STEVE MNUCHIN
STEVE BANNON
GARY COHN
DINA POWELL
ALL THAT GLITTERS
President Trump is briefed on a military strike on Syria, at Mar-a-Lago, April 6. Among his advisers present, nearly one-third are Goldman Sachs alums (circled).
One photograph makes it abundantly clear just how pres ent a small group of Goldman Sachs alumni has become in Donald Trump’s White House. From April 6, it shows a stonefaced Trump and his advisers in a “sensitive, compartmented information facility” at Mara- Lago, just after the president had given the order to launch cruise missiles at a Syriangovernment airbase. In the closely cropped picture, released by Press Secretary Sean Spicer on Twitter, 14 men and one woman are crowded tightly around a small table, their eyes glued to a closed-circuit-television screen. Three of the people in the picture—Gary Cohn, the head of the National Economic Council and Trump’s chief economic adviser; Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary; and Dina Powell, a deputy national-security adviser— are former Goldman Sachs partners, one of the most coveted perches on Wall Street. A fourth, Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, was a Goldman Sachs vice president in the late 1980s, before he left the firm to start his own investment-banking business.
“I find it validating,” says Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman’s chairman and C.E.O., from his Battery Park City, Manhattan, office, 41 floors above the Hudson River, “that as he was looking for good people it happens that a lot of them had Goldman Sachs affiliations. It makes me feel good that he sees in those people the same thing I see in those people.”
That Trump would turn to Goldman Sachs to fill some of the most important positions in his fledgling administration is rich with irony. For years, Trump and Goldman practiced mutual disdain. Trump was the poster child of the kind of client that Goldman, which has always prided itself on superb risk management, warned its bankers to avoid. At least four of Trump’s hotel and casino businesses have ended up in bankruptcy court, costing creditors and shareholders billions of dollars in losses. For this reason and others, Goldman determined never to do business with Trump and conveyed that message to its new recruits. Sources at Goldman now deny he was unwelcome at the firm, but more than one former Goldman banker has told me that it’s true, and Goldman has never underwritten a single stock or bond offering for a Trump majority-owned business or realestate proj ect or lent him any money.
Goldman also avoided Trump politically. It is no secret that Cohn, when he was Goldman’s president and C.O.O., and Blankfein were Democrats—although neither man was particularly enamored of President Obama and his anti–Wall Street rhetoric. Famously, Goldman paid Hillary Clinton $675,000 to appear at three non-taxing question-andanswer sessions during 2013, less than two years before she declared her candidacy for president. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Goldman employees and affiliated pacs donated less than $5,000 to Trump during the 2016 election cycle. By contrast, Clinton received more than $340,000 from them.
During the campaign, Trump was not shy about returning the love. He criticized his political opponents mercilessly for their ties to Goldman Sachs. During a rally in February 2016, when he was still trying to fend off Senator Ted Cruz, whose wife, Heidi, is a managing director at the bank, Trump said, “I know the guys at Goldman Sachs. They have total, total, total control over him. Just like they have total control over Hillary Clinton.” As the presidential campaign was coming to a close, Trump ran a television ad featuring Blankfein (along with billionaire businessman George Soros) as one of Wall Street’s arch-villains, responsible for sending U.S. jobs overseas and closing U.S. factories.
Yet, after his surprise victory, last November, Trump did a 180-degree turn on Goldman Sachs. Perhaps he decided that, after a long and divisive campaign, he had to show the capital markets that he wasn’t a total lunatic, especially when in the early-morning hours of November 9 the futures market plunged some 1,000 points. What better way to reassure Wall Street that he wasn’t completely bonkers than to hire Goldman Sachs’s best and brightest?
And, even better, he could make them kiss his ring and show them who’s boss. At the infamous June 12 Cabinet meeting Mnuchin fell right in line with the other sycophants in the room praising Trump. “There was nothing rehearsed about that,” Mnuchin says. “I mean, it was, basically: the vice president started it, and I think it was how everybody felt in the room.” He dismisses the widespread charges of fawning at that Cabinet meeting: “What criticism? I mostly list that in the fake news.”
