Navarro’s influence stems instead from a combination of bold ideology and lock-jawed dogmatism. He and Trump share a series of out-of-the-mainstream convictions, among them that China has spent the past two decades ripping off the United States, that aggressive trade policies will bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S., and that America’s trade deficit is bleeding the country dry and even undermining its national security.

A handful of Trump’s top officials share this perspective, among them Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who is actually negotiating America’s trade deals. Many others—including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Larry Kudlow of the National Economic Council—do not. They want China to stop stealing intellectual property and to open up its markets, sure. They do not see decoupling the Chinese and American economies as a good and necessary goal.

But in Navarro and Trump’s view of the world, the United States is not starting a trade war so much as it is belatedly joining one. “We’re a tributary state to China, right? We’re the Jamestown to their Great Britain,” the former White House strategist Steve Bannon, who remains close to Navarro, told me. “We’re finally engaged in the economic war that they’ve had against us for the last 25 years.”

In this conflict, Navarro’s role is to shepherd Trump’s more extreme ideas into reality, ensuring that the president’s convictions are not weakened as officials translate them from bully-pulpit shouts to negotiated legalese. He is the madman behind Trump’s “madman theory” approach to trade policy, there to make enemies and allies alike believe that the president can and will do anything to make America great again.

“The reality is, unless the president talks tough on trade and has possible concrete actions to back up that talk, these people won’t talk to us,” Navarro told me. “They had no incentive to talk to us, none, because they’re winning and we’re losing.”

Navarro grew up an East Coast latchkey kid. He went to Tufts University on a scholarship, spent three years in the Peace Corps in Thailand, then headed to Harvard to get a doctorate in economics, later decamping to Southern California to teach.

But his was never a sleepy professor’s life. In the late 1980s, Navarro became a crusader against what he saw as the ticky-tacky overdevelopment of San Diego, and ran for office—for mayor, city-council member, county supervisor, U.S. representative, and council member again.

He lost each time, but won a reputation for being “the cruelest and meanest son of a bitch that ever ran for office in San Diego.” That, at least, is how Navarro himself put it in his political memoir, San Diego Confidential—200 pages of name-calling, score-settling, dad jokes, and dirty jokes. His mayoral opponent broke down in tears at a prime-time debate while describing the viciousness of Navarro’s negative campaigning. (Crocodile tears, he says.) During the same campaign, he shoved a female political aide working for the rival candidate, a moment caught on camera. (She started it, he says.)