Levin Report

White House Adviser Tells Europeans, Trump “Came Here to Get Smarter”

Gary Cohn does not stick to the script.
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By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

As you‘ve probably heard, the relatively successful first half of Donald Trump’s big trip abroad took a turn Thursday in Brussels as our Queens-born president, surrounded by his snooty European counterparts, started acting like his old self again. Naturally, that involved his painfully uncomfortable take on handshakes, upbraiding allies, and describing Germany as “bad, very bad,” because of all the cars it sells in the U.S. On Friday, the president proceeded to go Full Trump when he took to Twitter to make boastful, vague claims about all the money and jobs he’d saved in the last week:

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As Fortune notes, the saving of “many billions of dollars” presumably refers to the $110 billion arms deal his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, brokered with Saudi Arabia. But it’s wildly unclear how the president’s road trip saved “millions of jobs.” While Trump said in a speech that “we signed historic agreements with the Kingdom that will invest almost $400 billion in our two countries and create many thousands of jobs in America and Saudi Arabia,” the announcement was just that—a collection of words suggesting a potential future course of action. Whether or not Saudi Arabia will follow through, or what those investments might entail, remains to be seen. Some of the money Trump referred to is presumably the same $50 billion the Kingdom already committed to a SoftBank investment fund that was announced months ago. It’s also not clear how thousands suddenly became millions, unless we’re using the same math that allowed Trump to claim he had the biggest inaugural crowds in the history of inaugural crowds. (Adding insult to injury: a number of companies involved declined to confirm any “specific number” of jobs saved or supported, suggesting Trump’s original estimate of thousands was more guesswork than reality.)

In what has become a regular part of White House aide‘s jobs, officials scrambled to clarify what the Tweeter-in-Chief really meant by his morning missive, telling the Washington Post that the president wasn’t simply referring to Saudi deals but “benefits to trade from the entire trip from Saudi Arabia to the G7,” and that “any improvement on trade would save many jobs. Stopping even one bad trade deal can save millions.”

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Does Donald Trump know that those evil German car companies actually make a lot of their cars in . . . the U.S.?

Maybe he was just jet-lagged and forgot.

While the U.S. is the second-largest export market for German automakers and the manufacturers are adding or expanding Mexican production facilities, the U.S. remains an important source of their global production. More than half of the vehicles the German companies make in America are exported. German auto factories are in Republican-leaning states, including the Volkswagen plant that makes Passat sedans and Atlas SUVs in Tennessee. In Alabama, Daimler produces more SUVs than anywhere else in the world and is in the midst of a $1.3 billion expansion . . . BMW’s biggest plant worldwide is in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Top economic adviser goes rogue

Of all of the people who signed up to join the Trump administration, one of the most surprising was Gary Cohn. In his past life, the National Economic Council director was the president of Goldman Sachs, where he was surrounded by mostly intelligent people and had a boss who is widely respected. He’s a registered Democrat. And, unlike many of the people on Team Trump, he is aware of basic facts like if you want to build a road, it costs money. But Cohn was widely known to have grown sick and tired of waiting for Lloyd Blankfein to vacate the C.E.O. office, allowing him to get the job, and so when the call came to work for the White House, it appeared to be a good way to make a graceful exit. (When you’re worth hundreds of millions of dollars, retirement starts to look like a fate worse than death.) But the last several months have clearly worn on Cohn, and on Friday, he showed signs of taking the first step in a series of steps that might result in blurting out, “I can‘t work with you morons anymore!”

One of them involved trashing coal, i.e., the thing Trump seems to think is the cornerstone of a vibrant 21st-century economy. Mediaite has the details of Cohn’s pique:

“Coal doesn’t even make that much sense anymore as a feedstock,” Cohn said. The comment is remarkably at odds with the rhetoric Trump campaigned on, specifically his promise to revive the coal industry. Trump’s pledge to “put miners back to work” has often been credited with the president’s electoral success in the Rust Belt, once home to a booming coal industry. As many have pointed out, Trump is unlikely to be able to put people back to work in the coal mines, and it looks like Cohn is aware with that reality, pointing to other more viable sources of energy. “Natural gas, which we have become an abundant producer, which we’re going to became a major exporter of, is such a cleaner fuel,” Cohn said.

The other was the tacit admission that the president may be dumb, or at the very least, nowhere near up as smart as a person representing the U.S. at the G7 Summit should be.

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Have a great long weekend!

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