White House insiders call for Trump official's exit as crisis deepens

Howard Lutnick, Chairman and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, gestures as he speaks during a rally for Donald Trump at Madison Square Garden, in New York, U.S., October 27, 2024. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly/File Photo

So far, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick has been able to score deals that make President Donald Trump happy. However, he's now alienated the rest of the powers that be.

According to Politico, politicians on both sides of the aisle are angry over Lutnick's name popping up in the investigation files around Jeffrey Epstein. Lutnick lived next to Epstein for a time, went to his home and to his private island with his family. He never engaged in anything untoward, he told reporters.

“He is thumbing a middle finger to anyone who thinks he’s on the outs because the president has really given a lot of his Cabinet the assurance that they’re not going anywhere until he wants them to go somewhere,” said one person close to the White House.

Other Cabinet-level officials don't like Lutnick's "style," the report said. And there are larger questions about how much Lutnick's children were profiting from his position in the Cabinet. Over the holidays, Trump confronted the secretary over the matter while at Mar-a-Lago.

Lutnick also promised Trump that he would deliver on $15 trillion to the government through Trump's tariffs. The problem with that now, however, is that the U.S. Senate stopped the retaliatory tariffs. So, Trump has issued a blanket 10 percent tariff on all countries.

Politico said that they spoke to 15 people for the report.

“The reality is that only a small fraction of that [promised sum] has any specifics behind it and can really be considered a new investment. So the rest of it is just repackaged stuff that they were already going to do, or stuff that’s related to the AI boom and has almost nothing to do with tariffs,” Scott Lincicome, the VP of general economics at the Cato Institute, which leans libertarian.

“If we’re sitting here in three years and the investment data show a really modest bump in domestic investment outside of the AI boom, then it’ll be a significant black mark against the tariff record and Lutnick himself to the extent that he’s the engineer of all of it,” said Lincicome.

Lutnick has also become a kind of gatekeeper, causing problems for other departments.

“No one’s allowed to talk to the interagency without Howard giving explicit approval,” said one administration official when speaking to Politico. “Even when his staff show up to meetings at the White House, they’re under a gag order, and they literally just say, ‘Hi, I don’t have a position from the Secretary on this, so Commerce has no position at this time.’”

They also said that if you're saying something Lutnick doesn't like, he just yells over you, whether or not it is helpful or a good idea.

“When you’re in a meeting with him, if he disagrees with what you’re saying, or if you are trying to offer, even diplomatically, an alternative view, he just completely shouts over you,” the official said. One of those discussions happened last year when there was a discussion about trade rules.

Three people confirmed that there appears to be a larger-than-normal turnover at the Commerce Department as a result of Lutnick's attitude. The department denies it, saying that it has one of the lowest rates across government. Given the government purges, however, that may not be a helpful indicator.

The other Lutnick problem has been that he had an outsized role when he was helping Trump form the Cabinet. He made huge promises about staffing without making it clear that the staff must pass background checks.

“He indicated [that] without even thinking about the vetting ramifications,” said the official with direct knowledge.

“This is a total outsider, and it was his show for a while, and he kind of thought he could do whatever he wanted,” the official who overheard Lutnick said.

Then the loyalty tests came into play. Experienced candidates were quickly sidelined by the process, even if they had close relationships with the Cabinet member they would serve under.

"Five Trump administration officials – four current and one former – interviewed for this article described a dynamic in which Lutnick would insert himself into negotiations of all kinds that are already underway, sometimes accelerating them, sometimes complicating them," Politico reported.

One described Lutnick poking his head into deals around on subjects he has little expertise. It could result in there being no enforcement or follow-through

The first administration official described Lutnick as "just chas[ing] a headline. And so if he thinks there’s a headline, he can seize quick victory.”

On the White House side, Lutnick's standards mean that even the top aides in the President's office must wait on Lutnick's approval for something.

One example comes from the Department of Energy, which spent months negotiating a nuclear reactor deal with the company Westinghouse. Lutnick then stepped in and began negotiating directly with the company instead of through Energy Secretary Chris Wright.

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