If there is one alum of the Trump White House that Donald Trump rightly fears ever going full apostate, it’s The Big Grundle himself: Gary Cohn.
Gary was barely aligned with the president when he worked in the actual White House, which was troubling for everyone who wanted a cogent economic policy from the administration. But in the year-plus since Gary’s been out of the West Wing, he’s been relatively quiet, offering only somewhat vague criticisms of Trump’s ongoing trade wars and nasty Fed tweets.
So we got a bit of a tingle this morning to see the Big Grundle is stepping up his game a bit in an interview with the BBC:
US President Donald Trump’s trade war with China is backfiring and impacting the US economy, according to his former chief economic adviser.
The tariff battle has had a “dramatic impact” on US manufacturing and capital investment, Gary Cohn told the BBC.
Gary reiterated the thoughts he’s been sharing since he was at the White House regarding how easy it would be to force China to do our bidding:
I think everyone loses in a trade war. We are an 80% service economy. The service side of the economy is doing very well, because, guess what, it’s not being tariffed.”
Mr Cohn said the tariffs had made it expensive to import vital products from China, counteracting the effects of Mr Trump’s tax cuts, which were designed to stimulate the US economy.
He said: “When you build plant equipment, you’re buying steel, you’re buying aluminium, you’re buying imported products and then we put tariffs on those, so literally the tax incentive we gave you with one hand was taken away with the other hand.
Again, this was nothing new from the big guy, but it was the most vocal he’s been about the subject in some time, so it likely pricked the very fragile ego of the leader of the free world. But what Gary did later in the interview must have set off a five-alarm rage in the oval office:
When asked if the US president was a racist, Gary Cohn said: “Donald Trump is Donald Trump, and what you see is what you get.”
This is not even a non-denial, it’s what we would call a “Goldman sure.” And it clearly set a furious fire under the already rattled least racist person in the world™, because after spending a night fuming that he only got a totally unnecessary 25bps interest rate cut, our fearless leader decided to settle all scores with one batshit tweetstorm:
And now the S&P looks like this:
So, eat shit, Gary Cohn! Our totally non-racist president who makes the best deals knows exactly what he’s doing!