“They’re controlled by lobbyists, they’re controlled by their donors, they’re controlled by special interests,” Donald Trump said of his Republican opponents. Nobody owned him, he said, because he was funding his own campaign and totally removed from the lobbyists.
It was always a lie. On May 5, we got another reminder: Goldman Sachs partner and former George Soros comrade Steve Mnuchin will be the Trump campaign’s finance director, Trump announced Thursday.
Throughout the primary, Trump attacked Ted Cruz for his connections to Goldman Sachs. Cruz’s wife worked at Goldman, and Cruz on one form failed to disclose a Goldman loan he used to finance his 2012 Senate run (although he had disclosed it on another).
Mnuchin, a Yale alumnus, spent nearly two decades at Goldman Sachs, serving as a managing director and later a partner. His father was a general partner at Goldman, too. Mnuchin’s work at Goldman included trading in government debt and mortgage-backed securities. He left Goldman a millionaire and started his own investment firm. He has worked for Soros Fund Management, owned by liberal billionaire speculator George Soros.
Mnuchin is also a major political donor, who has given a clear majority of his donations to Democrats. Chuck Schumer, President Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Al Gore and Tom Daschle all pocketed Mnuchin money.
Turning to a Soros-connected Goldmanite Hillary Clinton donor jibes well with what we already know about Trump, but it clashes with Trump’s pretenses of being an outsider running against a rigged system. Trump has never been distant from lobbyists or the rigged system. Trump has always been tight with K Street.
Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s combative campaign manager, was a subsidy and earmark lobbyist for years. From 2005 through early 2011, Lewandowski was a registered lobbyist at Schwartz Communications, a Massachusetts-based public-relations and lobbying firm. Lewandowski’s clients included biotech firms, solar-panel makers and government contractors.
Lewandowksi successfully lobbied to get a half-million-dollar green-energy earmark, for Borrego Solar, Mother Jones reported earlier this year.
“Passport Systems secured more than $23.9 million in federal dollars between 2008 and 2011,” Mother Jones wrote of another Lewandowski client. “In the six years Lewandowski represented Passport Systems, it paid his firm more than $350,000.”
For equipment-maker Pavilion Technologies, Lewandowski was registered to lobby on “environment,” according to a lobbying registration. Company documents filed with the federal government suggest Lewandowski lobbied the Environmental Protection Agency, the House, and the Senate on rules requiring emissions testing. Pavilion sold emissions-testing equipment.
Lewandowski has been bumped from his prime spot in the Trump campaign by Paul Manafort. Manafort, of course, is a lobbyist. His lobbying firm, Davis Manafort, represented U.S. companies including Verizon, SBC Telecommunications, Airborne Express, Bell South and Fruit of the Loom, according to lobbying filings.
In the 1990s, Manafort lobbied to win $43-million of taxpayer money for a developer who later made Manafort a 20-percent partner in the project, according to the LA Times.
Manafort’s former friends from the lobbying world, including Rick Gates and Doug Davenport, also work on Trump’s campaign. They also have an impressive array of unsavory foreign clients. Politico reported: “Clients included Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, Angolan guerrilla Jonas Savimbi, a group accused of being a front for Pakistani intelligence, and — most recently — ousted Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych.”
Mainstream K Street is warming to Trump, too, and clearly favored him over conservative Cruz. Lobbyists Trent Lott, Bob Dole, Bob Livingston, Rudy Giuliani all lined up behind Trump before the primary was over.
While this K Street and Wall Street love may surprise his supporters, it actually makes perfect sense. Trump is ultimately a dealmaker, who feels unrestrained by any underlying beliefs, constitutional limits on executive power, or a sense of propriety. He’s a lobbyist dream.
Wall Streeters willing to get in bed with a President Trump may foresee their loyalty being rewarded via presidential power. This no doubt will be part of Mnuchin’s pitch to potential donors. Also, Trump has made it very clear that he punishes his enemies and will target companies who displease him — another incentive to donate.
Clinton, the all-but-certain Democratic nominee, will be more corporatist, cronyist, Wall-Street-funded, K-Street-connected than any nominee in the history of U.S. politics. But at least nobody ever believed she was anything other than that.
Trump, however, conned millions of Americans into thinking he’ll battle the system. Instead he’ll just make a corrupt system even more corrupt.
Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
