Donald Trump plans to name economist and CNBC contributor Larry Kudlow to replace Gary Cohn as director of the White House National Economic Council, adding a longtime confidant to the president’s inner circle, a person familiar with the decision said.
Trump may announce the move as soon as Thursday, according to CNBC, which reported the president’s decision earlier. On Tuesday, Trump said Kudlow had “a very good chance” at getting the job. White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the president spoke with Kudlow by phone on Tuesday but declined to describe the conversation.
Kudlow, 70, is expected to provide a familiarity and loyalty to Trump, who has seen a flood of high-level departures throughout his administration, including by some of the aides with whom he is closest personally. A television host from New Jersey, Kudlow is seen as temperamentally and politically similar to the president.
He’s also seen within the White House as having credibility on both Wall Street and in Washington, where he served as an adviser to former President Ronald Reagan.
Trump has made clear that he’s hoping to use the turnover to reshape his staff closer to his own image, and has tired of a senior staff that often opposed the policies and priorities Trump supported on the campaign trail.
Cohn announced his departure last week after Trump moved forward with steep tariffs on steel and aluminum imports -- a plan Cohn had vociferously opposed.
Kudlow has also clashed with Trump in the past. Earlier this month, he wrote a column for CNBC describing the president’s tariffs as “a regressive tax on low-income families.”
“Trump should also examine the historical record on tariffs, because they have almost never worked as intended and almost always deliver an unhappy ending,” Kudlow wrote in the March 3 column, which also included praise for other parts of the president’s economic agenda. Kudlow has strongly backed the tax overhaul that Trump signed at the end of last year.
Yet, as he left the White House on Tuesday for a trip to California, Trump said Kudlow “now has come around to believing in tariffs.”
In 2016, when a tape surfaced before the election featuring Trump boasting about grabbing women’s genitals, Kudlow said he was “furious” and threatened to vote for Mike Pence as a write-in candidate.