Economy

Some of Trump's Biggest Supporters Hate His Goldman Sachs Moves

November 30th 2016

Following reports that Donald Trump chose a former Goldman Sachs executive, Steven Mnuchin, to run the Treasury Department, some of the president-elect's most vocal supporters expressed anger and outrage online.

Trump claimed many times during his campaign and since the election that he will "drain the swamp," meaning he will remove career politicians, lobbyists and people with ties to financial institutions from positions of power.

However, Trump has recently selected many of those kinds of people to help him run the federal government.

One major Trump supporter, conservative author Mike Cernovich, complained about Trump choosing former Goldman Sachs banker Steven Mnuchin to run theTreasury Department in a tweet that has apparently been deleted.

Twitter

Conservative radio host and former-Congressman Joe Walsh, who before the election said he would arm himself and take to the streets if Trump was not elected, also called "bullshit" on the hire.

Mnuchin, who worked for Goldman Sachs from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, was hired as the Trump campaign's national finance chairman in May. Another major reason Trump selecting Mnuchin has his fans upset is that Mnuchin worked closely with liberal megadonor George Soros over the years, according to Vox.

Mnuchin isn't the only Goldman Sachs alum in the running for a spot in Trump's administration. On Wednesday, Politico reported that the investment bank's former president, Gary Cohn, was in the running to head the office of budget management. Both Mnuchin and Cohn need to be approved by the senate before they can begin working. 

Richard Wolff, a professor of economics emeritus at the Univeristy of Massachusetts, Amherst, told ATTN: that Trump likely picked Mnuchin to appease the Wall St. community, because he says many in the financial services industry are concerned about what Trump will do and might make his job much harder if he threatens their profits in any way.

"Mnuchin is exactly, down to the last detail, everything that Mr. Trump caricatured as his great formidable enemy that he was going to smite, in the Biblical sense, and here he is putting that guy in charge," Wolff said. "Is it conceivable that he will be willing and able to go completely against his society, his community, his colleagues, his lifetime of work and that of his father? Sure, that's always possible, but would you bet on that? If you have any sense of how these things normally go, you'd be nuts to bet on such a thing."

Share your opinion

Do you think Donald Trump will rein in Wall Street?

Yes 16%No 84%