Trump reportedly indicates his displeasure by refusing to make eye contact

(Image credit: Saul Loeb/Getty Images)

last updated 9 September 2017

If you're a White House staffer who has gotten on President Trump's bad side, you'll know when he stops looking you in the eye.

So reports The New York Times in a Friday article addressing Trump's present displeasure with White House chief economic adviser Gary Cohn, who publicly criticized Trump's responses to the white nationalist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia:

[White House Chief of Staff John] Kelly made a point, one staff member said, of throwing his arm around Mr. Cohn in solidarity, in full view of the news media, as they exited Marine One last week on the South Lawn.But he has not always been successful. Several aides said Mr. Trump is freezing out Mr. Cohn by employing a familiar tactic: refusing to make eye contact with Mr. Cohn when his adviser greets him. [The New York Times]

Cohn was supposed to lead an infrastructure meeting at the White House on Thursday, the Times adds, and Kelly announced as much at the start of the gathering of White House officials and state and federal lawmakers. That plan was stymied when Trump, "whose most cutting insult is to pretend someone does not exist or that he barely knows them, virtually ignored" Cohn throughout the talks. Read the rest of the Times story here.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.