Kevin Hassett

Kevin Hassett served as Trump’s Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) from 2017-2019. Hassett was a chief promoter of the Trump tax cuts that disproportionately benefited wealthy individuals and large corporations. He returned to the White House in March 2020 to advise President Trump on the Administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, where he touted inaccurate and unfounded COVID-19 death projections, minimizing its deadly effects. A Trump ally, Hassett has reportedly been shortlisted for Trump’s Chair of the Federal Reserve.

As CEA Chair, Hassett made and enabled numerous misleading statements. He argued that cutting the corporate tax rate from 35% to 20% would raise wages by $4,000 per household. This claim was widely criticized as unrealistic and unsupported by evidence. Larry Summers called Trump’s tax plan “some combination of dishonest, incompetent and absurd,” stating that the projected benefit to workers was 300% of the tax cut’s cost. Hassett was also sharply criticized by economists, including Larry Summers, for calling work from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center that criticized his and Trump’s plan “scientifically indefensible” and “fiction”.

Eight months after leaving his role at CEA, Hassett returned to the White House in March 2020 in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, despite having no experience in infectious diseases. During his tenure, a draft report prepared by Johns Hopkins for the CDC projected 200,000 COVID deaths by June 1st. Hasset, however, aiming to paint a rosier picture for President Trump, created a “cubic model” that showed “deaths dropping precipitously in May – and essentially going to zero by May 15”. Hassett contradicted public health experts throughout this role and was a staunch proponent of quickly reopening the economy. On May 26, 2020, Hassett told Dana Bash on CNN that “our human capital stock is ready to get back to work”. This was seen as dehumanizing language, reducing workers to mere economic inputs during a time of high unemployment and health risks. The claim was also far from reality as polling from April 27 - May 4 showed that 74% of Americans want the U.S. to focus on controlling the virus instead of reopening businesses.

Hassett co-authored a book in 1999 titled Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market. The book argued that stocks in 1999 were significantly undervalued and concluded that there would be a fourfold market increase with the Dow Jones Industrial Average rising to 36,000 by 2002 or 2004. This prediction was far off the mark, as it wasn’t until 2021 when Dow 36,000 would be reached in actuality, 22 years after the book was published. Hassett later referred to this as a “youthful indiscretion”.

Hassett also wrote a book called The Drift: Stopping America’s Slide to Socialism where he argues “Washington bureaucrats had undermined the American Dream by inserting themselves into every aspect of the economy. These ‘experts’ were leading us down the path to socialism.” He has also claimed that “the destruction of our institutions is exactly the point of today’s far Left”.

Hassett has been a proponent of a points-based immigration system which would consider factors like education to determine an immigrant’s eligibility. Hassett, along with Jared Kushner and Steven Miller were the core group influencing Trump’s term one proposal of a merit-based system. A merit-based immigration plan would favor well-off immigrants over asylum seekers and people without means.