Larry Kudlow Is Joining the White House

Conservative CNBC commentator Larry Kudlow is set to become the next director of the White House’s National Economics Council. The Washington Post reports that he has officially accepted the job, which will effectively make him Donald Trump’s top economic adviser.

It would be easy to get snarky about this pick. Trump, the television-obsessed president who appears to get most of his information from cable news, has chosen a cable-news talking head to run point on his economic agenda. It’s a bit on the nose.

But as I wrote yesterday, Trump’s decision to tap Kudlow is probably good news for the country. The man may be a supply-side stereotype who hasn’t had a new thought about the economy since 1982, but as a result, he’s a pretty dedicated free trader. And at a moment when the White House is getting serious about throwing up tariffs, he might restrain some of Trump’s protectionist instincts. (Yes, that’s what we thought Gary Cohn would do too, but that relationship may have been poisoned over Charlottesville.)

Kudlow’s résumé also fits the job reasonably well. He may mostly be known as a pinstripe-wearing Wall Street pundit these days, but despite his lack of an economics Ph.D., he did do time as a junior economist at the Federal Reserve, as the chief economist at Ronald Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget, and as chief economist at Bear Stearns. (Accomplishing that sort of career trajectory without formal credentials is a lot less common now.) He’s an objectively more reasonable choice to run the NEC than Rick Perry was to oversee the Department of Energy or Ben Carson was to sit atop the HUD. Though it may be a low bar, Trump has made much worse decisions.