National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn has no regrets about trashing President Donald Trump’s response to the violence in Charlottesville earlier this month.
According to a report in Politico, Cohn told “associates” that he “didn’t regret one bit having made his comments.” Cohn also reportedly complained loudly about President Trump at a dinner in a Long Island restaurant — loud enough to be overheard by others, according to the Washington Post.
Cohn, a Democrat, bought into the opposition and media line that the violent Antifa activists who attacked right-wing extremists in Charlottesville were merely “[c]tizens standing up for equality and freedom.”
He has evidently refused to reconsider his views as Antifa proudly claimed credit for the violence and launched more attacks in the days that followed, violently assaulting a group of peaceful right-wing protesters Sunday in Berkeley, California.
Nor was Cohn moved by the stirring defense offered by Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin, a fellow Jew who responded to criticism by his Yale classmates with a public letter declaring that the allegations against Trump were inaccurate.
Whatever the reason for Cohn’s stubborn public opposition to the president’s words, Charlottesville was not the first time he expressed contempt for the president, whom he ostensibly serves in the public interest.
In May, as President Trump considered withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords, Cohn reassured reporters in Europe that the president was becoming “smarter” and “more knowledgeable” about the issue of climate change, and that his views were “evolving.”
As Breitbart News noted at the time: “It is the kind of comment that tends to reinforce the false narrative the media spins about every single Republican president — i.e. that he is stupid.”
The question remains why, if Cohn is so contemptuous of President Trump, he remains in the White House. He is leading the effort to push tax reform, but the effort is of great interest to Congress as well and would likely survive without Cohn’s involvement.
Cohn is said to be jockeying to lead the Federal Reserve — yet while independence is a valued trait in a Fed chief, he does not have the job yet.
In the meantime, he is simply undermining the president.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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