President Donald Trump’s top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, was “doing well” on Monday night after suffering a “very mild heart attack,” a White House spokeswoman said.
“Our Great Larry Kudlow, who has been working so hard on trade and the economy, has just suffered a heart attack,” Trump said in a tweet from Singapore shortly before his summit with Kim Jong Un.
Our Great Larry Kudlow, who has been working so hard on trade and the economy, has just suffered a heart attack. He is now in Walter Reed Medical Center.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 12, 2018
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the 70-year-old Kudlow was “doing well.”
She said in a statement that he “experienced what his doctors say, was a very mild heart attack.”
“Larry is currently in good condition at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and his doctors expect he will make a full and speedy recovery,” Sanders added.
Kudlow’s wife, Judy, said he was doing “fine,” Robert Costa, a Washington Post reporter, said in a Twitter posting. In another tweet, Costa said Kudlow “is up and talking tonight and spoke by phone with Dr. Art Laffer,” citing two people close to Kudlow. Laffer is a conservative economist best known for advocating lower tax rates to increase revenues.
Kudlow, a former economic adviser to President Ronald Reagan and a Wall Street economist, has played a key role in ongoing trade talks, including disputes with China that led Trump to threaten tariffs. Kudlow, along with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, is known as an advocate within the administration of more robust trade in opposition to more protectionist views advocated by trade adviser Peter Navarro.
He co-authored an editorial arguing tariffs are a tax on consumers earlier this year before Trump chose him as director of the White House National Economic Council. Yet Kudlow has defended Trump’s trade policies in public since his appointment.
Kudlow accompanied Trump this weekend to the annual G-7 meeting in Quebec, where the president traded barbs with the leaders of Canada, Germany and France over trade. On Sunday, Kudlow said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “really kind of stabbed us in the back” after criticizing U.S. tariffs on imported steel and aluminum and Trump’s positions on trade in a news conference following the summit.
For five years before his White House appointment in March, Kudlow hosted a CNBC show on business and politics. During Reagan’s first term, he was associate director for economics and planning in the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. He has also worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.