Donald Trump, the political outsider running a renegade campaign for president, has a fresh idea about who should head the Treasury Department: an ex-Goldman Sachs executive.
Fortune’s Dan Primack reports that Anthony Scaramucci, a Trump fundraiser and hedge fund salesman, says Trump has told potential donors that if he is elected he wants to nominate Steve Mnuchin, his campaign’s finance chairman, to be Treasury secretary.
Mnuchin is the co-CEO and co-founder of Dune Capital Management, a hedge fund. He worked at Goldman Sachs for 17 years and left in 2002. Mnuchin’s father, Robert, was a partner at Goldman Sachs before retiring to run an art gallery. In 2004, Steve started Dune Capital with funding from George Soros, the progressive trader, philanthropist and boogeyman to conservative conspiracy theorists everywhere.
If hiring a former Goldman Sachs executive to run fundraising efforts was an odd choice for Trump, who’d bragged that self-funding his campaign made him immune to special interests, then daydreaming about appointing the same person Treasury secretary ― presumably to woo donors ― only amplifies the absurdity. In truth, Trump was never fully self-funding his presidential bid, and his campaign staff is increasingly stocked with lobbyists.
Were Mnuchin appointed secretary of the Treasury, he’d be the third Goldman alum to hold the post. Robert Rubin served as secretary for four years during the Clinton administration, and Hank Paulson spent the last two and a half years of George W. Bush’s presidency in the position.
Trump has previously said that activist investor Carl Icahn, a pioneer of the hostile takeover in the 1980s, would be his Treasury secretary. Icahn initially declined Trump’s offer before deciding that actually, he would like to run the Treasury in a Trump administration.
Scaramucci did not respond to a request for comment.
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims ― 1.6 billion members of an entire religion ― from entering the U.S.
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