Larry Kudlow, the White House’s top economic adviser, says the impeachment trial against President Trump beginning in the Senate could be a Democratic-led effort to distract from recent economic gains.
“The impeachment trial has had no impact at all on the economy and the stock market. None, zero. That’s a function of good policies and a free market country and brilliant entrepreneurs,” Kudlow said at the White House Friday.
“I sometimes get a little annoyed that impeachment and all the theater going with that could be an effort on the other side of the aisle to obstruct and obfuscate the economic progress we’re making.”
House Democrats this week finally sent over their articles of impeachment against Trump to the Senate, which will commence its trial next week.
Trump has maintained he did nothing wrong in his dealings with Ukraine, though several officials have testified that he acted improperly, leveraging military aid and a White House meeting to pressure the Ukrainian president to investigate his political rivals.
The Government Accountability Office also said Thursday that the administration’s freezing of nearly $400 million in congressionally approved aid to Kyiv broke the law.
Trump administration officials have touted economic gains since he took office, viewing it as a top talking point heading into the president’s reelection effort later this year.
The economy added 145,000 jobs in December, meeting economists’ expectations, and the unemployment rate held steady at 3.5 percent, the lowest level in nearly 50 years. The unemployment rate fell from 3.9 percent in December 2018 to 3.5 percent in 2019.
This article originally appeared on The Hill.
