But the larger point that Trump has surrounded himself largely with the wealthy remains valid. Sure, there are those in Trump’s inner circle-among them Nikki Haley, Reince Priebus, Michael Flynn, Jeff Sessions, and Mike Pompeo-who are mere pikers financially, mainly because they have been in government most of their adult lives. He still runs Dune Capital, a hedge fund. Including dividends paid, Mnuchin and his investors cleared more than $5 billion on the deal. In August 2015, Mnuchin sold OneWest to CIT, the finance giant, for $3.4 billion. (Sound familiar?) Mnuchin moved from New York City to Los Angeles to run the bank, which he renamed OneWest. A former Goldman Sachs partner, like his father, he and a bunch of his fellow hedge-fund billionaires, including George Soros and John Paulson, bought control of IndyMac, a failed California bank, for $1.6 billion during the height of the 2008 financial crisis. of JPMorgan Chase, has withdrawn from consideration (or was never in consideration, depending on whom you want to believe). Steven Mnuchin, the Trump campaign’s finance chairman, seems to be the leading candidate to become secretary of the Treasury now that Jamie Dimon, the chairman and C.E.O. (His likely deputy secretary, Todd Ricketts, is a member of one of the richest families in America.) Forbes pegs his net worth at $2.9 billion. But Ross hit the cash register when he became a private-equity mogul, investing in out-of-favor industries, such as coal and steel, and making a fortune. Ross did well as an investment banker and met Trump decades ago while advising any number of Trump’s companies on their many trips through bankruptcy court. ( Forbes has pegged the DeVos family’s wealth at $5.1 billion.) Wilbur Ross, a former investment banker at Rothschild & Co., is Trump’s openly rumored pick to be commerce secretary. Betsy DeVos, Trump’s announced pick for secretary of education, for instance, is the daughter-in-law of the co-founder of the privately held Amway Corporation, the multi-level marketing company. As with Trump himself, the net worth of many of his top advisers and nominees for Cabinet positions is difficult to pin down precisely, but there is no question that many of them are among the wealthiest of the wealthy. “My own house was an eyesore,” Carraway explains, “but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires.”Īs he assembles his Cabinet, Donald Trump appears to be soliciting the consoling proximity of not millionaires, of course, but fellow billionaires.

There is a moment in the opening pages of The Great Gatsby when Nick Carraway sheepishly confesses how he has somehow managed to rent his modest $80-per-month house on West Egg, amid the myriad moguls and barons, and beside Jay Gatsby’s own fanciful “imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy.” Millioniares, it seemed, were everywhere.

Trump tweet cabinet all billionaires