The United States’ last two presidents were criticized by some of their supporters for being overly deferential to advisors: there were liberals and progressives who believed that President Barack Obama became overly reliant on Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on economic policy and some conservatives who believed that President George W. Bush was too quick to defer to the neocon war hawks in his administration on foreign policy. But President Donald Trump has had the opposite problem: a tendency to grow angry and defensive when challenged by advisers — and Gary Cohn, Trump’s former chief economic adviser, fears that being surrounded by yes-men could prove problematic for Trump.
Trump’s administration, according to the Brookings Institution, has had an 80% turnover rate. Appearing on former Obama adviser David Axelrod’s podcast, “The Axe Files,” Cohn (who resigned from the Trump Administration in March 2018) asserted that Trump, at this point, might be lacking the constructive criticism he needs in the White House.
“We had an interesting nucleus of people when I was in the White House — the initial team,” Cohn told Axelrod during the interview. “We were not bashful. It was a group that was willing to tell the president what he needed to know, whether he wanted to hear it or not.”