Finance & Commerce
BALTIMORE — For more than a decade and a half, Larry Kudlow has been a fixture on the CNBC business news network, a pinstripe-suited conservative arguing relentlessly for tax cuts and a smaller government with tart sound bites.
Kudlow will soon gain considerably more influence and a more targeted audience. Kudlow told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday that he’s accepted President Donald Trump’s offer to serve as White House economic adviser.
Kudlow, who has spent decades writing and speaking about economic policy, will serve as director of the National Economic Council. The 70-year-old Kudlow will 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.
Kudlow, too, had made clear his opposition to the tariffs, as did many economists. But that won’t likely prove an insurmountable barrier between Kudlow and Trump, especially after the president amended his decision to say he would temporarily exempt Canada and Mexico from the tariffs and potentially other countries as well.
Kudlow has informally advised the Trump administration in the past. But moving into the White House would confer on him the official role of chief emissary of Trump’s economic policies.
Friends and colleagues say 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 well-known economist and longtime friend of Kudlow.
The two men and their wives used to celebrate New Year’s Eve together outside San Diego where Laffer lived at the time. In the Reagan administration, Kudlow worked in the White House budget office, and 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 Trump signed into law late last year.
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 Kudlow worked at Laffer’s research and consulting firm.
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 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 Kudlow gained a high-profile platform for explaining, defending and — at times — faulting Trump’s economic agenda.
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 Reagan’s 1980s tax cuts followed the same template. When Trump’s own tax cuts ran into resistance over the higher budget deficits that would result, Kudlow downplayed the risks of debt. He argued on CNBC that Reagan ran even higher deficits to finance tax cuts and military spending — a formula that Kudlow contends helped accelerate growth.
Laffer described Kudlow as someone who would be inclined to offer “unvarnished” advice to the president on the appropriate path for economic policy.
“And if by chance, he doesn’t convince the president of something, he will be a loyal employee,” Laffer said. “He stays loyal even if the decision goes against him.”
Kudlow has shown himself willing to embrace personal transformations. He converted from Judaism to Catholicism, according to a 2000 interview with the religious magazine Crisis. And after graduating as a history major from the University of Rochester in 1969, he worked on Democratic campaigns in New York. But he evolved into a committed Republican who considered entering the 2016 race to challenge Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat.
