The Swamp

Camelot This Ain’t Steven Mnuchin and Louise Linton, mascots of Trump-era “glamour.”

- Olivia Nuzzi

IN SNOWCAPPED DAVOS last month, Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin casually diverged from two decades of U.S. fiscal orthodoxy and accidentally tipped the value of the dollar further into a spiral with a single sentence. “Obviously,” he said, “a weaker dollar is good for us as it relates to trade and opportunities.”

“It was distressing to me because it just shows a disregard for basic competence in governing,” said a former top economic official in Democratic administrations—referring specifically to the Treasury secretary’s not seeming to know he had any obligations beyond giving voice to his own personal preferences about things like, oh, say, monetary policy. That a weak dollar was not, actually, the policy goal of the government made it an obvious gaffe. But it was also a phenomenon now common in the Trump era: a political blunder in which the blunderer seems to not know or care how much destruction he has just wrought. The comment ricocheted throughout the world, sinking the dollar to a three-year low in currency markets and prompting clarifications from the president (himself no stranger to this kind of Alfred E. Neuman–in–a–china–shop mess and someone who had, for a while, cheered the possibility of a weak dollar). For his part, the Treasury secretary seemed just annoyed. “I think I’ve actually been quite consistent on my comment on the dollar,” he said on CNBC. “In the short term, where the dollar is, is not a concern of mine, okay?”