Donald Trump’s top economic adviser and his pick for the Federal Reserve are putting on a master class in craven suck-uppery. Back in 2015, National Economic Council director Larry Kudlow and Federal Reserve nominee Stephen Moore had a cozy little radio chat about how dangerous and extremist Trump’s ideas about immigration were. But while Trump’s immigration stances haven’t changed, except maybe for the worse, his ability to advance Kudlow and Moore’s careers has.
Moore in 2015, on Trump’s plans for mass deportations: “I think it's a crazy policy. I think it's bad economics and I think it's even worse politics.” Moore also called it a “very extreme nativist position” and a “very dangerous thing,” though the fact that the danger he saw was to the Republican Party does put his about-face in contest.
Moore’s explanation in 2019 is that he said “a lot of negative things about Donald Trump before I met him.” In other recent about-faces, Moore has renounced his affection for the gold standard and for abolishing the Federal Reserve and the minimum wage.
Kudlow, who in 2015 was egging Moore on with talk of Trump’s “crazy, crazy stuff” and “un-American” ideas that appealed only to “the nativist fringe,” now says that “I should've never said it because it was never true.”