This surely is not what Donald Trump expected to hear.
Larry Kudlow is Trump’s old friend and ally.
But Kudlow gave Trump a message that is going to leave the White House stunned.
Donald Trump is extremely popular among conservative voters, and that certainly does not show any signs of changing in the near future.
But if there’s one issue where Trump has proven to be divisive even among conservatives, it is the tariffs that he has imposed on a number of foreign countries, including U.S. allies.
If the tariffs were only imposed on China, for example, they may not have been as controversial, but they were also imposed on countries like Canada.
Larry Kudlow was not happy when he found out about this, and he has been speaking his mind about the situation with the tariffs.
He delivered a message to Trump that must have been jarring for those in the White House who were listening to what Kudlow had to say.
Kudlow harshly criticized Trump’s tariffs in a public diatribe on national television, and Donald Trump is not going to be pleased with his old friend.
According to Breitbart, “On Tuesday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s ‘Kudlow,’ host Larry Kudlow said that he doesn’t understand President Donald Trump’s 51st state push with Canada and ‘Canada’s not the enemy. They are a longtime partner and ally.’ And while there are some issues with Canada, we need their oil at the moment and ‘I’d like to see Mr. Trump save the vitriol for China, which is our worst enemy.’”
Of course, Kudlow’s remarks are strange in the sense that Trump has indeed saved quite a bit of vitriol for China, who he imposed large tariffs on.
In fact, the tariff war between the U.S. and China has arguably been more intense than the one that has erupted between the U.S. and Canada.
Here’s part of what Kudlow said: “Canada’s not for sale, according to Prime Minister Carney. And polls show, by a huge margin, the vast majority of Canadians agree with their new Prime Minister. Indeed, that issue was one of the deciding issues in the campaign that elected Mr. Carney in the first place. So, I never really understood President Trump’s logic constantly pursuing this 51st state business, except it may as well have been a hangover from the Justin Trudeau era, where Mr. Trump had a very strong dislike for Trudeau, and rightly so.”
Kudlow makes clear in his remarks that he opposes the liberal Canadian government, and that he was not a fan of Justin Trudeau, the highly controversial former Prime Minister.
On that issue he and Trump are in agreement, but the approach that Kudlow would like to see is far different from Trump’s approach.
Trump, of course, is unlikely to back down as a result of what Kudlow said.
But he probably isn’t going to be too happy to see someone he hired for his administration back in his first term saying this on national television.