Gary Cohn isn’t the oldest of President Donald Trump’s senior White House aides, or the most experienced, at least when it comes to government. Indeed, unlike Mike Pence, Reince Priebus, and Kellyanne Conway, Cohn has no experience in politics to speak of. He’s not even a Republican!
Yet as director of the National Economic Council, the 56-year-old Cohn has emerged as the adult in the room, a sage presence in a West Wing that’s perceived as new and untested. Colleagues in the White House describe the president’s top economic adviser as pragmatic and solutions-focused—”a doer, not a talker.”
“He’s not somebody who feels the need to fill the empty air with his own voice,” says one senior White House adviser. “So his words seem to matter more. He speaks with authority and experience, and when he offers [it], his advice and counsel are taken very seriously.”
Cohn has found himself with a seat at the table for some of the administration’s biggest policy debates. He’s a regular in meetings about repealing and replacing Obamacare, working particularly with Conway and others on the communications staff about how to sell Trump’s forthcoming health care proposal. Cohn has also become a familiar voice and presence on Capitol Hill, speaking and meeting with congressional leaders regularly. Cohn and House speaker Paul Ryan have met a handful of times in person and have talked on the phone about tax reform and financial regulatory reform.
There are some limits to Cohn’s policy influence. He’s among the minority of Trump advisers arguing against a border-adjusted tax, which has the support of Steve Bannon, Priebus, Ryan, and others. Cohn is also expected to be a countervailing voice against the more protectionist and “tough on China” forces within the White House, like senior adviser Stephen Miller and National Trade Council chairman Peter Navarro.
But Cohn has also shown an ability to navigate the internal politics in the administration. Despite reports last December that Trump was preparing to tap conservative economist and TV commentator Larry Kudlow as chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, Kudlow never got the nod—thanks in large part, say people close to Kudlow, to Cohn’s opposition. Cohn is also uniquely positioned to have influence with Trump because of his closeness to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and another senior adviser. White House sources dismiss the idea that Cohn has designs on a much bigger role—perhaps even chief of staff.
“Gary and President Trump maintain an open and ongoing dialogue on the many important economic policy priorities for this administration,” said a White House spokesman. Cohn ignored requests to be interviewed for this article, and several White House aides declined to speak on the record about him.
Born and raised in the Cleveland area, Cohn claims working-class roots by way of Jewish grandparents who immigrated from Poland. A 2011 Bloomberg Businessweek profile describes Cohn as the “son of an electrician-turned-real estate developer.” Cohn attended high school in suburban Cleveland before enrolling at American University in Washington. (He would later serve on the university’s board.) With a degree but no real direction, Cohn returned to Cleveland in 1982, where he got a job with the home products division of United States Steel.
On a business trip to New York just a few months after graduating, Cohn visited a commodities exchange at the World Trade Center on a whim. He milled around outside the trading floor for hours, waiting to find the right person to ask about a job. As he began to leave, he overheard a trader saying he was heading to the airport. Cohn asked the trader if they could share a cab to LaGuardia. The trader agreed.
“I said, here’s my shot. I’ve got 45 minutes, in traffic on a Friday afternoon, to convince this guy that I’m hirable and need a job,” Cohn told the 2009 American University business school graduating class. Cohn told his fellow passenger he knew about options trading, and the trader asked him to interview for a job the next Monday. When Cohn got home, he says, he purchased Lawrence G. McMillan’s book on options investing and taught himself enough over the weekend to get the job.
He was recruited by Goldman Sachs for its commodities trading shop in 1990 (the same year Steve Bannon left the company), where he worked with future Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein. It was during these trading-floor days that the 6-foot-3 Cohn earned a reputation as an aggressive and competitive trader, a representative of a new kind of investment banker. Some of his colleagues even gave Cohn a nickname: the Thug. A Goldman Sachs employee who worked closely with Cohn during the last decade says that’s an outdated description of a “tough trader” who became a hardworking but thoughtful executive and a “normal person.”
Cohn took over as president and chief operating officer in 2006, just two years before the financial crash. Goldman was perceived as one of the chief villains of the crash after profiting from the collapse of the subprime mortgage market. The company needed a public face to counter its negative image, and Cohn began to make frequent TV appearances. He also got to know Kushner, the young New York real-estate developer who married Ivanka Trump in 2009.
Cohn was publicly quiet about the election before November, though one associate at Goldman recalls him saying, “Don’t count Donald Trump out.” On CNBC just a week after the election, Cohn called the result “not that shocking” and said he was “cautiously optimistic” about what the Trump administration could do to bring stability to markets. Not long after, Kushner introduced Cohn to his father-in-law at Trump Tower, and by mid-December, Cohn had accepted the position at the NEC.
Many traditional economic conservatives in Washington are skeptical of Cohn, noting that he is a registered Democrat and unfamiliar with the conservative movement. When asked about his politics, senior White House staff members say Cohn probably leans liberal, though they add he’s not particularly ideological. Cohn has also surrounded himself with some conservative staff on the NEC, including Jeremy Katz, a veteran of the George W. Bush White House’s economic policy team, and Shahira Knight, a former Republican tax policy aide on Capitol Hill.
But Cohn likely isn’t at the White House for his political views, or even for his policy recommendations. As his Goldman Sachs associate says, “He’s a take-charge guy, but in a crisis moment, he’s also the calmest one in the room.” For an administration that’s bound to face a lot of crises—as indeed it already has—Cohn may be a real asset.
Michael Warren is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
