Trump’s Newest Economic Sherpas Are Not Like His Old Ones
The New York Times
A little-known investment banker, a former hedge fund star and an acolyte of George Soros have the president-elect’s ear.
To staff his first term as president, Donald J. Trump attracted a group of largely by-the-book aides and advisers who produced an economic record — corporate tax cuts and financial deregulation — that would have been in place in any typical Republican administration.
During the campaign for Mr. Trump’s second term, however, those voices were mostly replaced by other Wall Street figures, some of whom are less orthodox in their thinking, as well as a new cohort of Silicon Valley investors jostling to upend the traditional banking system. They include the chief executive of an investment bank, Howard Lutnick, and the investors Scott Bessent and John Paulson.
Also out: any certainty that the incoming Trump administration’s effect on the job market, consumer prices and the international economy writ large will resemble the last term or any other administration in recent history.
The major financial figures from Mr. Trump’s first term included Steven Mnuchin, the Goldman Sachs partner turned Treasury secretary, and Gary Cohn, also a former Goldman executive and, for a spell, Mr. Trump’s chief economic adviser. Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and personal counsel, Jared Kushner, the scion of a real estate fortune, also counted as a mainstream name.
Those three and others pushed Mr. Trump toward longtime Republican priorities like cutting corporate taxes, and tried to discourage nationalist economic impulses like tariffs. But the individuals around the president-elect this year are encouraging him to take a hard turn in a new direction, economically speaking.
There is Mr. Lutnick, the chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, a small player in the investment banking world, who heads Mr. Trump’s transition team. He’s a big proponent of tariffs on imports from China as a substitute for income tax.
