Goldman In The White House

Watching a risky career move unfold in real time.

- Jessica Pressler

Gary Cohn, the current head of the National Economic Council, likes to say he is a fan of bad decisions. “I’m really good at making mistakes,” he told business-school students at Sacred Heart University last year. And at American University, his alma mater, in 2009: “I always saw 95 percent of my great decisions start out as bad decisions.”

Last November, when Cohn walked into Trump Tower, he didn’t expect to be making decisions of any kind. He was there, like Floyd Mayweather before and Kanye West after him, because he had been summoned. In his case, to impart the macroeconomic wisdom he possessed as president of Goldman Sachs onto the newly elected president of the United States: Donald Trump, the man the smart money said would never win.

“It was crazy,” Cohn told a friend later of the meeting, which was supposed to last 15 minutes but stretched to an hour and a half. He found himself explaining to the former star of The Apprentice why a stronger dollar led to a weaker economy. The meeting concluded with Trump wondering aloud if he should make Cohn his Treasury secretary. This was awkward because Trump’s campaign-finance chair, Steven Mnuchin, whom Cohn had worked with in the same partner class at Goldman, was sitting right there and already had dibs on the position.

Ha-ha. Trump was only kidding.

Though seriously, he later asked, what about director of the National Economic Council? Would Cohn want that job?

“That I would consider,” Cohn told him.

Afterward, Cohn’s New York cohort would debate which part of this story was the craziest: Was it that Trump had offered the job to a 26-year veteran of Goldman Sachs—a bank whose greedy sibilance Trump had repeatedly invoked on the campaign trail, and whose CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, was targeted in a campaign attack ad that the Anti-Defamation League denounced as anti-Semitic?