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With Gary Cohn out at the White House, President Donald Trump can run the economy like the slapstick show he's always wanted.

The stars are Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and Trump's top trade adviser, Peter Navarro.

These three stooges will surely provide the protectionist antics that make their boss laugh, but they're a danger to the US economy.

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is a sycophant.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is a sycophant.

The White House trade adviser Peter Navarro is a sycophant.

And now, in an effort to please the president of the United States, they will put on a show in the White House, billed as one about the US economy, of which they are all now in charge.

But it will really be a show about victimization, revenge, and some really good sound bites. That's the kind Donald Trump likes.

There will be no facts. There will be fewer figures. They'll tell Americans that trade wars "are easy to win" and have no consequences. They'll say debt and deficits don't matter. They'll say whatever Trump, who thinks people still get milk from the "local milk people," tells them to say.

The healthy debate Trump claims to foster in his White House is part of the joke. The debates will all end in agreement with him, and that means we're in danger of starting a trade war that could spike prices at a time when the economy is already inflating.

Nyuck, nyuck, nyuck.

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The 3 stooges

All of these men are ridiculous for their own reasons. I can't even rank them.

Despite his lightly used Harvard Ph.D. in economics, Navarro is what economists would impolitely call "a crank." The Trump administration apparently found him after Jared Kushner, most likely thirsting for knowledge, searched for books about China on Amazon. There, he found Navarro's "Death by China."

To give you a sense of its contents: An expert interviewed in the documentary made from the book said that "China is the only country in the world that is preparing to kill Americans."

So when Gary Cohn, the administration's soon-to-be-erstwhile economic adviser, sidelined Navarro last year, Wall Street cheered. According to The Daily Beast, Navarro could be seen wandering the halls of the White House with a copy of his own book in hand.

"The thing about Peter Navarro is that he was never a part of the group of economists who ever studied the global free-trade system," Lee Branstetter, an economist at Carnegie Mellon, told me last year.

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Andy Kropa/Getty ImagesWith Navarro elevated and Cohn out, expect the administration to take aggressive action — especially against China — every chance it gets. Navarro, like Trump, sees the US, the richest country in the world, as a global victim.