Is Larry Kudlow Fox Enough for Fox Business?

In and around March 2018, there was a feeling at CNBC headquarters in Fort Lee, New Jersey, that if Larry Kudlow — a former CNBC anchor who had segued into being a roving on-air contributor — joined the Trump administration as Donald Trump’s second National Economic Council director, no one was going to come out of the experience unscathed.

不是CNBC。不是kudlow。不是特朗普。不是美国人。一位前CNBC记者告诉我，CNBC的人们想知道Kudlow，“他是他他妈的心灵吗？”

努力劝阻Kudlow夺取特朗普工作，有人想出了让他与Gary Cohn谈话的聪明才与头，这是特朗普的首席运营官第一的chief economic adviser. Kudlow needed to hear from a Trump insider that going to work for the president would surely leave him bathed in the Trump Stink, as it had so many others, and might potentially make him toxic to future employers, especially if he were planning a return to cable television.

No one knew better than Cohn the depths of Trump’s malignancy. His penchant for showing up at the Oval Office around noon each day. His unparalleled narcissism and utter disinterest in governing. His cynical policies. His need to be reminded on a daily basis why he couldn’t act on the anger he harbored against Jeff Bezos, and hisWashington Post，以某种方式惩罚亚马逊。当然，当然，在2017年夏洛茨维尔骚乱唤醒了特朗普的古怪讲话，促使COHN公开与总统突破的页面金融时报。Cohn left the administration in March 2018 after Trump passed him over for jobs running the CIA and the State Department, and after Cohn took himself out of consideration to succeed Janet Yellen as chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Surely Cohn would tell Kudlow not to take the White House job. But Cohn went off-script.

Instead, he encouraged Kudlow. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, Cohn told him. Maybe he could do some good. And that was that. “Listen,” Kudlow told people. “When the president calls you up, you have to serve.” Others figured Kudlow had already made up his mind. He had been itching to return to the White House since he had worked for Ronald Reagan as the associate director for economics in the Office of Management and Budget. “Larry had always wanted to go back to Washington and be in an administration,” says Jake Novak, one of his several CNBC producers. “That was true. I knew that about him from like the second we worked together.” (At the time of his departure from CNBC, Mark Hoffman, the network’s chairman, issued a statement praising Kudlow and wishing him well at the White House. Afterward, when he worked for Trump, Kudlow appeared often on CNBC.)

Says Anthony Scaramucci, who knows and likes Kudlow and who famously lasted just 11 days as Trump’s director of communications, “You start to have your ego talking and your pride talking and you’re starting to form-fit the narrative, going to work in the White House for the American president.” He then starts into a soliloquy of what he imagines Kudlow was thinking as he considered Trump’s offer: “Oh, by the way, the American president is a fucking lunatic sociopath with mental illness. I’m going to choose to overlook that because I want to be able to go work in the White House. . . . My dream was always to return to the White House because it fits my pride-based narrative about myself. Well, Trump is a lunatic. It doesn’t matter. I’m going to go work for him. But when I am working for him and Trump doesn’t agree with anything that you agree with, well, you know what? I’m going to talk myself into doing this because I hope it’ll be good for me and good for the country.”

Serving Trump as NEC director was Kudlow’s last, best chance for another top government position. Kudlow was 71 years old. He had chronic back pain. It was now or never.

他跳了。

The end result? “The son of a bitch had a fucking heart attack six weeks into it because of the stress related to it,” Scaramucci says.

现在73并从2018年的健康恐慌中恢复过来，Kudlow走出了白宫。他的任期很大程度上是无效的。他忠诚于胜过其他一切，就像总统认为他会一样。如果特朗普希望他说大流行很快就会结束，Kudlow遵守了。如果特朗普希望他说大流行造成的经济问题很快，那么Kudlow就是这样做的。Kudlow不在那里褶皱羽毛，或接受特朗普。他在那里举行公司线。他在那里忠实地为美国总统提供服务。

Kudlow.’s only criticism of Trump came after the January 6 assault on Capitol Hill. By then, the election was long over. Trump had lost decisively. It was time for Kudlow to think about his next gig. It was time to act more rationally again, and hope that people would overlook his rabid support of the president. Would he be able to make his way back in front of a camera?

