FILE PHOTO: Director of the White House National Economic Council Gary Cohn arrives prior to U.S. President Donald Trump announced his decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, at the White House in Washington, U.S., June 1, 2017. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts
Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) told CNN that Trump’s top economic adviser Gary Cohn faked a bad phone connection to escape a phone call with the president.
Video:
Transcript via CNN:
HARLOW: Good morning. You were part of this call with the president while he was in Asia on taxes. And at one point, it’s reported that you looked over to his chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, and said to him, quote, “We’re not going to have a real conversation here. Can you just tell the president he’s brilliant and say we’re losing the connection and hang up?” Seriously?
CARPER: Seriously, and he did. And we’ve been having about a half an hour conversation with Gary, with Marc Short and with Sharira Knight, the three people from the administration. We had a great conversation. They’re asking questions about more moderate Democrats and trying to see if there’s some kind of middle ground on tax reform.
About 30 minutes into the call, Gary gets up and takes a call on his cell phone, comes back into the room, he says, we have somebody calling in from Asia, and it was the president, which was the nice. Nice of him to do that. Fifteen minutes later, the president is still talking. And we — I said to Gary, it was a room where we’re all sitting around this big squad table, and I said, Gary, why don’t you do this? Why don’t you just take the phone from, you know, your cell phone back and you say, Mr. President, you’re brilliant.
And — but we’re losing contact, and I think we’re going to lose you now, so good-bye. And that’s what he did and he hung up. And we went back to having the kind of conversation that we needed to, where they ask a question, looking for consensus, looking for common ground, and we — I think we’ve identified a little bit. BERMAN: Sir, are you saying that Gary Cohn faked a bad connection to
get the president off the phone?
CARPER: I’m sorry, say again?
BERMAN: Are you saying Gary Cohn faked a bad connection to get the president off the phone?
CARPER: Well, I wouldn’t — I don’t want to throw him under the bus, but yes.
HARLOW: I think you just did.
It is difficult to tell what is worse. Is it worse that Trump’s own economic adviser would fake a bad connection to get out of a phone call with him, or is it worse that Trump fell for it?
A president should be smarter than to fall for the old I have a bad connection, so I have to go trick.
The evidence is piling up that Donald Trump really is an idiot because only a complete fool would fall for such a silly stunt.
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