Trump’s choice
Commentator says he has accepted job as top economic aide
Larry Kudlow accepted an offer to be the president’s economic adviser.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has chosen Larry Kudlow to be his top economic aide, elevating the influence of a fixture on the CNBC business news network who previously served in the Reagan administration and has emerged as a leading evangelist for tax cuts and a smaller government.
Kudlow said Wednesday that he has accepted the offer, saying the economy is poised to take off after Trump signed $1.5 trillion worth of tax cuts into law.
“The economy is starting to roar, and we're going to get more of that,” he said.
Kudlow will join an administration in the middle of a tumultuous remodeling as a wave of White House staffers and top officials have departed in recent weeks. Trump on Tuesday dumped his secretary of state, former Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson.
Kudlow would succeed Gary Cohn, a former Goldman Sachs executive who is leaving the post in a dispute over Trump's decision to impose tariffs on imported steel and aluminum.
With Trump's tax cuts already being implemented, Kudlow would be advising a president who appears increasingly determined to tax foreign imports — a policy Kudlow personally opposes. Kudlow said he is “in accord” with Trump's agenda and his team at the White House would help implement the policies set by the president.
Trump has promised to reduce the trade imbalance with China and rewrite the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. Kudlow declined to say what advice he would give the president on trade issues, saying instead that Trump is “a very good negotiator.”
Kudlow, 70, has informally advised the Trump administration in the past, and he has spoken with the president “at some length in recent days,” so he is ready “to hit the ground running.”
Friends and colleagues say Kudlow possesses two critical attributes prized by the president: He is a bluntly spoken debater and is resolutely loyal.
In 1987, Kudlow moved to Wall Street and, though he never completed a master's program 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, after which he worked at the research and consulting firm of Arthur Laffer, a well-known economist and longtime friend of Kudlow.
Kudlow soon settled comfortably into the world of political and economic punditry, working at the conservative National Review magazine and ultimately becoming a host of CNBC shows beginning in 2001.