Trump picks camera-ready Kudlow as top economy aide
CNBC contributor replaces Cohn
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has chosen Larry Kudlow to be his top economic aide, elevating the influence of a long-time 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.
Mr. Kudlow told The Associated Press on Wednesday that he has accepted the offer, saying the U.S. economy is poised to take off after Mr. 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.
Mr. 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. Mr. Trump on Tuesday dumped via Twitter his secretary of state, former Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson.
The famously pinstripesuited Mr. Kudlow would succeed Gary Cohn, a former Goldman Sachs executive who is leaving 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 would be advising a president who appears increasingly determined to tax foreign imports — a policy that Mr. Kudlow personally opposes. Mr. Kudlow said that he is “in accord” with Mr. Trump’s agenda and that his team at the White House would help implement the policies set by the president.
Mr. Trump has promised to reduce the trade imbalance with China and rewrite the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. Mr. Kudlow declined to say what advice he would give the president on trade issues, saying, instead that Mr. Trump is “a very good negotiator.”
Mr. 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 that he is ready “to hit the ground running.”
Friends and colleagues say Mr. Kudlow possesses two critical attributes prized by the president: He is a bluntly spoken debater and is resolutely loyal.
“He’s a very sensitive man and a very logical man, which is exactly what Trump needs,” said Arthur Laffer, a wellknown economist and longtime friend of Mr. Kudlow.
The two men and their wives used to celebrate New Year’s Eve together outside San Diego where Mr. Laffer lived at the time. In the Reagan administration, Mr. Kudlow worked in the White House budget office, and Mr. Laffer served on an economic policy advisory board. Both built their economic visions around the notion that tax cuts are critical for maximizing economic growth, a principle at the heart of the $1.5 trillion tax reduction Mr. Trump signed into law late last year.
In 1987, Mr. 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 Mr. Kudlow worked at Mr. Laffer’s research and consulting firm.
Mr. 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. He has remained a contributor to CNBC and a colleague and friend for many at the network. Indeed, among the first to report on Mr. Kudlow’s possible move to the White House was Jim Cramer, the stock market guru and his former co-host on “Kudlow & Cramer.” It was on CNBC that Mr. Kudlow gained a high-profile platform for explaining, defending and — at times — faulting Mr. Trump’s economic agenda.
Mr. Kudlow channeled his push for lower taxes into a 2016 book he co-wrote and in which he argued that President John F. Kennedy’s tax cuts had boosted economic growth. The book, “JFK and the Reagan Revolution,” asserted that President Ronald Reagan’s 1980s tax cuts followed the same template. When Mr. Trump’s own tax cuts ran into resistance over the higher budget deficits that would result, Mr. Kudlow downplayed the risks of debt. He argued on CNBC that Mr. Reagan ran even higher deficits to finance tax cuts and military spending — a formula that Mr. Kudlow contends helped accelerate growth.
Mr. Kudlow has, at times, been overly optimistic — if not outright mistaken — about what Republican administrations can achieve for the economy. He declared in a December 2007 column for National Review that George W. Bush’s presidency was ushering in a new golden era.
Economists later concluded that the Great Recession and the financial meltdown it triggered began the month that column was published.