Newly arrived White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow, a proponent of free trade, spent his third day on the job calming markets amid the president’s escalation with China over trade.
On Day Three of Larry Kudlow’s first week at the White House, the president’s new economic adviser did exactly what he was hired to do: go on TV to calm the stock market over something his boss said.
Kudlow, a former CNBC contributor and Wall Street economist who now oversees the National Economic Council, is a self-avowed advocate of free trade—but he found himself on Wednesday defending President Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs on Chinese goods.
Kudlow’s performance on Wednesday set the stage for him to play the role in the coming months of the White House’s top economic salesman, forcing him to “jump right into the frying pan,” one longtime ally said.
The administration’s recent moves on trade have spooked the stock market and scared American companies that produce goods China now intends to tax at a higher rate. Only hours after the U. S. released a list of Chinese products it intends to target, China moved to impose tariffs on roughly $50 billion in U. S. exports of soybeans, cars and other products, raising the prospect of a trade war.
With markets slipping early in the day, Kudlow went on Fox Business Network’s Varney & Co., to say the trade plans were just “the first proposals”—a not-so-coded message to his former Wall Street colleagues.
“In the United States at least, we’re putting it out for comment, it’s going to take a couple months. I doubt if there will be any concrete action for several months,” he said, before pivoting to his support for the president. “Trump’s putting his cards on the table. He’s standing up for this country, but he’s also standing up for better world trade.”
Kudlow said in an interview with POLITICO on Wednesday that he views his role in part as reframing Trump’s actions on tariffs as part of a strategic move to create trade with China that eventually leads to faster growth and higher wages in the U. S. “I like to say that there is a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow,” Kudlow said, adding that so far Trump has liked his efforts to rebrand the trade moves in ways that are more palatable to free-traders and Wall Street.
Kudlow, a former Reagan budget official who hasn’t lived in Washington in years, took the White House job knowing he might wind up in exactly this spot, trying to clean up messes made by Trump and his aggressively protectionist advisers including trade adviser Peter Navarro and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, people close to the NEC director said.
