two. option number two was not the full assault of tariffs across the board. option number two was doing these carve-outs. and this remains a mystery as to why the president and this based on your good reporting may have just had a fit of rage or a temper tantrum and decided to go the full route when even folks like ross were presenting to him a different medium step. so it s important to note that gary cohn knows he didn t win the election. he knows that president trump won on nationalist principalles. he s not walking out and saying it s either me or the president. but if president trump wants to have america win, the tariff he s imposing doesn t make america win. umm, certainly gary cohn would argue about it. i think gary cohn s departure has caused some discombobulation among those who watch politics fairly closely, including of course wall street and folks who
wilbur ross and peter navarro, a big loss for republicans and free traders. wall street doesn t like it much either. i ve got the best team, all women, here to break it down today. first we get to our panel. impleme i want to break down why exactly the departure of trump s economic adviser is such a big deal. guys like gary cohn and rob porter, huge advocates of free trade. they were the guys arguing that america does best when it can buy and sell products all over the world. but this this white house, their views were in direct contradiction to men like commerce secretary wilbur ross and top trade adviser peter navarro that want nationalist policies that favor u.s. corporations over global trade. trump has always leaned toward the nationalist side of things, that s how he ended up with navarro. with porter gone and cohn leaving, there s no one to balance out the argument. in the short term it means tariffs are close to being a done deal. that said, i hear that senators will take a sho
attempts to leave nafta. but somehow navarro wormed his way back into the president s heart again and was really holding his attention on this issue along with ross and lighthizer. to that exact point, we ve heard all these months, people in the white house who are viewed as globalists, we re lucky they re there, what they re doing behind the scenes, you know, on the good side, you know, you can t even count it. and many of us have rolled our eyes saying what could they possibly have been doing? but politico said today the number of bad ideas that have come through this white house that are thankfully dead, there are too many to count. with gary gone i just think from a policy perspective it means disaster. this is from a white house official. what s your take on that? yeah, i think there are people in the white house who are sober and serious individuals who see the number of their natural allies dwindling. i think that s what that is about. they re seeing people leave. can i ask
point of i guess two questions. one is, i was wondering if the surprise tariff announcement was connected in any way to the celebrated pennsylvania congressional election, primary election of the other day. i was wondering, because it s pennsylvania, it s important to the president. the second thing is, this is just unclear to me. what are the powers of a president here? does a president have the power to unilaterally just on his own wake up and say in the morning, we ll put a 25% tariff on steel, that s the way it goes? does congress not have to support this? but this is the issue. and for gary cohn, this is as much about process as it is about policy. gary cohn is not surprised that the president supports this kind of policy. but when the president comes out of left field with wilbur ross and wakes up and says 10 and 25%, when there is no
very predictable and now it s a confluence of also personnel not being there to stop the brake, to put the brakes on. on this point, it s not new to cohn that there were factionists in the white house, the globalist coalition, to use the right wing slur, versus the nationalist coalition. there was a process, after john kelly was made chief of staff, as we ve all read in the times and everywhere else, there was a process in place, john kelly wasn t necessarily governing the tweets but he was making sure that the people who met with the president were vetted by him in advance. that process apparently broke down, with secret meetings orchestrated by ross and others, members of industry and the president. i think cohn told white house officials, i just can t work this way.