Ex-White House attorney Ty Cobb bashed the president and press secretary on a range of issues from the administration’s sweeping tariffs to Trump’s on-again, off-again “TACO” trade moves.
Cobb, who defended Trump during Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether the President’s 2016 campaign colluded with Russia, ripped into him over his defense of using destabilizing global tariffs on friends and foes amid ongoing court rulings on the trade policy.
“He’s making that up,” Cobb told Burnett, referring to Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, or IEEPA, to justify his tax plan. “He views himself as all-powerful,” Cobb said. “But just because he says it doesn’t make it so.”
The IEEPA allows the president to regulate trade during certain emergencies. The U.S. Court of International Trade blocked most of the tariffs in an order Wednesday, ruling Trump has overstepped his authority in issuing levies on almost every foreign country that does business with the United States. But an appeals court reinstated the taxes in a ruling Thursday.
“The statute in question has never in history been used in connection with tariffs,” Cobb said.
“So, I think the likelihood is that this statute will be upheld and enforced in a way that precludes the president from trying to pretend that he has these all-encompassing powers.”
Burnett asked Cobb how the President is handling the “TACO Trade” jab, or “Trump Always Chickens Out,” a term coined by financial analysts to describe the continually shifting tariffs Trump is levying on trading partners.
“I think it bothers him very much,” Cobb said, adding that Trump’s defense of himself reminded him of a “wounded narcissist.”
“He doesn’t take criticism well,” Cobb concluded.
And, in fact, Trump lashed out at a reporter who asked him about the acronym Wednesday, denying he was “chickening out”. He defended his trade policy and called the question “nasty.”
“You call that chickening out?” Trump asked, according to the Associated Press. “It’s called negotiation,” adding that he sets a “ridiculous high number and I go down a little bit, you know, a little bit” until the figure is more reasonable.
But Cobb saved his most cutting remarks for Trump Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, whom he called “creepy Karoline.”
“I don’t think creepy Karoline, when she speaks, I don’t think anybody in America really takes her seriously on a matter of substance,” Cobb told Burnett when asked about Leavitt’s response to the court ruling freezing the administration’s tariff policy. Leavitt said during the White House briefing Thursday that the courts have “no role” in trade matters.
“She’s not, you know, learned by any imagination, and I think her comments are clearly so defensive and so ill-informed that people may largely turn her out. She’s wrong,” he concluded.
Leavitt is the youngest White House press secretary in history. The 27-year-old served as Trump’s campaign spokesperson and as an assistant press secretary in his first administration. She moved from a White House intern in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building mailroom onto the Trump communication team. In 2020, after Trump lost re-election, she worked as communications director for New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik.