Whatever Trump’s convoluted logic for going Goldman, it confounded Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, an outspoken critic of Wall Street’s bad behavior leading up to the financial crisis and since. “Donald Trump promised to drain the swamp,” she says. “Then he put enough Goldman bankers on his team to open a branch office of Goldman in the White House.” The more Warren thinks about it, the more exasperated she gets. “Donald Trump ran on not Goldman Sachs running this economy. If there was a single economic idea that was consistent in his campaign, it was that Goldman Sachs should not run America’s economy. Then he got elected, put in a Goldman team, and handed them the keys.”
“I think Mnuchin’s homework is being checked by Gary Cohn,” says a former Goldman partner.
If Trump’s about-face was surprising, you also have to wonder why Gary Cohn, a lifelong Democrat, left Goldman to accept Trump’s offer. The conventional wisdom is that Cohn, 56, grew tired of waiting for Blankfein to retire from the C.E.O. post at Goldman and leapt at the chance to serve his country in such a crucial role. Becoming the director of the National Economic Council gave Cohn a graceful exit from Goldman and allowed him to follow in the footsteps of two illustrious Goldman senior partners: Robert Rubin and Stephen Friedman. (Leaving also allowed Cohn the not insignificant economic benefit of being able to convert his roughly $250 million of Goldman Sachs stock into Treasury securities on a tax-deferred basis. In 2016, Goldman paid Cohn $20 million and then vested his restricted stock after he left for Washington.)
There is another version of Cohn’s decision to leave Goldman that is slightly more complicated. In September 2015, Blankfein announced the shocking news that he had lymphoma. He had been C.E.O. for nearly a dec ade and had successfully steered Goldman through both the 2008 financial crisis and the reputational abyss that followed, when the firm became the symbol of Wall Street greed and arrogance.
While Blankfein was recuperating, Cohn seemed to delight in the attention and adulation he received when he filled in for his boss on earnings calls, industry pres en ta tions, and media events, such as The New York Times’s DealBook Conference. That’s when, some say, he became overconfident and decided to inquire of several of his fellow board members about becoming C.E.O., even as Blankfein was responding well to his chemotherapy treatments. “Gary made a play to replace Lloyd,” according to a former Goldman partner. It didn’t work. The board was “noncommittal” to Cohn, he continues. “There’s a lot of loyalty to Lloyd on the board.”
“I think Gary had been getting frustrated in the sense of ‘Will I ever be in a position to lead?’ ” says a longtime Goldman partner. “And I think the conclusion was ‘Well, not now, buddy.’ He then started looking at ‘Wait a minute—there’s other opportunities here to do things.’ ”
The board consensus was that Cohn wasn’t well rounded enough to lead the firm. “We’d talk about how we’d ‘crossed the Rubicon’ and he wouldn’t know what we were talking about,” says a former Goldman board member. “But he was unusually bright, knew markets, had huge character, and was straightforward. If you think I’m blunt, he’s right from the brain to the mouth.”
But the man who had made any number of successful bets as a Goldman trader had miscalculated. That quickly proved to be an untenable situation for both Cohn and Blankfein.
A source close to the situation describes what happened at Goldman differently. “The honest-to-goodness story is: did Gary have lunch with Bayo [Adebayo Ogunlesi], Goldman’s lead director, once or twice? Absolutely. Did he ever make a power play to become C.E.O.? He absolutely did not. He met with Bayo and said, ‘Look, is the board comfortable with Lloyd staying on?’ Bayo said, ‘Yeah.’ Gary said, ‘Well, look, that’s great. I know where I am. I’m not in any hurry and I’m not threatening, but we should all be on the same page that I’ve been president and chief operating officer for 10 years.’ Gary gets a lot of phone calls for opportunities. He told Bayo he was going to start listening when his phone rang.”
The timing was perfect for Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, to pounce. He approached Cohn, supposedly at the sugges tion of mutual friends. “Jared Kushner has always been a little starstruck with Goldman Sachs people,” says a former Goldman partner who knows him well. “He’s always liked that sort of promotional edginess that Goldman Sachs has had, and he’s always liked the reputation that Goldman Sachs has the best people, quote unquote, the smartest, savviest people. The idea, by the way, that Jared was suddenly in a position where he actually had the power to call on and hire and lure a number of people like that to the bench side, if you will, was a very, very intoxicating, enticing, and really kind of exciting thing to him,” the former partner continues. “This was an incredibly sort of convenient and opportune kind of thing that came along for Gary because— whether he was going to Washington or not—Gary was out.”
