In his latest wide-ranging interview President Trump on Thursday lashed out at three adversaries du jour, starting with his former attorney Michael Cohen was Trump claimed a “low-level” employee who did limited legal work as he sought to distance himself from his longtime associate.
“He did very low-level work,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News. “He did more public relations than he did law. You would see him on television and he was OK on television.”
Trump on Michael Cohen: “It happens” .also says Cohen did “very low level work … more public relations than he did law” pic.twitter.com/uL3wicrWCP
— John Whitehouse (@existentialfish) December 13, 2018
The comments appeared to undercut Trump’s claim made hours earlier that Cohen who yesterday was sentenced to three years in prison, “was a lawyer” and as a result “has great liability” for campaign finance law violations, according to The Hill.
Asked why he hired Cohen in the first place, Trump pointed to a favor from “years ago” when Cohen was on a condominium committee that oversaw the approval of Trump World Tower in Manhattan. “I thought he was a great guy. I thought he was really a nice guy,” Trump said. “He was really supportive, and I liked him, and he was a lawyer, and because of that I did it. And you know what, in retrospect, I made a mistake.”
Separately, in the same interview Trump once again criticized General Motors’ plan to cut jobs and said the automaker won’t be “treated well.”
“I think she’s making a big mistake,” Trump said of GM CEO Mary Barra, adding “I don’t like what she did, it was nasty. It doesn’t really matter because Ohio is under my leadership from a national standpoint. Ohio is going to replace those jobs in like two minutes.”
The largest U.S. automaker’s recent decision to cut up to 14,000 jobs that span three states has brought the company controversy with lawmakers from the region and drawn the president’s ire.
“To tell me a couple of weeks before Christmas that she’s going to close in Ohio and Michigan, not acceptable to me,” Trump told Fox News. “General Motors is not going to be treated well.”
Turmp then took aim at GM’s plan to focus on electric cars, predicting that “all electric is not going to work.”
Trump then said he would seek further reductions in the tariff China charges on U.S.-made automobiles. “It’s not acceptable, 15 is still too high.”
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Finally, Trump took aim at his adversary in the Marriner Eccles building, saying that “he hopes the Fed won’t be raising rates anymore.”
Trump explained that according to him the U.S. is almost at a “normalized interest rate, and yet” the economy is “soaring”, which of course is confusing considering the same “soaring” economy can’t handle rates above 2.25%.
It was Trump’s latest criticism of the central bank’s policy, which came in just one week before the next Fed meeting. According to consensus the Fed is likely to raise its benchmark interest rate by a quarter-point to a range between 2.25% and 2.5% at the end of their meeting on Dec. 19, while the Fed has telegraphed it will keep rising rates at least three more times in 2019 although the market has now largely priced out any more Fed hikes next year.
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