Cohn joins exodus

IN AN administration filled with people with dubious ideas, limited experience and loads of ethical baggage, Gary Cohn, the former Goldman Sachs executive who became the top economics official in the Trump White House, was supposed to be among the sensible adults in the room. Now, he is leaving after failing repeatedly to be the stabilising influence that the Trump administration sorely needed.

Many critics of Trump are already cheering Cohn’s departure. Indeed, he has done an awful job. His chief accomplishment was helping pass a tax cut that will benefit wealthy people like himself while adding $1.5 trillion to the national debt for future generations to pay off. Cohn’s other pet project – to develop a plan to rebuild American infrastructure – produced a shambolic proposal that is going nowhere in Congress.

Last summer, Cohn displayed moral poverty by refusing to quit the administration while simultaneously alerting friends and the media that he was very upset when Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” after neo-Nazis and white supremacists clashed with protesters, leaving a young woman dead in Charlottesville, Va.

And then there is the proximate cause for his actual departure: his failure to keep President Trump from imposing tariffs on steel and aluminium imports, which will hurt American allies and domestic industries that use those metals.