有一件事是肯定的：Kudlow可以返回CNBC。但在几周之内，他在某种程度上回到了电视台，在狐狸商业网络上的日常节目中，一个特朗普臭被认为是资产的少数有线电视频道之一。“请记住，”Scaramucci说，“他是一位扮演国家经济顾问的电视专家。他不是一个播放电视局部的国家经济顾问。“（我们采访结束时，Scaramucci在福克斯的贡献者之后成为CNBC的常规贡献者。）

但这些天在许多有线电视Aficionados之间传播的问题是kudlow是否是他特朗普的臭，太脑和周到的狐狸成功。他是否愿意接受每日亵渎，让娄多巴斯一个失控这么长时间？

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大多数前首席经济顾问以某种方式返回华尔街。COHN在最近加亚博篮球怎么下串入IBM作为副主席之前，COHN共同赞助了SPAC或专用收购公司。他也是风险投资投资者。两位科恩的前高盛同事 - 罗伯特·鲁宾和斯蒂芬弗里德曼 - 在他们的圣诞董事之后也回到了华尔街。鲁宾，Bill Clinton于1993年创建了该职位（Rubin于1995年继续成为财政部长），是一家专门的顾问，是Centerview合作伙伴，华尔街并购精品店。在乔治W·布什的弗里德曼是一个私募股权公司的石点资本的联合创始人。（兴趣点：弗里德曼的儿子David Benioff，是其中一个ShowrunnersGame of Thrones。) Larry Summers, like Rubin, served both as Treasury secretary (after Rubin) and as NEC director in the first Obama administration. He’s been an adviser to hedge funds but spends most of his time these days back at Harvard, where he was once the university’s president. (Two other former chief economic advisers, Jeffrey Zients and Gene Sperling, have joined the Biden administration.)

特朗普后行政kudlow是壁街相邻的。他是罗斯收购公司的三个董事会成员之一，由威尔伯罗斯，特朗普前商务秘书威尔堡罗斯开始。Ross收购募集了3亿美元，首次公开募股，而且与Spac Universe的其余部分，是私营公司购买的徘徊。Kudlow也是Bahnsen集团的经济顾问，该顾问是一个有26亿美元的财富管理公司的管理层。（Fox比CNBC更灵活，就其空中人才的外部收入。）

但他的日常工作 - 他的激情 - 仍然是有线电视。

共识似乎是Kudlow每年支付约100万美元才能锚定福克斯商业展。“他们要支付倾向于右倾的白人男性，”一只狐狸员工告诉我。在Fox Business，Kudlow每日在下午4:00每日生活。三个小时后，他的录音显示再次出现。（福克斯拒绝让他在面试中可用，尽管众多要求。狐狸发言人Caley Cronin说，Kudlow是“非常忙碌”。）

Kudlow.loves the idea of using his knowledge of economics to help everyday Americans understand finance and the financial markets. According to Albert Lewittin, who produced Kudlow’s show on CNBC for a few years, “It’s the ability to say, ‘Hey, I helped you understand something. You may not agree with me. You may not agree with my political stand, but at least I helped you understand it, or at least give you a perspective on it.’”

It feeds his ego, too. “He really believes in what he’s doing,” says Novak. “If he’s not going to be in D.C., he’s going to want to be in front of that microphone. He’s going to want to be in front of that camera. You can’t have successful radio or TV without people like that. You can’t have wallflowers in television.”

The firstKudlow.显示在2月16日播出。史蒂夫·Mnuchin,特朗普的former Treasury secretary, was one of his guests. It was Mnuchin’s first interview since the end of the Trump administration. “Mnuchin threw him a bone,” says Scaramucci. Following an exchange of pleasantries, the two were off in the weeds talking about the dangers of passing a $1.9 trillion appropriations bill using the so-called “reconciliation” process, which requires only 50 votes in the Senate. Kudlow reminded Mnuchin that he and David Stockman, Kudlow’s boss in Reagan’s OMB, had used reconciliation to pass some laws and that Mnuchin had employed it to pass the massive 2018 tax cut. But now, they argued, it was probably a mistake for Biden to use it. “At some point, the national debt becomes an issue,” Mnuchin said, without irony. Kudlow said Biden was pursuing a hate-Trump progressive agenda. Kudlow’s also had on his show other Trump loyalists such as Stephen Miller and Mark Meadows.

