The best and the brightest

How did Peter Navarro make it to the White House? As reported in Vanity Fair in April 2017, Jared Kushner was at work, sort of:

At one point during the campaign, when Trump wanted to speak more substantively about China, he gave Kushner a summary of his views and then asked him to do some research. Kushner simply went on Amazon, where he was struck by the title of one book, Death by China, co-authored by Peter Navarro. He cold-called Navarro, a well-known trade-deficit hawk, who agreed to join the team as an economic adviser. (When he joined, Navarro was in fact the campaign’s only economic adviser.)

The Washington Post revived this bit yesterday.

[“Simply went on Amazon”? I’d quibble with simply, but Jared Kushner does seem simple. The alarmist red is mine.]