Top economic adviser suffers heart attack
NEW YORK: Larry Kudlow, the prominent economic commentator who joined the Trump administration this year as the president’s top economic adviser, has suffered a “very mild” heart attack, the White House said on Monday night.
Mr Kudlow was being treated at Walter Reed National Military Medical Centre in Bethesda, Maryland, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters in Singapore. She said Mr Kudlow was in good condition and “doing well”.
Mr Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council, had joined President Donald Trump last week in Canada for the meeting of the Group of Seven world leaders. Minutes before Mr Trump met with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un in Singapore, the president tweeted, “Our Great Larry Kudlow, who has been working so hard on trade and the economy, has just suffered a heart attack.”
Mr Kudlow appeared on Sunday on CNN to back up Mr Trump’s complaint that he had been blindsided by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s criticism of his tariff threats at a news conference that followed the G-7 meeting in Canada. The meeting, which had been shadowed by the Trump administration’s escalation of rhetoric on trade and tariffs, splintered shortly after the president left Quebec and tweeted he was pulling back his approval of a joint G-7 statement.
Mr Trump’s choice of Mr Kudlow to be his top economic aide elevated the influence of a longtime fixture on the business news network CNBC. He previously served in the Reagan administration and emerged as a leading evangelist for tax cuts and smaller government.
The famously pinstripe-suited Mr Kudlow succeeded Gary Cohn, a former Goldman Sachs executive who left the post in a dispute over Mr Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on imported steel and aluminum.
With Mr Trump’s tax cuts already being implemented, Mr Kudlow has been advising a president who pushed to tax foreign imports — a policy Mr Kudlow personally opposes. Mr Kudlow said he is “in accord” with Mr Trump’s agenda and his team at the White House would help implement the policies set by the president.
After working in President Ronald Reagan’s administration, Mr Kudlow moved to Wall Street and, though he never completed a master’s programme in economics and policy at Princeton University, served as chief economist at Bear Stearns. He left that position in the early 1990s to treat an addiction to alcohol and drugs.
Mr Kudlow soon settled comfortably into the world of political and economic commentary, working at the conservative magazine National Review and becoming a host of CNBC shows beginning in 2001.