On February 21, Howard Kurtz — the host of Fox News’sMedia Buzz计划 - 邀请Kudlow在节目中讨论福克斯业务的前几天。Kurtz问他，如果他在福克斯生意的角色是为了捍卫他的工作，而抨击拜登的经济政策。“这并不完全爆发新闻，”Kudlow告诉Kurtz。“我是一家自由企业，私营企业供应方案，他相信较低的税收和[较少]的法规和能源和公平和互惠贸易。我真诚地相信 - 这是30或40年的回来，当我第一次为里根总统 - 那些会产生巨大经济的东西，让人们回到工作，给予我们长期繁荣的繁荣。如果拜登总统接近该剧本，我将更加肯定，我会喜欢那个。顺便说一下，它不一定是民主党与共和党人。我是前民主党人，现在是一个共和党。“

他们公开讨论了Kudlow对特朗普选举后行为的批评，导致1月6日在国会大厦的骚乱。“我至关重要，”Kudlow说。“这并不意味着我不佩服总统特朗普。这并不意味着我没有在总统特朗普下一辈子的工作，享受它。我们非常好。“他说，如果国会经过认证的选举大学投票，特朗普在竞争“谈论他对外交政策的成就时，就贸易等等，他就会”大得多“，因为他们是后果成就。他实际上是生成了两个追回：Perfemery，现在在大流行期间。这就是我希望他走到的方式。他没有那样。“

Kudlow一直是Sui Generis。He was born into a Jewish family in Englewood, New Jersey. His father worked at a successful textiles company owned by his mother’s family. They owned a second home in Palm Beach. They had nice cars. Kudlow excelled at the private Englewood School for Boys. He played tennis, was an editor of the school newspaper, and acted in plays. He hoped to go to Princeton, but he didn’t make it in as an undergrad. Instead, he studied history at the University of Rochester, where he was a star on the tennis team. Kudlow was also a member of Students for a Democratic Society, a left-wing student protest organization. After graduating in 1969, he worked with Bill Clinton on a political campaign in Connecticut. In 1971 he enrolled in a master’s degree program at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School. But he left without completing his studies.

不知何故，他在纽约美联储银行成为初级经济学家 - 尽管他没有经济学学位。然而，似乎没有阻止一个男人患有他的智慧和gab的礼物。两年后，这家大华尔街经纪公司的潘曼贝伯现在是瑞银的一部分，被称为Kudlow其主要经济学家。他是28岁。

In 1979 he parlayed his position at PaineWebber into a job as chief economist at Bear Stearns, where he transformed himself into an ardent supply-sider — then all the rage among up-and-coming economists who believed that wealth would trickle down to the middle class and the poor if taxes on the rich were cut. This, of course, was the economic philosophy of Ronald Reagan and of David Stockman, Reagan’s new director of the Office of Management and Budget. Stockman showed up at Bear Stearns one day to gauge Kudlow’s reaction to the president’s supply-side proposals and left sold on Larry Kudlow, who soon moved to Washington to work for Stockman. According to Suzanna Andrews in a 1995纽约magazine profile of Kudlow, when he left OMB after two years, people were shocked. “He was very close to reaching the caviar,” an unnamed Republican strategist told her. Kudlow then tried to set up a consulting business in Washington, at the Watergate Hotel. It failed. (Kudlow declined to comment on why he left the Reagan administration or why he closed up his consulting business in Washington.) In 1985 he returned to Bear Stearns, where he worked closely with Alan Schwartz, Bear’s final CEO before the firm’s March 2008 implosion.

Andrews wrote that Kudlow regularly overindulged in cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine. And from time to time, he got hooked on one or more of these substances. By 1992, Kudlow had been divorced twice and was in the fifth year of marriage to Judy, his third wife. “Cocaine did not disrupt the Kudlows’ life until 1992, when he began to miss important meetings at Bear Stearns,” Andrews reported in纽约。Kudlow.went into his first of four rehabilitation programs that year after admitting to Ace Greenberg, Bear’s chairman, that he had a serious problem.

