. When our economic policies are based on the advice of whatever the hippie analog of an economist is, the patient suffers.  Related Articles Which Republican will consolidate support in the 2026 gubernatorial race? Americans are waking up to the reality of the U.S. immigration system How badly will taxpayers be fleeced to prop up the 2028 Olympics? Tariff mania shows why no one person can run an economy Free trade is critical to America’s continued prosperity Clearly Trump doesn’t know the first thing about how to calculate tariffs so he listened to the intellectually impoverished people he has placed in charge of those sorts of things. They then paraded Trump out in front of the world and had him present a completely ridiculous tariff plan, and then later revealed their comically bad methodology – all other economists then proceeded to laugh and point. Trump started off with huge tariffs across the board, then lowered them to a base of 10% and 145% for China after the market reacted as everyone predicted. The huge tariffs on China were still too destructive though, so he exempted electronic devices last Friday. Now the Trump administration is claiming that these exemptions are only temporary – isn’t everything? It sure looks like they’re just making things up as they go along without much thought. Rafael Perez is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. ...read more read less