Fox Business star and former Trump adviser Larry Kudlow has detailed his battle with cocaine and alcohol addiction in a new interview.
Speaking on Miranda Devine’s Pod Force One podcast, Kudlow recalled becoming “caught up in the zeitgeist” of 1980s and 1990s Wall Street, when he was the chief economist at Bear Stearns.
“Some people just got hooked on alcohol and or cocaine or other drugs or whatever, other people didn’t,” he said. “I knew lots of people at Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs and others, who had the same stresses I had, and they were fine. So I’ve always taken personal responsibility for it.”
He said the turning point came when his wife Judith “Judy” Pond Kudlow intervened, sending him to a five-month residential drug treatment program in 1995, a year after he was forced to resign from Bear Stearns.
Judy had filed for divorce shortly before he entered the program, and sought to bar him from withdrawing funds from his retirement account. In court papers, she said Kudlow, 47 at the time, “has been on a steady cocaine binge and is desperate for money.”
Kudlow credited the rehab program with leading him to sobriety and faith. Born to a Jewish family, he converted to Catholicism in 1997.
Judy, whom Kudlow met in the early 1980s while working as a Reagan administration official, never ended up divorcing him.
“I’m so blessed because I got a second chance in my life,” Kudlow reflected, “because the crash and burn was pretty awful.” He said he goes to “four or five” Twelve-step program meetings to this day.
Kudlow, who served as the director of the National Economic Council during Donald Trump’s first term, said he’s spoken “very briefly” about his substance abuse with the president.
Trump famously doesn’t touch alcohol or other drugs, often citing his older brother Fred Trump Jr., who died an alcoholic in 1981 at age 42.
“It’s very personal to him,” Kudlow said. “And it’s very personal to me.”
The Fox host argued that Trump is “better than he was in his first term,” saying, “One of the, I think, wonderful things that President Trump has done is he has put religion back into the country.”
Stressing the “need for religion,” Kudlow said it “breeds better behavior and it breeds personal individual responsibility.”
He said he tells people in his 12-step meetings that just thinking about praying means they are making progress.
Kudlow said he had “talked about” a return to the White House with Trump but decided against it, noting he was “very busy at Fox.”
“I’m still very much in touch with him,” he stressed.