1994年底，在缺少一个重要的会议后留下了1994年底，留下了这次公司的客户滞留了200年的重要会议。在专业康复试图National Review和at Montgomery Securities, a San Francisco–based investment banking boutique. Kudlow had regular appearances as a smooth-talking pundit on CNBC, and on cable TV shows such asFiring Line和Crossfire。威廉·克拉利，他的老板National Review，告诉安德鲁斯，Kudlow以“沟通复杂的经济方程式的巨大惯用的天赋”，“信心”和“真正的可靠性感。”

There were two more stints in rehab centers. After Judy threatened to divorce him, Kudlow finally admitted the extent of his addictions and entered a six-month treatment program at the Hazelden Center in Minnesota. By all accounts, he came out a changed man. He even converted to Catholicism.

The word is that the rehabilitated Kudlow is one of the nicest guys around and one of the hardest-working. “Larry was a total gentleman,” says one cable executive who knows him well. “People really loved working with him.” Adds Novak, one of his former CNBC producers, “Larry is a recovering addict. When he noticed people struggling with that, which he often did, at both CNBC and some of the other places he worked, he was a very big help to them.”

Kudlow也是一个“绝对的工作狂，”Lewittin说。他指出，Kudlow非常努力地努力“让故事”并尝试“向CNBC受众，主要街道受众和华尔街观众解释非常困难和非常复杂的经济原则。这是一条非常困难的线，以便在尝试解释它。“Lewittin不断惊讶于Kudlow如何吞噬关于货币供应的报告 - 奥术数据很少理解 - 然后将“散发出来”在可理解的声音中的CNBC观众。“这并不容易，”刘蒂汀笔记。Kudlow还能够挖掘历史数字，看看趋势，与他的生产者合作，使观众能够理解的图表。“让我们弄清楚如何让它变得简单，”他对Lewittin说。“让我们保持简单。”Lewittin补充道，“他很棒。”令人钦佩地说，这是一个Kudlow竞争对手，“他很聪明。 He’s an economist. You can connect the dots as to why he’d be on a business network. And he can talk any business story.”

Kudlow.was peripatetic. He’d play tennis in the morning. Come into the office in Fort Lee around 1:00 p.m. Meet with the team. Then head into New York City for the afternoon, where he would do his writing for theNational Review山上或WABC的广播节目。然后他就come back to Fort Lee for his CNBC show. “There were times when I would say ‘Okay, Larry, you’ve got to tell me exactly where you are on the highway,’” Lewittin recalls. “And he’d say, ‘I’m on the Henry Hudson’ or ‘I’m on the FDR.’ It’s 20 minutes to air. Is he going to make it? Is he going to make it?” After the show, Kudlow was back to New York City for dinner with his wife and friends.

Lewittin says Kudlow was also willing to work on his craft. “It’s fascinating. You don’t find a lot of on-air talent who can do that,” he explains. “A lot of on-air talent are ‘I know what’s best. I know what’s good. Do it my way.’ He’s not like that. He was always very much like, ‘Give me an idea of how we can do this better.’ Always looking for that kind of feedback. Very shocking. You don’t find that.” When Lewittin’s father got sick, Kudlow was the first to ask about him. When his nightly show on CNBC ended in March 2014 — both the show and Kudlow were losing steam — Kudlow took his small team out to dinner at the Four Seasons on Park Avenue. “It was a lovely, lovely dinner,” says Lewittin.

But for all of his reported kindnesses, Kudlow is adept at provoking the social media trolls — most noticeably, as of late, on Twitter. One evening in March 2021, Kudlow ventured onto Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show. Ingraham asked him about rumors that Biden was thinking about increasing taxes to pay for his $2 trillion infrastructure and climate change proposals. Kudlow responded in part, “The way to get upper-income people to pay more in taxes is to lower their tax rate. Not only will they have investment incentives, they will also have no tax avoidance. . . . They never tell you that, but the evidence is very clear.”

