Steven Mnuchin might have a shot at Treasury secretary, but his Wall Street pedigree makes him the type Donald Trump fans love to hate.
One theory bouncing between Manhattan and Beverly Hills holds that an investor with so much Wall Street blood in his veins spotted the trade of a lifetime. In exchange for a few months of unpaid work, Mnuchin gets a shot at joining President Trump’s cabinet. Goldman partners have wealth, and movie producers befriend stars, but the secretary of the Treasury gets his signature stamped on cash.
.. he sounds less like a political obsessive than an investor closing a deal he can’t quite discuss. “This was a unique moment in time where there’s a unique role for me,” he says. “It’s a unique moment in time,” he says again. “A unique opportunity to help.” But he will allow that the idea of a top Washington job appeals to him. “Yeah, it does,” he says. And for everyone on both coasts who still can’t believe Mnuchin has tied himself to Trump, he has an answer: “Nobody’s going to be like, ‘Well, why did he do this?’ if I end up in the administration.”
.. Mnuchin helped work out a deal with the party for Trump to essentially outsource much of the work of raising money, and in return the RNC would get to pocket millions collected in his name. It was a classic Trump move. After his companies went bankrupt following debt-fueled bonanzas in the 1980s, Trump became a maestro of sticking his brand on someone else’s products—condos, cuff links, colognes. Mnuchin arranged for him to do the same thing on a presidential scale.
.. Mnuchin’s counterpart at the RNC is Lew Eisenberg, his father’s old partner at Goldman Sachs. “I knew him when he was 10,” Eisenberg says
.. Mnuchin was born into a level of privilege that makes Trump’s deluxe childhood look ordinary. His grandfather, an attorney, co-founded a yacht club in the Hamptons, and his father, Robert, was a top Goldman Sachs trader who later became an art dealer. Mnuchin followed his father to Yale, where he lived in the old Taft Hotel with Eddie Lampert, now a billionaire investor, and Sam Chalabi, whose uncle, Ahmad, later ran the Iraqi National Congress.
.. In 2004, Mnuchin founded his own hedge fund, Dune Capital Management, named for a spot near his house in the Hamptons, and got hundreds of millions of dollars from Soros.
.. Mnuchin gathered some billionaire allies, including Soros and hedge fund manager John Paulson, and assembled a $1.6 billion bid to buy IndyMac. Mnuchin got an agreement that guaranteed the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. would absorb almost all the loan losses after a certain threshold.
.. “He’s a guy that can recognize an opportunity and adapt to it,” he says. “He’s able to switch into different things.”
.. betting markets give Trump as much as a 28 percent chance of winning. Those are long odds in politics but not too shabby on Wall Street, and if his man makes it, Mnuchin could nab something priceless. All it costs him is a few months and some behind-the-back talk from friends who think he’s selling out to a demagogue.
.. “If you want to support Hillary and you haven’t been doing it for 15 to 25 years, probably dating back to Bill, you may be too late. In fact, at this point you are too late,” Sobel says. “Trump as a candidate didn’t exist two years ago. He doesn’t have the legacy organization that you had to endure and claw your way through. There’s no political machine.”
.. the foul-mouthed provocateur Steve Bannon ..
.. e has only pleasantries to share about Bannon, also a Goldman Sachs alumnus. Two days later, campaign Chairman Paul Manafort is gone.
.. He won’t go into details about how he met Trump. Nor what he thinks about the candidate insulting the parents of an American soldier killed in action. Mnuchin won’t say whether Goldman’s Hank Paulson was a good Treasury secretary.
.. Mnuchin surveyed the U-shaped table setup and decided Trump’s seat was too close to a wall. He convinced the country club staff that there was enough time to move the furniture about 2 feet.
.. At an August Trump fundraiser in the Hamptons, he encountered Carl Icahn, the billionaire investor whom Trump floated as a Treasury pick last year. “I hear the rumor is you will be secretary of the Treasury,” Icahn told Mnuchin. “And I will support you 100 percent on that! Because there’s no f—ing way I would ever do that.”
Steve Bannon’s Bad Day: Allegations of Voter Fraud and Domestic Violence
Donald Trump’s new campaign CEO, who is registered to vote at an empty house in Florida, may be as scandal-plagued as his predecessors.
