Comments by "" (@DavidJ222) on "Fareed: Is there a smarter way to take on China?" video.

  1. Gary Cohn's email describes what it was like to work in Trump's dumpster fire of a white house before he finally had enough, and resigned as Trump's chief economic advisor in 2018. "It’s worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns. Trump won’t read anything—not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored. And his staff is no better. Kushner is an entitled baby who knows nothing. Bannon is an arrogant prick who thinks he’s smarter than he is. Trump is less a person than a collection of terrible traits. No one will survive the first year but his family. I hate the work, but feel I need to stay because I’m the only person there with a clue what he’s doing. The reason so few jobs have been filled is that they only accept people who pass ridiculous purity tests, even for midlevel policy-making jobs where the people will never see the light of day. I am in a constant state of shock and horror."
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  2. Former White House chief economic advisor Gary Cohn lashed out at some of his former colleagues, charging in a radio interview that the U.S. is losing the trade war as administration officials pursue a strategy that hasn’t worked. Cohn, who was Trump’s first director of the National Economic Council, specifically pointed his finger at Peter Navarro, who serves as director of the National Trade Council, and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross for drawing the country into a misdirected tariff battle. “Tariffs don’t work. If anything, they hurt the economy because if you’re a typical American worker, you have a finite amount of income to spend. If you have to spend more on the necessity products that you need to live, you have less to spend on the services that you want to buy.” Cohn said he also had several high-profile disagreements with the administration, including one point where he nearly resigned following Trump’s comments on the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. Among the other revelations from his time in the White House, Cohn said a tipping point for him leaving was a meeting Navarro and Ross secretly set up with heads of the steel and aluminum industry to notify them that the administration was planning to levy tariffs on imports of the metals. “What happened in the White House is we got to a point, unfortunately, where one or two people decided that they were going to no longer be part of a process and a debate,” he said. When asked to confirm if it  was Navarro and Ross who set up the meeting, Cohn said, “Yes. Those are the two people. When the process breaks down, then you’re, sort of, in my mind, living in chaos. I don’t want to live in a chaotic organization.”
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