‘You’re not answering my question!’ Stephanie Ruhle skewers former Trump official on economy

MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle tried to pin down former White House economic adviser Gary Cohn in a live interview from Davos, but the ex-Trump administration official kept tap-dancing around her questions.

Cohn, who left the White House in March over his opposition to tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump, said he understood the growing anger toward the billionaires and business elites gathered at the Switzerland resort town for an annual World Economic Forum.

"I think we're in an interesting place, I get it to some degree, I get it to a large degree -- I really get what's going on," Cohn said. "The problem is we're evolving into a globalist world. As we evolve, we had to change all of the rules, and we're still operating with many very old rules. I think the new generation of students and kids today wants to change everything overnight, not understand there's a lot of rules that we have to live with right now. Maybe we just need to re-evaluate the rules and how we govern ourselves."

Ruhle suggested that sounded ridiculous at the present moment.

"If we need to change the rules, how are we going to do that?" she said. "We can't keep our government open."

Cohn agreed that keeping the federal government funded should be one of the easier functions of governing, but Ruhle pressed him on President Donald Trump's actions.

"Why would you say keeping the government open is an easy thing to do?" Ruhle said. "The president won't do it, he wants funding for a wall."

Cohn agreed the government should be open, he said restricting immigration simply didn't make sense from an economic standpoint.

"Look at where we are in the United States right now," Cohn said. "We have over 7 million job openings, we have less than 7 million unemployed people in the United States. If we want to continue to grow our economy, there's only one way to do it. Allow immigrants in the country -- they should be legal and we should have a mechanism for them to come into the country."

Ruhle appeared to be astonished by Cohn's analysis.

"If with have all these great job opportunities, how can the president -- you sat next to him," she said. "You were in the White House with him. How can he make the argument that Mexicans are stealing all of our jobs, we need a wall?"

Cohn repeated the statistic about 7 million job openings, but Ruhle tried to pin him down.

"You're not answering my question," she said.

Cohn said he was simply stating facts.

"We have 3.1 percent wage growth in the United States," he said. "The bottom wage earners are growing faster than the top wage earners. All the wage data is really good right now. The hardest thing for CEOs to do today is hire good people."

Ruhle asked what the president would say when Cohn presented him with statistics that undermined his proposals, but the former White House adviser wriggled away.

"He wants to drive wages, we have to do that, we're doing that, the tax code is doing that, the economy is doing it," Cohn said. "We're getting the results that we wanted to get from the tax code, it's happening. We just have to continue to allow this to go."