“Kaboom!” tweeted Molly Jong-Fast, an editor-at-large at每日野兽。“你知道我们绕过这句话，”拉里·库鲁洛对一切都错了“，但拉里·库鲁洛对一切都错了。”

然而，对于一个人来说，诺瓦克继续相信Kudlow是对的。“这真是太棒了，人们如何在无知的无知中尖锐，”他说。“这正是你如何获得[富人]的方式。当您有更少的理由找到避免税收的漏洞时，您只需支付Friggin的扁平费率。我可以理解人们辩论，并说，“好吧，一些富人仍然会找到漏洞，”或其他任何东西。没关系。但整个'这两就是两个加二等于五，拉里是一个白痴，让我们笑，“那种真正理解它和你没有的人的尖锐嘲笑，永远是我对互联网的那些事情之一。但互联网是那种废话的培养皿。“

To the outside world it looks like Fox Business cleverly swapped Lou Dobbs — one expensive white man with MAGA credentials — for Larry Kudlow, a less expensive white man with MAGA credentials. “Dobbs overreached; Kudlow was cheap,” explains Scaramucci. “It’s an arbitrage.”

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It takes timefor any cable television show to gain an audience, of course.

Presumably, the TV overlords want to see an increasing slope of viewership over time. Perhaps thanks to Mnuchin, and others, Kudlow came out of the box strong: The February 19 ratings had Kudlow’s 4:00 show at 235,000 viewers, about a third of what Dobbs used to command. “Not terrible,” says one longtime cable executive. (The consistent winner on Fox Business in the post-Dobbs era is Stuart Varney, who is on from 9:00 a.m. to noon weekdays and gets about 250,000 viewers for his show.)

然而，在3月的第三周，Kudlow的数字降至约150,000名观众，而Varney的展会击中近300,000。什么时候Kudlow.reairs晚上7点,它吸引s about 75,000 viewers. By the end of March, according to Fox, the show had settled into a daily viewership of about 190,000 people. Fox has declared victory. Not only has Kudlow delivered more viewers — and more prosperous viewers — to Fox Business in the 4:00 p.m. time slot, Fox claims that he has also swiped 7 percent of CNBC viewers during that time period. Fox has said that since it began airing on Fox Business, Kudlow’s show has become the tenth-most-watched show on business television. (Disclosure: I have been a paid CNBC contributor since 2018.)

A bigger concern than ratings is whether Kudlow will ultimately be able to fit into the Fox ethos of culture wars and bashing everything Biden, from rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement to the “Iran Deal Disaster,” as a chyron at the bottom of Kudlow’s show read one day recently. Is Kudlow just “another horn in the trumpet section?,” wonders one longtime former cable television executive.

Another cable executive worries that Kudlow is not “really hyperbolic” enough for Fox. When Kudlow worked for Trump, he continues, “he had a couple missteps, like denying the scope of Covid. But for the most part, he’s not willing to flat-out lie enough to appeal to that audience. You’ve got to have that playbook, that anti-immigration, lower-taxes, smaller-government playbook, in order for it to work.” The executive notes that there’s a “certain agility” that’s needed to get ratings on Fox, such as aggressiveness and anger, adding, “Larry is an elegant man. He is an elegant man. . . . Larry’s not a blame-game guy. That’s what resonates there. He’s just not a guy who is pointing a finger and blaming someone.”

另一方面，Kudlow都遵循Neil Cavuto和Liz Claman，这两个长期福克斯商业锚在福克斯和福克斯生意中从未成为特朗普队的一部分，所以也许希望Kudlow可以像他们一样雕刻出独立的小路。（福克斯发言人Cronin拒绝发表评论Kudlow时间在Fox Business网络的任何方面。）

第二个电缆执行在调整到几个Kudlow的节目后给我发电子邮件。他知道并喜欢Kudlow，并希望他快乐和成功。是的，这是在Kudlow的任期里，但他总是被尊重的人看起来像他的诚信仍然存在的遗体和狐狸新闻业务模式之间的遗体之间。“我认为他一切都在成为一个科学旦尼尔，”行政写作。“第一次Covid-for-For-Trum，现在是气候变化的狐狸。这样一个好人，但看起来他对试图吸引Q-Anon眼球比信誉或完整性更感兴趣。伤心。”