.. But voting experts point out that there are virtually no documented cases of in-person voter fraud, where someone shows up and votes in someone else’s name. More common are cases where someone is registered at an address where they don’t live—just like Bannon. It’s not altogether uncommon for people to have failed to update old registrations, but it’s particularly embarrassing for Bannon, since he is running a presidential campaign, no less one that is warning about widespread fraud.
.. Not only is the whiff of voter fraud an embarrassing disclosure for a campaign that has railed against it, but the domestic-violence charges make Bannon the latest figure on the Trump campaign embroiled in misogyny and violence.
.. his ex-wife Ivana even alleged marital rape, though she has since withdrawn the claim.
.. Manafort, in turn, was hired as a counterweight to and later a replacement for Corey Lewandowski
.. But Lewandowski was pushed aside and later fired, beset by the campaign’s struggles at winning delegates but also by Lewandowski’s repeated physical altercations on the trail. In the most high-profile case, Lewandowski grabbed then-Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields at a rally in Florida, then denied he had done so. Although a prosecutor declined to bring charges, video evidence showed Lewandowski had lied about the encounter.
Pence ducks deportation questions
Indiana Gov. Mike Pence on Sunday repeatedly avoided clarifying whether his running mate, Republican nominee Donald Trump, still wants to deport all undocumented immigrants in the United States or only criminals.
In an interview with host Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Pence insisted Trump’s position on immigration has remained consistent. Yet after hearing clips of Trump earlier in the campaign promising to deport all undocumented immigrants, Pence refused to say whether that is still the plan... Pressed by Tapper, Pence said Trump’s call for deportation was “a mechanism, not a policy,”
.. “There will be no change in the principle here,” Pence said. “There will be no path to legalization and no path to citizenship. Donald Trump will articulate what we do with the people who are here.”
.. He waved off stories about domestic violence charges against Trump’s new campaign executive, Breitbart chairman Steve Bannon, saying voters don’t care so much about “process” stories.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/pence-trump-deportation-questions-227477#ixzz4IfOBBn8a
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What if Trump won’t accept defeat?
As their nominee unravels, Republicans worry where his scorched-earth, rigged-election rhetoric leads the GOP and the country.
The first image of a Trump campaign ad, released on Friday, is that of a polling place as a narrator alleges “the system” is “rigged”; and his campaign has already begun recruiting volunteers to monitor polling places, specifically in urban precincts where African-American voters, very few of whom support Trump, predominate.
Trump’s words are having an effect. Just 38 percent of Trump supporters believe their votes will be counted accurately, and only 49 percent of all registered voters are “very confident” their votes will be tabulated without error, according to a Pew Research survey last week.
The implications — short- and long-term — are serious. Interviews with more than a dozen senior GOP operatives suggest growing panic that Trump’s descent down this alt-right rabbit hole and, beyond that, his efforts to delegitimize the very institutions that undergird American democracy — the media and the electoral process itself — threaten not just their congressional majorities or the party’s survival but, potentially, the stability of the country’s political system.
.. “Among the values most necessary for a functioning democracy is the peaceful transition of power that’s gone on uninterrupted since 1797. What enables that is the acceptance of the election’s outcome by the losers,” said Steve Schmidt, the GOP operative who was McCain’s campaign strategist in 2008.
.. “Here you have a candidate after a terrible three weeks, which has all been self-inflicted, saying the only way we lose is if it’s ‘rigged’ or stolen
.. That’s an assault on some of the pillars that undergird our system. People need to understand just how radical a departure this is from the mean of American politics.”
.. many Republicans fear that Trump’s efforts to diminish people’s confidence in mainstream media, fair elections and politics itself will have a lasting impact.
.. He is a postmodern authoritarian who’s in the process of delegitimizing every institution — the media, the ballot box — that can be a check on him.”
.. “I can’t see the fever swamp, alt-reality media universe on the right learning the lessons of this,” Sykes said. “Can you see Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham saying, ‘OK, sorry, we screwed up’?”
.. But my fear is that Bannon and Trump uniting could be about them looking to do something long-term that would ensure this fringe element remains.”