Until last week, nobody was more despised inside the Trump White House than “special government employee” Elon Musk. But after Musk’s $25 million belly flop in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election punctured his aura of invincibility, that baton passed to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
Lutnick is loathed for two reasons. The first is that he defeated efforts by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and National Economic Council chair Kevin Hassett to limit the size and scope of Trump’s tariffs, which, if we’re lucky, will tip the U.S. economy into a recession. (If we’re unlucky, the tariffs will tip the global economy into a depression.) The second reason Trump officials hate Lutnick is that nobody thinks he actually believes the hooey he spouts in furtherance of a maximalist tariff policy. In an administration overflowing with sycophants, no nose is burrowed more deeply inside Trump’s gluteus maximus than Lutnick’s.
Lutnick “is constantly auditioning for Trump’s approval,” a person identified as being “close to the administration” told Politico on March 11. “He’s trying to be a mini-Trump.” According to Politico, “White House and administration officials” were “growing increasingly frustrated with Lutnick” because of his “abrasive personality” and frequent TV appearances that showed “a lack of understanding of even the basics about how tariffs and the economy work.” Lutnick elbowed aside even the rabid White House trade hawk Peter Navarro, Politico said, not to mention the actual U.S. trade representative, Jamieson Greer, becoming Capitol Hill’s “go-to contact person on tariffs.” (It is Greer, however, who is set to testify Tuesday before the House Ways and Means Committee.)
The Trump administration is where reputations go to die. Before Trump, the world knew Lutnick as the Cantor Fitzgerald chief executive who lost 650 employees during the September 11 attacks, including his brother Gary and his best friend, Doug, all of them inside the financial services company’s World Trade Center headquarters when the planes hit. (Lutnick was dropping his son off at Horace Mann School.) “Cantor Fitzgerald gave the families $180 million and paid for the healthcare for ten years,” Lutnick wrote last September on X. Lutnick also started the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund, a charity to address disasters worldwide. The Financial Times named him “person of the year” for 2001.
Even then, Lutnick’s halo was an awkward fit. “Mr. Lutnick was widely disliked in the industry, reported Susanne Craig in a New York Times profile in 2011:
A ruthless competitor even by Wall Street standards, he has made more than a few enemies over the years. In 1996, as Mr. Cantor, his mentor, lay dying, Mr. Lutnick fought with Mr. Cantor’s wife, Iris, for control of Cantor Fitzgerald. She later barred him from the funeral.
Lutnick cut off paychecks to the families of dead employees four days after 9/11. “It was just math,” he told the Times in 2011. “We lost all our producers. There simply was no money.” A November 2001 report in Forbes by Susan Adams said Lutnick was “succumbing to media pressure” when he greenlit the 10-year health coverage and other payments to grieving families. Still, Lutnick won grudging respect in subsequent years for giving away $90 million of his own money to the surviving families and for bringing Cantor Fitzgerald back to life, enlarging the payroll to 13,000.
Lutnick supported Hillary Clinton in 2016, hosting a fundraiser for her at his Upper East Side brownstone. But he switched his allegiance to Trump in 2020, and in 2024 Lutnick hosted a Trump fundraiser at his Bridgehampton mansion that raised $15 million. Lutnick donated nearly $9 million to a Trump PAC and $5 million to other conservative groups. By October, The Wall Street Journal was calling Lutnick Trump’s “top emissary to Wall Street.”
Trump named Lutnick co-chair of his transition (with Linda McMahon, now education secretary), and in that capacity Lutnick pushed hard to become treasury secretary. “He’s following the Cheney model,” one transition official told CNN, a reference to when Dick Cheney, whom candidate George W. Bush asked in 2000 to find a running mate, chose himself. Musk went on Twitter to promote Lutnick for the Treasury, disparaging Lutnick’s competitor for the job, Scott Bessent, as “a business-as usual choice.” Lutnick, Musk said, “will actually enact change.”
Be careful what you wish for! Musk is expressing mounting disagreement with the tariff policy. This past weekend, he attacked Navarro (but not Lutnick) on X and posted a Milton Friedman video that explains the global nature of supply chains. Navarro replied by saying Musk “doesn’t understand” trade.
Lutnick, meanwhile, appeared Sunday on CBS News’s Face the Nation to defend the tariffs. “We’ve got to start to protect ourselves,” Lutnick said, “and we’ve got to stop having all the countries of the world ripping us off. We have a $1.2 trillion trade deficit, and the rest of the world has a surplus with us. They’re earning our money. They’re taking our money, and Donald Trump has seen this, and he’s going to stop it.”
Does Lutnick truly believe it’s good policy to impose high tariffs based on the size of trade deficits (rather than the trade practices of individual nations)? Does he think it’s good policy to slap a 10 percent tariff on everybody? Even if these actions crash the stock market? (The Dow dropped another 349 points Monday.) Probably he does not. CNN reported last month that “Lutnick’s own views on trade are more nuanced than his salesmanship would suggest” and that “privately” he’s told friends he was “not thrilled” by Trump’s impulsiveness on trade. If that’s what Lutnick believed before Liberation Day, then imagine the disparity now between Lutnick’s relentless public maximalism and whatever he tells intimates.
In other words, Lutnick is not an idiot. He just plays one on TV and in the Oval Office to please the leader of the free world. If anybody is to take the fall for the economic wreckage Trump’s creating, everybody’s rooting for it to be Lutnick. But Lutnick still dreams of becoming treasury secretary, and there are rumors that Bessent (who can’t summon Lutnick-like enthusiasm in shilling for this policy) wants out. Almost nobody inside the White House (much less outside it) can bear to contemplate that the oleaginous Lutnick will become Trump’s actual emissary to Wall Street. But given the scrambled mental state of our commander in chief, don’t rule it out.