Let’s give credit where credit is due: Elon Musk and Peter Navarro are mostly right — about each other, that is. Their recent round of MAGA-world backstabbing and catfighting offers a textbook example of what happens when talented or intelligent people (suspending our disbelief here) get sucked into the vortex of He Who Demands the Front Page, the would-be dictator and accomplished attention-whore who once again, and to the entire world’s bewilderment, occupies the White House.

Partway through the dizzying and appalling last two weeks of trade wars, courtroom battles, street abductions and social media posturing, these two Trump factotums wound up in a war of words. The administration’s official position seemed to be “Let them fight,” which is certainly on brand. 

Musk, whose band of roving nerd-assassins is conducting something like a large-scale Stalinist show trial of the entire federal bureaucracy, called Navarro a “moron” who was “dumber than a sack of bricks.” That came after Navarro — who holds the same ill-defined “trade adviser” position he held in the first Trump administration, making him one of the few 2017 holdovers — derided Musk as a “car assembler” who relies on insidious foreign suppliers and is incapable of understanding the sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs that Navarro may or may not have authored, and which Trump may or may not have recanted.  

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If that all seems like too much to process, I hear you. If deciding which of those guys you like less seems pointless or impossible, I feel you. I actually do want to make a case that Navarro is not quite as bad as Musk, or at least is more deeply pathetic. It’s a flimsy case, I must admit, and rests in large part on the inarguable fact that it’s hard for anyone to be worse than Elon Musk. It certainly doesn’t imply any endorsement of Navarro’s disastrous trade-war policies, although there’s no telling how far his ideas got hijacked or mistranslated on their way through Donald Trump’s brain.

The larger lesson here, which applies both to the pro-tariff “moron” and the feckless “car assembler,” is a familiar one: People who may at some point — if viewed through the hypothetical long lens of history — have made useful contributions of some kind have........

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