Cohn was the quintessential Goldman executive, with a wellknown backstory: a middleclass striver from the heartland who came to the firm and succeeded wildly. From a suburb of Cleveland, the dyslexic grandson of Jewish immigrants, he was pressured by his father to get a job he didn’t want, in the home-products division of U.S. Steel.
On a business trip to New York he visited the comex—the Commodity Exchange Inc., as it used to be known—in Lower Manhattan and eventually talked his way into a job trading options. In 1990 he joined the J. Aron division of Goldman, rising through the ranks, along with his mentor, Blankfein. When C.E.O. Hank Paulson became Treasury secretary, in 2006, Blankfein succeeded him, choosing Cohn to be his deputy.
“I think people respected Gary completely,” says Robert Steel, a former Goldman partner, Treasury official, and New York City deputy mayor who is now the C.E.O. of Perella Weinberg, the boutique investment bank. “I don’t think there’s any issue of him being a jerk or a bad guy or anything like that. He’s very generous. He’s raised a lot of money for N.Y.U. hospital. He has nice kids, one wife. He’s not obnoxious. He looks you in the eye. I’ve never heard him say a single thing derogatory about anybody᠁ He’s never read a fivepage memo in his life, but when he asks you to describe something to him he pays incredible attention and remembers every word.”
Adds John F. W. Rogers, Goldman’s longtime consigliere, “If you went and talked to most of the bankers at the firm, they would say Gary was a guy who’d go anywhere, anytime, if we asked him to. He was always engaging, and he always brought an interesting market perspective to the dialogue of the problem of the client. He also was an exceptional listener and would look for those common points of moving the conversation forward.”
A former Goldman partner, who still speaks occasionally to Cohn, thinks he’s already made “a huge difference” in the White House. “Trump likes alpha males that either have been in the military and have been in battle or alpha males that have made a lot of money,” he says. “Trump likes to say, ‘That’s my Goldman Sachs president over there,’ ‘That’s my Exxon C.E.O. over there,’ you know, ‘That’s my general over there.’ ” The partner says that, by working closely with Ivanka Trump, Kushner, and Dina Powell, Cohn has tempered the reactionary influence of people around the president (such as Peter Navarro, head of the National Trade Council, and Steve Bannon, the chief strategist with white-nationalist leanings), and he is dedicated to making sure the U.S. doesn’t start any ridiculous trade wars or do something “crazy” on health care. “I’m not going to let it happen,” the former partner says Cohn told him.
But he also may be starting to hedge his bets. Trump has asked Cohn to head up the search for a replacement for Federal Reserve chairman Janet Yellen, when her term expires early next year. She may yet get reappointed, but there has also been speculation that Cohn himself wants the job, which would insulate him, and his reputation, from the ongoing Trump scandals. Crazier things have happened: Once upon a time Dick Cheney led the search for George W. Bush’s vice president and then took the job himself.
Like Cohn, Steve Mnuchin became a Goldman partner in 1994 and made his first fortune, said to be around $100 million, when Goldman went public, five years later. ( Fortune puts Mnuchin’s current net worth at close to $500 million, based on his disclosure forms.) But that’s pretty much where the similarities between Mnuchin and Cohn end. Mnuchin is Goldman royalty, which is far from the norm at a firm that takes pride in hiring the ambitious sons and daughters of the middle class and molding them in “the Goldman Way.” Steve’s father, Robert Mnuchin, was a Yale graduate and a longtime Goldman partner, a member of the management committee, and the head of institutional equity trading. In his 17 years at Goldman Sachs, his son had a variety of jobs. At his peak he ran Goldman’s mortgage-backed securities division, as a protégé of Mike Mortara, an ex– Salomon Brothers trader who became a Goldman legend. Mortara co-headed the fixed-income division with Blankfein. “They hated one another,” the former partner says. In 1999, at the height of the dot-com bubble, Paulson decided he needed to separate them. He moved Mortara out of fixed-income to run something called GS Ventures, a short-lived venture-capital fund. Mnuchin followed his rabbi there, but in November 2000, Mortara died suddenly of a brain aneurysm, at the age of 51.
