Donald Trump’s most senior economic adviser once torched the president’s marquee tariff policy as “terrifying and tin-eared,” warning it could tip the U.S. into financial ruin.
Kevin Hassett, 63, is the White House’s top economist and the favorite to be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve. The White House regularly puts Hassett on television to defend its fiscal position.
Hassett told Fox Business News’ Maria Bartiromo on Friday that “the economy is booming so much because of President Trump’s policies that the marginal impact of the [government] shutdown has been small.”
The unemployment rate rose to 4.3 percent in August 2025—near a four-year high, and a clear sign labour market strength is fading. According to the Congressional Budget Office, real GDP growth is projected to slump to just 1.4% this year—substantially weaker than earlier expectations.
The Daily Beast has uncovered a column Hassett once wrote that he might rather had been forgotten, in which he was highly critical of Trump’s long-standing desire to place tariffs on China.
In the February 2011 op-ed for Bloomberg, headlined “Trump’s past may ruin any presidential plans,” he wrote that the then-property developer had “a tin ear on tax policy,” and warned that his desire for a 25% levy on all Chinese imports would be “terrifyingly similar to the Smoot-Hawley tariffs” that deepened the Great Depression. The piece was also published in newspapers including The Sarasota Herald-Tribune and remains on the website of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the center-right think-tank Hassett worked for at the time.
The Great Depression was the worst economic collapse in U.S. history, beginning after the 1929 Wall Street crash and deepening through the 1930s. By 1933, nearly one in four Americans was unemployed, thousands of banks had failed, and industrial output had halved.
The crisis was in part fueled by the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which triggered retaliatory trade wars that crippled global commerce. Farms and factories shuttered, breadlines stretched across cities, and deflation tightened its grip.
Under Trump, tariffs on China have exceeded even the 25% rate Hassett decried. Since April, U.S. duties on Chinese imports have sat at about 30%. Last week, Trump threatened additional levies of 100% on China alongside new software export controls, signaling a further escalation.
It is not known whether Trump is aware of Hassett’s one-time criticism of him, and if he doesn’t, how he might react. But the 79-year-old is known to rarely tolerate dissent from his own team.
Trump ousted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in 2017 after reports that Tillerson called him a “f***ing moron,” and three years later fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper after he refused to deploy troops on U.S. streets and ousted top cybersecurity official Chris Krebs for saying the 2020 election was not rigged.
Yet two of Trump’s current allies once used the harshest comparisons. Vice President JD Vance suggested in 2016 that Trump could be “America’s Hitler.” And it emerged last year that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had, also in 2016, compared Trump to the former Nazi leader.
Hassett’s about-face over tariffs has made him one of the most vocal public champions of Trump’s policy of using them as leverage to create international trade deals. Hassett told CNBC’s Squawk Box in April that a universal 10% “baseline” tariff is “here to stay,” barring “extraordinary agreement” with individual countries.
In TV hits since then, he argued tariffs are “working exactly the way we thought,” pressuring Beijing to “stop bad acting and come to the table,” while downplaying fears that the policy is aimed at coercing the Fed.
He’s also signaled the White House will keep tariffs in place as a constant, even as it entertains carve-outs via negotiations and pushes partners for better offers.
Hassett’s résumé also shows how far he has traveled politically. A former Columbia Business School professor and Federal Reserve Board economist, he consulted for the Treasury under both Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton before in 1997 joining the AEI.
He chaired Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2017 to 2019, returned as a senior adviser in 2020, and now runs the National Economic Council in Trump’s second term—frequently fronting TV defenses of the administration’s economy.
Hassett’s loyalty to Trump in that period has made him the current frontrunner to replace Jerome Powell as the next chair of the Fed Reserve, a suggestion that Politico reported last month spooked even his own friends.
As Trump’s top economic whisperer, Hassett has accused the Fed of “injecting politics” into interest rate decisions and wondered aloud if officials were “putting politics ahead of their mandate.”
In August, he scolded the central bank for being “a little bit late to the game” on cuts, and suggested what he claimed were ballooning costs on the Fed’s HQ overhaul as potential grounds to remove Powell. He has promoted a conspiracy theory that crucial data about jobs was skewed to help Democrats and hurt Trump.
Gregory Mankiw, a former economic adviser to President George W. Bush told Politico: “I’ve known [Hassett] for a very long time. I’ve liked him and I’ve respected him, but lately I’ve seen him go on TV and make arguments that really make no sense in support of this administration’s policies.
“It’s a scary thought to have the kind of Fed chair that’s willing to sacrifice the central bank’s independence out of loyalty to the president. I’m less confident about Kevin Hassett, given his recent statements.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and Kevin Hassett for comment.
The post Top Trump Goon Called His Biggest Policy ‘Tin-Eared and Terrifying’ appeared first on The Daily Beast.
