Trump is reportedly reconsidering his picks for Treasury secretary because a leading candidate has gotten on his ‘nerves’

When you’re trying to win a gig working for donald trump, there’s apparently a fine line between showing the undying loyalty he demands and sticking your head so far up his ass that it starts to annoy him. And that’s a lesson that Cantor Fitzgerald’s CEO and future Treasury Secretary Howard Lutnick have recently learned.

New York Times reports that Trump “has had second thoughts” about the two candidates who were previously under consideration for Treasury Secretary. One of those people is Scott Bessent, formerly employed in George Soros who went on to found the investment firm Key Square Capital Management. The other is Lutnick, who ran Trump’s second-term transition team and “has been getting on Mr. Trump’s nerves lately.” According to the paper, Trump has “privately expressed frustration that Mr. Lutnick has hung around him too much and that he has manipulated the transition process for his own purposes.” If that sounds like a familiar tale, it may be because of reports last year that failed the gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake had basically moved into Mar-a-Lago in an attempt to become Trump’s VP, only for Trump to become “less enthused” about her after deciding she was a “spotlight hound.” (At the time, a spokesperson for Lake insisted that talk of Trump allegedly getting mad at her was nothing more than “pathetic attempts by Team DeSantis” to create drama.)

Regardless, with Lutnick apparently on the sidelines, Trump is reportedly now considering the former Federal Reserve governor Kevin Warsh and Wall Street billionaire Marc Rowan to the top job. (Bessent is said to still be under consideration.) According to times, Trump wants a “big” for the role, whatever that means, and not surprisingly, “tends to value wealth and status on Wall Street.” He reportedly “made it clear to people close to him that he is very impressed with Mr. Rowan, the CEO and co-founder of Apollo Global Management,” and “noted that Mr. Warsh is smart and handsome,” of which the latter is of course extremely important when it comes to managing the federal government’s finances. (During his first term, Trump decided that he could not reappoint Janet Yellen as chairman of the Federal Reserve because she wasn’t tall enough.)

Trump is said to want a Treasury Secretary who will embrace his economic policies, e.g slap across-the-board tariffs on all foreign goods entering the country, which experts warn could have devastating consequences and, at a minimum, will make lives much more expensive for average families. Seam Times notes, “of the choices he’s considering, Mr. Lutnick has been particularly vocal in support of tariffs.” Lutnick also appears to be the only Treasury candidate who has openly done so embraced Robert F. Kennedy Jr.‘s anti-vaccine stance and the thoroughly debunked claim that vaccines cause autism.

If you would like to receive the Levin Report in your inbox daily, click here to subscribe.

In Trump’s America, a poll that’s wrong now constitutes “election fraud”