Mnuchin left Goldman two years later, in 2002, convinced that, with the ascension of Blankfein, his days at the firm were numbered. He went to work briefly with his former Yale roommate Eddie Lampert, the billionaire hedge-fund manager, who invited him onto the board of directors of Sears Holdings, the parent company of both Sears and Kmart, Lampert’s ill-fated—and ongoing—retail venture. (Mnuchin resigned his board seat before he was confirmed as Treasury secretary.) In 2004, he started Dune Capital Management with financial backing from George Soros.
At Dune Capital, Mnuchin wasn’t afraid of taking big risks. He formed RatPac-Dune Entertainment, a film-financing company, with Hollywood producer Brett Ratner and investor James Packer. They have had some successes, including The Lego Movie, American Sniper, and, most recently, Wonder Woman, and their share of bombs, including Pan and In the Heart of the Sea. “Now he’s making movies,” says a former Goldman partner, who knew him when. “[Now] he’s going around with … Trump-like guys, which is really different than [who he was], which was a bit socially awkward, very smart, really into teamwork. I would have sworn he was a Democrat—a liberal Democrat.”
In 2014, Mnuchin’s fund invested a reported $80 million in a small Hollywood studio, Relativity Media. For a time, he was co-chairman of Relativity’s board, having been personally recruited to it by the studio’s founder, Ryan Kavanaugh. Mnuchin and other Wall Street investors were assuming Relativity would eventually go public, and they’d all cash in. Instead, in 2015, it filed for bankruptcy, and Mnuchin lost his $80 million investment. But he enjoyed the Hollywood social scene; he recently married the Scottish actress Louise Linton, 18 years his junior. It is Mnuchin’s third marriage; he has three children from his second marriage.
Mnuchin also built a real-estate business at Dune, which invested in two Trump proj ects: the Trump International Hotel Waikiki and the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago. In November 2008, a day before a $330 million payment was due on the $640 million Chicago-tower construction loan, Trump sued his lenders, including Dune Capital. Incredibly, Trump claimed that his lenders had precipitated the 2008 financial crisis and therefore he shouldn’t have to repay the loan, which had been provided by a syndicate led by Deutsche Bank. The lawsuit between Trump and his Chicago creditors was later settled, and the building was completed. But Trump ended up losing his $40 million of equity in the building. “I like to think of Chicago as something that I got built, that is a great monument,” he once told me. “I always say it was better for the people of Chicago than it was for Donald Trump.”
Mnuchin’s biggest score by far came when he led a group of investors, including Soros, billionaire hedge-fund manager John Paulson, and computer billionaire Michael Dell, in the 2009 acquisition of IndyMac, a failed Californiabased bank that had made too many risky mortgages in the years leading up to the financial crisis. With the help of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which agreed to cover a portion of any future loan losses, Mnuchin and his partners bought IndyMac for $1.55 billion and renamed it OneWest.
In 2014, CIT Group, a large financial institution then run by former Goldman partner John Thain, bought OneWest for $3.4 billion in cash and CIT stock. While it’s not known publicly exactly how much Mnuchin made from the deal, his 1.2 percent stake in CIT was at one time worth around $100 million.
OneWest generated plenty of controversy when Mnuchin owned it, including claims that the bank ruthlessly foreclosed on individual homeowners for tiny infractions. In 2011 the Office of Thrift Supervision issued a consent order after its review of OneWest uncovered “unsafe and unsound practices.” California housing advocacy groups have also filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, alleging that OneWest discriminated in its lending practices against African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians.
Mnuchin says he has known Trump for about 15 years and “met with him several times during the primaries, when he was funding the entire primary himself, and then, when it got to the point that it was clear that he was going to win the nomination, he reached out to me and asked me to work for him being the finance chairman. I was also a senior economic adviser on the campaign.”
