[A Forgotten Post. I meant to publish this three weeks ago!]
Finally, I see why Peter Navarro sticks with President Trump:
In his 2011 book “Death by China,” President Donald Trump’s senior adviser Peter Navarro quoted a China hawk named “Ron Vara” to prove his point on the threat posed by Beijing to the American economy.
“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,” Vara said. He appears once more in the book and is even referenced in the index.
There’s just one problem — Vara doesn’t appear to exist, according to an investigation by an Australian academic, who determined that Vara is actually Navarro. Ron Vara is even an anagram of Navarro’s last name. [CNN]
And why does this explain that? Because Trump does the same thing:
The voice is instantly familiar; the tone, confident, even cocky; the cadence, distinctly Trumpian. The man on the phone vigorously defending Donald Trump says he’s a media spokesman named John Miller, but then he says, “I’m sort of new here,” and “I’m somebody that he knows and I think somebody that he trusts and likes” and even “I’m going to do this a little, part time, and then, yeah, go on with my life.”
A recording obtained by The Washington Post captures what New York reporters and editors who covered Trump’s early career experienced in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s: calls from Trump’s Manhattan office that resulted in conversations with “John Miller” or “John Barron” — public-relations men who sound precisely like Trump himself — who indeed are Trump, masquerading as an unusually helpful and boastful advocate for himself, according to the journalists and several of Trump’s top aides. [WaPo]
Navarro tried to shrug it off as him being superior to everyone else, but there’s a key problem with that assertion: if you quote someone else as an authority, you don’t necessarily have to then prove the point. While appeal to authority is a fallacious argument technique in formal rhetoric and logic, it’s not uncommon to see such in literature as a simple short-hand for an argument, with an implicit Go see his arguments present.
But if you can’t quote someone else, then you have to prove your point. By using this appeal to a non-existent authority, Navarro is skipping the actual proof – and proving himself a fraud.
