Dana Milbank: To the obsequious go the Cabinet posts
Last summer, when President Trump said there were “some very fine people” among the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, he was standing in Trump Tower with two of his top economic advisers, Gary Cohn and Steven Mnuchin.
In the days that followed, those two men, both Jewish, made very different choices.
Cohn, after hesitating, spoke out about his “distress” and said “this administration can and must do better” in condemning white supremacists.
By contrast, Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, like Cohn a Goldman Sachs alum, rejected a plea from 300 Yale classmates to protest “Trump’s support of Nazism,” saying the “allegations” are inaccurate and blaming the press and Trump’s opponents for an attempt to “distract.”
Cohn’s principled action likely cost him the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve. Last month, Cohn quit as the head of the National Economic Council after clashing with Trump over trade. Mnuchin remains in the president’s good graces despite policy gaffes and embarrassing stories about personal extravagance.
It is the triumph of the bootlicker.
Six months ago, Lawrence Summers, a former treasury secretary, said “Mnuchin may be the greatest sycophant in Cabinet history.”
There is no longer need for a qualifier.
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