What to Know About Larry Kudlow, President Trump’s Favorite to Replace Economic Adviser Gary Cohn - TIME

What to Know About Larry Kudlow, President Trump’s Favorite to Replace Economic Adviser Gary Cohn Posted: 13 Mar 2018 12:51 PM PDT Who will replace economic adviser Gary Cohn in the White House? The current name floating as a “favorite” or “front-runner,” according to the New York Times and Reuters respectively, is CNBC commentator and radio host Lawrence Kudlow. “We don’t agree on everything, but in this case, I think that’s good,” President Donald Trump said of Kudlow, 70, on Tuesday. “I want to have a divergent opinion. We agree on most.” “I think Larry has a very good chance,” Trump continued. Last week, Cohn, the former Goldman Sachs president, resigned from his White House position as director of the National Economic Council, after losing the battle over Trump’s implementation of steel and aluminum tariffs. Since the announcement of Cohn’s resignation, several names have been floated for his replacement: Christopher Liddell, a former General Motors and Microsoft executive who works with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner in the White House Office of American Innovation, has been mentioned. So has White House adviser Peter Navarro, who favored the tariffs but has said he’s not in the running, according to Reuters. (On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote a scathing op-ed on Liddell and his stance on free trade.) Trump, of course is known for his mercurial tendencies, so it’s tough to know what will stick. But here’s what to know about Kudlow, the reported top candidate for the job. Kudlow as a media personality. Kudlow has been a host on several now-off the air CNBC programs, including The Kudlow Report, which ended in 2014. He currently serves as a commentator for CNBC (and often appears on Squawk Box). Kudlow also has an AM talk radio show on WABC called The Larry Kudlow Show, and he contributes to The National Review. Prior to media he worked on Wall Street as an economist at the now-defunct Bear Stearns. He left in 1995 due to alcohol and cocaine abuse, for which he went to rehab. Kudlow’s politics. Kudlow was initially a Democrat and supported Daniel Patrick Moynihan in a senate race in 1976. However, he served in the Reagan Administration and he is a believer in supply-side economics and deregulation. In 2016, Kudlow contemplated running as s Republican against Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal in Connecticut, but ultimately declined to run. During the 2016 election, he served as an informal advisor to Trump’s campaign, and recently he said on CNBC that Trump was “so good on taxes, he’s so good on tax cuts, he’s so good on deregulation, infrastructure — I even like him on immigration.” Where Kudlow overlaps with Trump’s economic policy. Kudlow has praised the president’s tax cuts, which were signed into law in December of 2017. “Trump and the GOP are on the side of the growth angels with the passage of powerful tax-cut legislation to boost business investment, wages, and take-home family pay,” Kudlow wrote in a CNBC op-ed. “The Democrats, meanwhile, are left with stale class-warfare slogans about tax cuts for the rich.” Where Kudlow and Trump’s economic ideas diverge. Trade: After Trump announced 25% tariffs on steel and 10% tariffs on aluminum, Kudlow, along with economist Arthur B. Laffer, and economic analyst Stephen Moore wrote an op-ed criticizing the president’s position, saying “tariff hikes are really tax hikes.” Kudlow: Trump's steel tariffs are a 'crisis of logic' — and the equivalent of a tax hike https://t.co/We2taNyTpW — Larry Kudlow (@larry_kudlow) March 3, 2018 “Even if tariffs save every one of the 140,000 or so steel jobs in America, it puts at risk 5 million manufacturing and related jobs in industries that use steel,” the three wrote. But, according to the New York Times, who spoke with Moore, Trump’s exemptions to Mexico and Canada made the tariff plan slightly more acceptable. “It’s a Trumpian way of negotiating,” Kudlow said of the tariff plan, in a radio interview on Sunday. “You knock them in the teeth and get their attention. And then you kind of work out a deal and I think that’s what he’s done. My hat’s off to him. He had me really worried. Now I’m not.” Kudlow, according to CNN Money, also believes that the president focuses too much on the stock market, and should pay more attention to the broader economy.