In May, Mnuchin went toe-to-toe with Senator Warren during a public hearing over the topic of whether the Trump administration would make good on backing a return to a form of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall law, which separated commercial banking from investment banking to prevent risky bets being made with depositors’ money. Cohn had led her and other senators to believe during an early-April closed-door meeting of the Senate Banking Committee that the Trump administration would support a reinstatement of the law. Now Mnuchin was hedging. It was quite the show, which ended with Warren concluding, “So, let me get this straight. You’re saying you’re in favor of Glass-Steagall, which breaks apart the two arms of banking … except you don’t want to break apart the two parts of banking. This is like something straight out of George Orwell.”
A former Goldman colleague says of Mnuchin, “If you look at him and you study him, he’s not a charismatic guy that will inspire you, [but] he is a very confident person? If the shit were hitting the fan or something like that, I’d rather have Hank [Paulson] there, but … I will not be surprised if Mnuchin does a very good job with all the limits that surround somebody in a role like that.”
Others disagree. “He’s in way over his head,” says one Washington insider. Another former Goldman partner adds, “I think his homework is being checked by Gary.”
There’s clearly friction between Cohn and Mnuchin. The Washington insider says that Mnuchin seems insecure in his role, is not a team player, and has so far not hired the best possible team at Treasury. Mnuchin dismisses such criticisms. “I was at Goldman for almost 18 years,” he says. “I oversaw various trading desks, I oversaw the technology division, so I had both operational as well as trading and riskmanagement expertise. I then started my own investment business; I’ve been a regional banker for the last eight years, so I’ve had firsthand experience on what it is to grow a regional bank, what it is to deal with regulators and interact with lots of small and medium-sized companies. So, I really see this as: my different jobs in my career were preparing me for the different parts of the Treasury job.”
As for his hires at Treasury, “I’d say we’ve probably interviewed 300 or 400 people for these jobs—we have every single one of the jobs filled. So what’s holding back the process is these jobs require security clearances? I think these comments that we haven’t filled jobs is ridiculous. We can get back to you with the facts, but I think we’ve filled jobs faster than the previous administration.”
Mnuchin and Cohn found themselves on the defensive over the bizarre rollout of Trump’s much-anticipated tax-reform plan. In late April, Trump visited the Treasury. “Steven didn’t want anyone else over there, if you notice,” the Washington insider says. “He wanted the whole thing to himself because it was his moment of glory.” Suddenly, and without warning, Trump announced that the tax-reform plan would be forthcoming the following week. Cohn and Mnuchin, who had been working on the assumption that any such announcement was months away, were shocked, and were left scrambling to put something together over the weekend. This resulted in an embarrassing, one-page, detail-free proposal, presented at an April 26 press conference. “Steven didn’t manage [Trump],” the insider concludes. Mnuchin responds, “That couldn’t be farther from the truth, okay? The facts are: I worked on a tax plan with the president for the last year. I started coming in, in January, and meeting with the House and the Senate and speaking to the leadership on tax reform, so we’ve been working on this since January. We have over 100 people in the Treasury working on it. [Tax reform] hasn’t been done in 30 years.”
In the White House, Steve Bannon is not considered part of the Goldman team. He was at Goldman, in the mergers-and-acquisitions department, but for only four years, in the late 1980s. “I don’t think Bannon has jack shit of a Goldman Sachs pedigree,” a former Goldman partner says. But “what was unusual about him,” recalls another partner who knew him at the firm, “was he was a huge patriot and kept thinking the country was going to hell᠁ He was really concerned about the United States of America. But I was never quite sure what he thought was wrong with it᠁ He was never able to articulate it in a way that I understood.”
Dina Habib Powell’s Goldman pedigree also sets some teeth on edge at the firm. But she’s beloved among the occupants of the top executive suites. Blankfein says he told Trump about her: “You’re going to find she’s going to be a very big, positive surprise to you. You’re going to find out that you end up counting on her for much more than you could imagine.”
And indeed shortly after Powell joined the administration to work with Ivanka Trump on women’s economic-empowerment issues, H. R. McMaster, the national-security adviser, plucked her to work with him as one of his deputies. Vogue recently called her Trump’s “right-hand woman.”
