When Gary Cohn finally quit his job at the White House in March 2018, it was over Donald Trump’s decision to hit China with tariffs, which the ex-Goldman Sachs president had insisted was a terrible idea that would only hurt the U.S. and not extract the concessions from Beijing Trump wanted, or do anything to shrink the trade deficit. One year later, the former National Economic Council director, among others, appears to have been correct: negotiators have yet to strike an agreement, despite the White House’s weekly insistence that one is just around the corner. Last week, the Commerce Department said the United States posted an $891.2 billion trade deficit for 2018, the largest in our 243-year history. But according to Cohn, he didn’t quit over the tariffs, per se, but rather because of the totally shady, ratfucking way Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and economic adviser Peter Navarro went about convincing the president to implement them.

In a podcast recorded this month with Freakonomics, Cohn tells host Stephen Dubner:

“You’re never going to win every argument. You’re never going to win every fight. But you’re part of a team. And when the team decides you’re going to do X versus Y, even though you passionately think that Y is right and X is definitely wrong, you have to be a team player. When I worked at Goldman Sachs for 27 years, it is the most team-oriented place in the world. So I believe in that team-oriented approach. What happened in the White House is we got to a point, unfortunately, where one or two people decided that they were going to no longer be part of a process and a debate. And they were going to use a direct connection to the president to set up a meeting and call in C.E.O.s of aluminum companies and steel companies to announce steel tariffs and aluminum tariffs without there being a process and a procedure to set up that meeting; without the chief of staff knowing there was a meeting; without the Office of Legal Counsel having written an executive order or a memo or anything to sign. And they created that meeting without anyone knowing it.”

C.E.O.s of aluminum and steel companies were, of course, always going to be in favor of tariffs of 25 percent on steel imports and 10 percent on aluminum imports, regardless of the fact that U.S. importers would pay the tax on those products, and not China, as Ross and Navarro were presumably happy to let Trump assume. But we digress:

DUBNER: These were [Peter] Navarro and Wilbur Ross? Are those the two people?

COHN: Yes. Those are the two people. When the process breaks down, then you’re sort of, in my mind, living in chaos. I don’t want to live in a chaotic organization. I’ll live in an organization where people vehemently disagree all day long, as long as there’s a policy to vehemently disagree. When people start end-running the process and start trying to take over, that’s not an organization that I wanted to be part of.

Of course, prior to Ross and Navarro end-running the process, Cohn probably wouldn’t have said he was enjoying his time in the White House. According to Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, in April 2017, an e-mail “purporting to represent the views of Gary Cohn” circulated around the West Wing, describing the situation as “worse than you can imagine,” Trump as “an idiot surrounded by clowns,” and claiming, “I need to stay because I’m the only person there with a clue what he’s doing.”

The White House did not immediately respond to The Hive’s request for comment.

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