Kudlow's Full Recovery Seen After Heart Attack, White House Says

Donald Trump’s top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, is expected to recover fully after suffering a mild heart attack in the U.S. shortly before the president’s nuclear summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, a White House aide said Tuesday.

"The great @larry_kudlow is expected to make a full and speedy recovery after a very mild heart attack. Larry is one of the smartest, most endearing, funniest people I know. ‘Hogie’ is praying for you!" White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said in a Twitter posting.

Trump announced Kudlow’s heart attack in a tweet from Singapore shortly before meeting with Kim.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement that Kudlow experienced "a very mild heart attack" and had been admitted to Walter Reed Military Medical Center on Monday.

Conservative economist Art Laffer, who has been a friend of Kudlow for decades, said Kudlow called him last night from Walter Reed to let him know he was doing fine.

“The called lasted 20 seconds. He just said, ’I want you to know I’m fine, I’m going to be fine,”’ Laffer said.

Kudlow, a former economic adviser to President Ronald Reagan and a Wall Street economist, has played a key role in ongoing trade talks, including disputes with China that led Trump to threaten tariffs. Kudlow, along with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, is known as an advocate within the administration of more robust trade in opposition to more protectionist views advocated by trade adviser Peter Navarro.

He co-authored an editorial arguing tariffs are a tax on consumers earlier this year before Trump chose him as director of the White House National Economic Council. Yet Kudlow has defended Trump’s trade policies in public since his appointment.

Kudlow accompanied Trump this weekend to the annual G-7 meeting in Quebec, where the president traded barbs with the leaders of Canada, Germany and France over trade. On Sunday, Kudlow said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “really kind of stabbed us in the back” after criticizing U.S. tariffs on imported steel and aluminum and Trump’s positions on trade in a news conference following the summit.

For five years before his White House appointment in March, Kudlow hosted a CNBC show on business and politics. During Reagan’s first term, he was associate director for economics and planning in the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. He has also worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.