In politics, there's nothing like being guided by a non-existent economist... or AI.

A politician is the sum of many things, often beyond his control. No candidate becomes president of a democratic nation without the invaluable help of countless like-minded people and calculated interests, starting with the citizens who have chosen to vote for him at the polls.

But the leader, no matter how personal and charismatic, would be nothing without a veritable army of scandalously well-paid advisors of all kinds, handpicked and wielding enormous power from undemocratic anonymity. And like any ordinary person, there is no politician without intellectual and cultural gaps. Filling these gaps is one of the main tasks, albeit unnoticeably, of his advisors.

Notable is the case that occurred in 2003 when the then Secretary of Economy of the PSOE, Jordi Sevilla, upon realizing that his boss and the leader of the opposition, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, was confusing certain economic terms, told him that a couple of afternoons would be enough to clear his ignorance.

Among Donald Trump's countless advisors, it has emerged that there was at least one nonexistent advisor known as Ron Vara, a renowned and widely cited economist in Trump's circles, a Harvard economist and champion of the president's tariff policies. Vara owed his fifteen minutes of fame to the real-life economist Peter Navarro, who did exert significant influence on Trump's protectionist positions.

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To lend more credibility to his arguments, Navarro liked to quote Ron Vara, the supposed Harvard professor. But it wouldn't take long for the New York Times and other publications to discover that Ron Vara was nothing more than an anagram of "Navarro"—that is, that Peter Navarro, Trump's advisor, had used a fictitious self to give more substance to his advice.

When the deception became known, Elon Musk, another prominent Trump advisor, now in disgrace (how long remains to be seen, since they need each other), said this about Navarro: "He's a real moron. He's dumber than a sack of bricks." Navarro—or was it Vara?—had accused the Tesla mogul of being little more than a pathetic car assembler, using foreign parts bought at bargain prices!

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At this point in the film, it's worth remembering that the discipline of economics is by no means an exact science, or that the Nobel Prize in Economics only dates back to 1969. Of course, years pass, but two opposing schools of thought persist, even if only behind the scenes: that of the Englishman Keynes (progressive) and that of his Austrian nemesis Hayek (conservative).

The first marked the period from 1945 to 1980 and contributed greatly to lifting the economies of many countries out of the hardships of the postwar years, as well as reducing the ravages of inequality. The second began with the neoliberalism of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, inspired by the theories of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek.

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It's doubtful that the mediocre Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan read more than a couple of pages, if that, of Hayek's work, but advisors are there for that purpose. As for Margaret Thatcher, she claims in her autobiography to have devoured The Road to Serfdom, the Austrian author's major work, as a student at Oxford in the aftermath of the war. Its English edition dates back to 1944, albeit in a very limited print run.

Coinciding with its publication was a rather abridged version of the very popular Reader's Digest magazine, which, according to several of her biographers, is the one that the future Iron Lady read. So what? It seems that our leaders today, with their swollen retinues of advisors, speechwriters, tweeters, influencers, gurus, Rasputins, and other palace bloodsuckers, don't read anymore, nor do they need to, as Trump has perfectly understood. On second thought, at least in politics, perhaps nonexistent advisors and AI are the harbingers of a future without a future.