The Big Problem with Trump's Billionaire-filled cabinet.

[spanone]

Actually, running a country isn’t exactly like running a business.

There is a moment in the opening pages of The Great Gatsby when Nick Carraway sheepishly confesses how he has somehow managed to rent his modest $80-per-month house on West Egg, amid the myriad moguls and barons, and beside Jay Gatsby’s own fanciful “imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy.” Millioniares, it seemed, were everywhere. “My own house was an eyesore,” Carraway explains, “but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires.”

As he assembles his Cabinet, Donald Trump appears to be soliciting the consoling proximity of not millionaires, of course, but fellow billionaires. As with Trump himself, the net worth of many of his top advisers and nominees for Cabinet positions is difficult to pin down precisely, but there is no question that many of them are among the wealthiest of the wealthy. Betsy DeVos, Trump’s announced pick for secretary of education, for instance, is the daughter-in-law of the co-founder of the privately held Amway Corporation, the multi-level marketing company. (Forbes has pegged the DeVos family’s wealth at $5.1 billion.) Wilbur Ross, a former investment banker at Rothschild & Co., is Trump’s openly rumored pick to be commerce secretary. Ross did well as an investment banker and met Trump decades ago while advising any number of Trump’s companies on their many trips through bankruptcy court. But Ross hit the cash register when he became a private-equity mogul, investing in out-of-favor industries, such as coal and steel, and making a fortune. Forbes pegs his net worth at $2.9 billion. (His likely deputy secretary, Todd Ricketts, is a member of one of the richest families in America.)

These aren’t the only billionaires. Steven Mnuchin, the Trump campaign’s finance chairman, seems to be the leading candidate to become secretary of the Treasury now that Jamie Dimon, the chairman and C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, has withdrawn from consideration (or was never in consideration, depending on whom you want to believe). Mnuchin is a billionaire, too. A former Goldman Sachs partner, like his father, he and a bunch of his fellow hedge-fund billionaires, including George Soros and John Paulson, bought control of IndyMac, a failed California bank, for $1.6 billion during the height of the 2008 financial crisis. (Sound familiar?) Mnuchin moved from New York City to Los Angeles to run the bank, which he renamed OneWest. In August 2015, Mnuchin sold OneWest to CIT, the finance giant, for $3.4 billion. Including dividends paid, Mnuchin and his investors cleared more than $5 billion on the deal. He still runs Dune Capital, a hedge fund.

There are also, of course, mere major millionaires. Mitt Romney, who Trump is batting around like a cat does a ball of string, is said to be the president-elect’s top choice for secretary of state. In 1984, Romney founded Bain Capital, one of the more successful private-equity firms of its era. During the 2012 presidential cycle, Romney’s campaign estimated his personal fortune at $250 million. That figure always struck me as very low. In an October 2012 opinion piece in The Washington Post, I speculated that Romney’s wealth was likely closer to $1 billion, given how successful Bain Capital has been over the years and the wealth created by the founders of similar vintage private-equity firms. For instance, Steve Schwarzman, the co-founder of the Blackstone Group, has an estimated net worth, according to Forbes, of around $10 billion; the founders of KKR, cousins Henry Kravis and George Roberts, have an estimated net worth of around $5 billion each.

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/the-big-problem-with-trumps-billionaire-filled-cabinet

[Solly Mack]

1. It isn't, but they don't care

and their supporters don't understand the difference.

[muntrv]

2. But..but...he's keeping jobs in Amurka! Look at Carrier!