It’s a trajectory that leaves many current and former Goldman rank-and-file bankers scratching their heads. Powell, one Goldman executive tells me, was always thought of around the firm as “content lite,” when it came to knowledge about finance, which is about as brutal an observation as can be made about someone at Goldman, where intellect and revenue generation are prized above all else.
“The most remarkable thing about Dina Powell is that she can manage up better than anybody I’ve ever seen in my entire life,” says one of her former Goldman colleagues. “I believe managing up is when you are able to get the people whom you work for to think you are unbelievably good and competent at what you do.”
Adds another former Goldman partner, “Her gift is that she’s incredibly politically astute. She is an incredible worker of people and relationships, and she is that type of person where, if you come into the room and Dina wants to make you feel like you’re important or whatever, you are going to feel it. She is very effective at that, and the exterior package is really well put together. So she plays the part extremely well, and she knows the game in Washington.”
Like Cohn’s, Powell’s narrative is classic Goldman, only more exotic. She was born in Cairo, and her father was a captain in the Egyptian Army. In 1977 the Habibs moved to Dallas to join grandparents who had already settled there. Her parents believed that she and her sister would have a much better chance of achieving their potential in the United States (another daughter was born in the U.S.). Their message was simple: “We left our homeland and all our everything behind so that you and your sisters can achieve your potential—as long as you’re a lawyer, a doctor, or an engineer.” Settling in was difficult. Her father drove a bus, owned a convenience store, and eventually became a small real-estate entrepreneur. Her mother was a social worker.
After she graduated from the University of Texas, in 1995, she got into law school but instead took an internship working for Kay Bailey Hutchison, the U.S. senator from Texas. Her parents were horrified. They wanted her to be a lawyer and thought she was ruining her life. She worked for Hutchison for one year and then spent the next four years working for Dick Armey, then the Republican majority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives. Armey later said something about Powell that many men echo: “We immediately recognized her brains and her ability, and then her charm, and finally, I think somebody noticed she was gorgeous, too.”
After George W. Bush was declared the winner of the 2000 election, Powell joined the White House and eventually became an assistant to Bush for presidential personnel, with responsibility to find and hire people to fill many of the empty White House positions. She later was promoted to become a deputy undersecretary of state, working closely with Karen Hughes, then the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. She traveled around the world with Hughes and later with Condoleezza Rice, then secretary of state, who has said she found Powell to be indispensable.
Powell’s role in Republican politics in Washington brought her to the attention of John F. W. Rogers, the longtime Goldman partner who had worked for both Ronald Reagan and James Baker. He hired her in 2007 as a managing director. Three years later—much to the surprise of many people at Goldman— Powell was made a partner. Rogers cites her “intuition” and “creativity” as reasons she did so well at Goldman. “We had this idea of what we wanted to pursue—a belief that women’s empowerment was going to be an emerging thematic issue,” he says. “We had ideas, but we didn’t have the execution. And one of the things that I found with her, she grabs hold and she executes.”
But there was plenty of resentment inside Goldman toward her and envy of her meteoric rise. “If there was ever a character tailormade for Dina Powell’s charms and abilities, it was John F. W. Rogers,” says someone who knows them both well. “She knows how to play that guy … a combination of actual smarts, charm, flirtation, compliments, loyalty, all those things? She was the apple of his eye at Goldman.”
Anne Black, now the president of Goldman Sachs Gives (a philanthropic fund for Goldman’s current and former senior employees), worked nearly nine years for Powell. “She was really a steadfast champion for me and others of us on the team, who were all promoted thanks to her,” she says. “She elevated my game, inspired me to be creative and bold, and expected us to show results.”A former Goldman partner who knows Powell well insists she played a substantive role at the firm and was a champion for the women who worked for her. “All six of her senior leadership team members were with her most of her 10-year tenure,” this person says. “She fought hard to ensure that each one was promoted several times.”
Rogers understands the envy. “She wasn’t in the revenue-producing area of the firm, so maybe some people here were jealous of her accomplishments,” he says. “But I’ll say I know a lot of other people apply standards to her that they never would apply to a man. That’s just a fact.”
