If you crossed a chihuahua with Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver, you'd wind up with Peter Navarro.

Donald Trump's former economic adviser, plucked from obscurity by Jared Kushner after an Amazon search for "China U Suck" (more or less), fancies himself an expert in all things, from epidemiology, to the Electoral Count Act, to executive privilege. There is no subject on which he will not yap with the utmost confidence, and in his actual area of expertise, he steered Trump into a disastrous trade war with China that was not, in fact, "good and easy to win."

And that was before he saddled the federal government with 63 million doses of hydroxybonermectin and forced states to bid against each other for ventilators and PPE. This is a guy so committed to being wrong that he had to invent an anagram alter ego to agree with himself in his books. Yet here he is twitching like a speed freak with Newsmax's Eric Bolling and threatening to do LOCK HER UPS to Dr. Anthony Fauci.

"Here's your future, Tony," he vamped. "Republicans are gonna sweep and take the House back from Nancy Pelosi. And as soon as that happens, you're gonna sit your ass down in a chair in Congress, and you're gonna confess to creating the virus that's killed almost a million Americans now, all on your watch, sir."

This would be an allusion to a ridiculous conspiracy theory that says the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the facility created coronavirus as a bioweapon, ipso facto expecto patronum Dr. Fauci created Covid. It's the dumbest shit ever, so naturally the Republicans slurp it right up like a chocolate milkshake.

"And then we're gonna figure out all the special deals you had with all those grant money things," he continued, as Bolling visibly stifled a laugh. "And we're gonna fit you for an orange jumpsuit, Tony, you can count on that."

Who is "we?" Would that be Attorney General Merrick Garland he thinks is going to arrest Tony Fauci? Because there may be one or two holes in this plan.

But more to the point, Navarro himself is currently defying subpoenas from not one but two congressional committees. So it's pretty fucking rich for him to threaten what Republicans will do when and if they take back the speaker's gavel. The Trump administration consistently blew off the House, effectively proving to the world that the legislature has zero power to force anyone to "sit your ass down in a chair in Congress" and "confess" to anything at all.

Navarro couldn't stop bragging about the idiotic plan he cooked up with Steve Bannon to ratfuck the Electoral College by having Mike Pence reject swing state votes, but he still claimed executive privilege and defied the January 6 Select Committee's subpoena for testimony — as if there was any possible privilege to be asserted for his conversations with a moldering podcaster who got booted out of the White House in 2017.

This asshole wrote a whole book about Trump's amazing Covid response, but still claimed executive privilege and refused to testify about it to the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis. And now he thinks the Committee is going to frog march Fauci in and slap leg irons on him?

Bitch, please. The penalty for defying a congressional subpoena, even if you get referred to the Justice Department for contempt apparently, is nothing, and nobody knows that better than Peter Navarro.

But that won't stop him from prancing around, nipping at the heels of an octogenarian public servant in a frantic effort to convey menace incommensurate with his stature.

"Don't be smug on CNN, dude," Navarro concluded his rant.

And then the world's least self-aware man jumped back into his owner's purse and settled in for a nice, long nap.

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