Top Trump goon Howard Lutnick’s Wall Street approach to his portfolio at the Commerce Department has apparently left staff at a total loss on how to actually get anything done.
“People who have worked closely with Mr. Lutnick in government describe him as a shrewd negotiator who eyes every contract for signs he could be ripped off,” The New York Times writes in a new report, published Thursday, on Lutnick’s turbulent tenure at the department under the second Trump administration.
“But his insistence on such personal scrutiny has led to bottlenecks, and employees complain that some of the department’s functions have slowed to a crawl,” the newspaper went on. ”Company executives and foreign officials have found him erratic, saying his aggressive style has made for rocky relations.”
The insider leaks form just one part of an explosive NYT review of how Lutnick’s background as a cut-throat corporate tycoon has shaped his stewardship of the Commerce Department.
Take the carmakers. U.S. auto manufacturing executives apparently spent months trekking to Lutnick’s “wood-paneled office” to plead their case last year after Trump’s tariffs on imported components threatened to cost the industry billions.
The secretary and his team finally told them relief was coming in October in the form of a credit covering duties on vehicle parts built in America, backdated to when the tariffs first hit in May. But then, he pulled the rug on them.
Lutnick told the same executives in December that the relief would kick in half a year later than they were promised, in an about-face that will cost each automaker hundreds of millions of dollars.
The executives privately griped about being misled but were unwilling to challenge the move in public, given Lutnick’s influence over their business prospects. The department apparently says he never told them the credit would be backdated.
The New York Times further outlines how Lutnick’s own art of the deal was forged over decades at Cantor Fitzgerald, the brokerage Lutnick, then still in his 30s, wrested from an aging Bernard Cantor in a move likened by one adviser to a “palace coup.”
Lutnick went on to build a sprawling empire of more than 818 corporate entities, the Times found, with firms tied to the billionaire secretary thought to have paid out north of $50 million over money laundering, bogus disclosures, and other claims of misconduct over the years.
“Howard was a hustler, an opportunist and someone who was willing to push the boundaries,” Rupak Ghose, a former corporate rival, told the newspaper.
His approach to business negotiations, described by the NYT as “bare-knuckle” and “brash,” has bruised U.S. allies during his time as commerce secretary.
He’s openly told reporters that Canadian negotiators “suck,” and his broadsides against Europe at January’s World Economic Forum irritated European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde so much that she stormed out mid-way through a dinner.
“I thought that was just too much and just unnecessarily offensive,” Lagarde later told The Wall Street Journal.
Then there are the revenue experiments. The “Trump Gold Card” promised to fast-track immigration paperwork for foreigners willing to cough up $1 million, though only one applicant had been approved as of an April hearing.
He also floated clawing back half the profits universities earn on federally funded patents, and engineered a workaround letting Washington skim 25 percent off Nvidia’s AI chip exports to China, though Beijing’s resistance has so far kept any from going through.
The Daily Beast has contacted the Commerce Department for comment on this story.
A spokesperson told the NYT that Lutnick “has delivered important wins for the American people,” including “bringing manufacturing back to the American soil.”