At Goldman, Powell held several jobs: president of the Goldman Sachs Foundation (Rogers is its chairman) and overseeing the firm’s 10,000 Women program, which provides capital and training to women entrepreneurs, and its 10,000 Small Businesses program. Powell was also head of Goldman’s Impact Investing Business, which makes loans to, and equity investments in, “underserved communities” in the U.S. Over a 13-month period ending in January, Goldman paid her around $6 million in compensation (the figure includes annual bonuses for two years), according to her White House disclosure forms.
Her fans at Goldman say she was worth every penny. Alison Mass, a Goldman investmentbanking partner, with whom she worked closely, says, “She got stuff done. She was great at executing. We were at a point where the partnership really valued what she did. She’s a great networker. She’s got one of those attractive personalities.”
Days after the election, Powell got a call from Ivanka, who was mapping out her agenda in Washington, focusing primarily on women’s empowerment issues. She called Powell, at Goldman, to find out what had accounted for the success of the 10,000 Women and 10,000 Small Businesses programs. Powell impressed Ivanka, who offered her a job. After Trump’s inauguration, Powell became a senior counselor to the president for entrepreneurship, small-business growth, and the empowerment of women. That didn’t last long. In March, soon after he replaced Michael Flynn as national-security adviser, McMaster asked her to join him as one of his deputies. She leapt at the chance. (Some 20 percent of her time is still spent on her initial White House job.) Some say she did so because she feared it would become obvious that she had little understanding of finance and economics; others say her language skills (she is fluent in Arabic) and previous experience in Washington made her a natural fit for the job, because it requires bringing together a disparate group of government officials to get things done.
Powell’s fingerprints were all over Trump’s May trip to Saudi Arabia and Israel. She spent months helping to plan it and working across various government agencies to make sure it came off without too many hitches. The consensus seems to be it was the most successful part of Trump’s first overseas venture. Stuart Jones, the acting assistant secretary of state for the bureau of Near East affairs, went on the overseas trip with Powell. He says she was “extremely influential and active” on the trip and deserves much of the credit for making the Mideast part a “historic” success.
Jones says people at Goldman are mistaken if they question her qualifications for her position on the National Security Council. “These are people who don’t know Washington,” he says. “That’s the dichotomy between New York and Washington. I can’t speak to her banking prowess, but in Washington it’s not just about deals. It’s about relationships. It’s about politics. It’s about fostering policy. It’s about bringing people along. That’s a different set of skills. She’s not only qualified, she’s the most qualified person in that group of people.”
The Washington insider also praises the job she’s doing in the White House. “She’s the best politician I’ve ever met in my life,” he says. “She can work an organization better than anyone I’ve ever seen? Unlike the rest of us, she has prior White House experience, and she really knows how this place works? She’s been able to use that to a huge advantage in here of working the system.”
While the Washington insider says that Trump listens to Powell, it seems she has little influence over him on Middle East policy, even though she probably understands its intricacies as well as anyone in the Cabinet.
A Middle East specialist calls Trump's Middle East policy in general an "unprecedented disaster." Whereas previous U.S. presidents have played a delicate game of appeasing the Saudis, while letting them know we won't support parts of their agenda not in our national interest, Trump has unbalanced the region by essentially tweeting them unconditional support for anything they want to do-the blockade of Qatar and roiling the Russians with further involvement against Assad in Syria, for instance.
Which brings us to the larger question: How successful is the Goldman troika at influencing the president? Recent signs have not been as encouraging as many people have hoped. Cohn and Powell (along with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, and "Javanka") urged Trump to keep the nation a signatory to the Paris climate agreement. They lobbied the president, but their sound reasoning was overwhelmed by the illogical arguments made by Bannon and the E.PA. administrator, Scott Pruitt, who together persuaded him to stick with his campaign promise to abandon the accord.
The crucial question confronting Cohn, Mnuchin, and Powell- whether they choose to acknowledge it or not- is if their association with Trump and his administration will forever tarnish the reputations they have worked so hard to build, mostly by affiliation with Goldman Sachs. And given how closely the three Goldman partners have come to be linked with Trump, it might not be great for Goldman either- a fact that Blankfein seems to have intuited. In his first-ever tweet, on June l, after Trump trashed the Paris accord, Blankfein wrote, "Today's decision is a setback for the environment and for the U.S. 's leadership position in the world ."