President Trump often relies on his Council of Economic Advisers to settle disputes in the Oval Office when aides disagree about the administration’s policy goals, the president’s chief economist said Thursday.
“He really likes to be in a meeting where there are a lot of different points of view and very often, I think the CEA in meetings like that is the referee,” CEA chair Kevin Hassett told reporters at a breakfast in Washington.
The former American Enterprise Institute scholar said he and his team are expected to provide “objective analyses” when the president is facing conflicting views from his staff, something that has become a fixture of the Trump White House because of his tendency to pit aides against each other and solicit an array of opinions on any given topic.
“On one occasion, where there was a meeting going on, the president told everyone in the room to ‘shut up and don’t talk until Kevin asks a question,’” Hasset recalled, adding he views the CEA’s “primary role” as providing independent counsel to the president and his team.
It was unclear which meeting Hasset was referring to, though one Oval Office meeting between U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and former aides Gary Cohn and Rob Porter made headlines earlier this year for how heated it became. Axios previously reported that Trump sat back and watched as Cohn, then chairman of the National Economic Council, and Porter fought Navarro and Ross tooth-and-nail over the latter pair’s desire for new tariffs on steel and aluminum imports.
Trump ultimately decided to move forward with the tariffs, leaving room for some countries to negotiate their way out, including Canada and Mexico. He later announced additional tariffs on $50 billion worth of Chinese goods, citing the country’s intellectual property theft.
