The Social World

Tag: Court Circular

  • Howard’s beginning: the luck of Lutnick

    With Elon Musk no longer sleeping in a cot in Washington, only one member of the White House inner circle comes close to matching Donald Trump’s net worth: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Commerce is usually a mid-tier cabinet post; even fervent political observers would be hard-pressed to name previous officeholders. But Lutnick has been one of Trump’s most impactful advisors in this second term. His ideas about tariffs have greatly affected the world’s economy, and have influenced Trump’s mercurial tariff pronouncements. Plus, he’s worth about $3 billion himself. Even Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, himself a billionaire, is only worth about half as much.

    Lutnick made his name as CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, a major New York financial services company. After hundreds of Cantor employees, including Lutnick’s brother, died in the 9/11 attacks, Lutnick rebuilt the company and provided support to the families of the victims, which amounted to two-thirds of the company’s workforce. Trump later called Lutnick “the embodiment of resilience in the face of unspeakable tragedy.”

    The two met in 2008, when Lutnick appeared on an episode of Trump’s TV show The Apprentice, but Lutnick wasn’t part of the conversation during the Donald’s first term. By the end of that term, he’d become a major Trump donor, and he stuck by Trump during the years of impeachment, the January 6 rebellion and exile. Lutnick is credited with raising $75 million for Trump’s 2024 capaign – and Trump rewarded Lutnick by making him co-chair of the presidential transition team.

    Trump’s nomination of Lutnick for Commerce met with controversy and resistance. One critic called it “totally sketchy” and others said that Cantor Fitzgerald’s vast interconnected business ties made it impossible for Lutnick to be an impartial bureaucrat. “Howard has gotten out way over his fucking skis on this,” a senior Republican official told Politico.

    The ballooning cryptocurrency industry was a particular space of concern, given Cantor Fitzgerald’s relationship with the controversial crypto company Tether, which issues a stablecoin tied to the value of the US dollar. Trump, who himself was about to make a vast fortune in crypto, hardly seemed to care, vowing to turn the US into “the crypto capital of the planet.” Who better to do that than Lutnick? “There’s nobody more loyal and capable than Howard,” Trump said.

    Given that tariffs are the shining centerpiece of Trump 2.0’s economic program, it’s not surprising that Lutnick supports them wholeheartedly. For him, tariffs are not just economic tools, but weapons that the government can use to affect national security and industrial policy. In an April interview with CNBC, he touted tariffs as the key element in transforming the American economy and was thrilled that a president, for once, was listening to him.

    “When I say to him we want fair trade, we want to be treated the way we deserve to be treated, that’s what’s happening now,” Lutnick said. “Finally, someone is behind the desk who is going to protect America. It feels great.”

    On tariffs, trade and industrial policy, Lutnick sounds so much like Trump it’s hard to tell where one man’s monologue ends and the other’s begins. “The rest of the world’s markets have been taking advantage of the trading policy,” he told CNBC. “Our policies were designed to make you rich and make us poor.” It’s been a non-stop tariff blitz for months. Back in April, Lutnick said on CBS’s Face the Nation, “The tariffs are coming. [Trump] announced it – and he wasn’t kidding. The tariffs are coming. Of course they are.” On Newsmax around the same time, he said “tariffs are not inflation. It is outrageous that people think tariffs are inflation.”

    In an economy run by two of America’s richest men, it’s hard to focus on, say, Lutnick’s efforts to onshore US semiconductor production. Tariffs take up all the oxygen. “Trump wants the people of America to appreciate these tariffs,” Lutnick said on Fox Business in November, “If he puts money into their pockets, they’ll better understand how important this is for America.” And there’s a literal plan to put money into the pockets of Americans, with the administration proposing a “tariff dividend” of $2,000. Why, with that, Americans could buy nearly 1/20th of a Bitcoin! “Yes, it’s going to make the country stronger,” Lutnick said.

    Then there’s the matter of Lutnick’s sons. In May, he transferred his ownership shares in Cantor Fitzgerald to his four children. His “economic benefits” have ceased but the family still runs the firm – and Bloomberg said, “the grip on his businesses is bolted tight.” Lutnick’s son Brandon is CEO and chairman and another Kyle, is executive vice-chairman. They’ve out-Successionedeven the Trump family. Brandon Lutnick is leaning hard into special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, for crypto, even while his father pushes the President to establish a national crypto reserve.

    “President Trump’s billionaire Commerce Secretary has been playing the ultimate Washington insider game to pad his family’s riches,” left-wing watchdog site Accountable.US said earlier this year. While it’s true the Lutnicks won’t be qualifying for a $2,000 tariff dividend check, it remains to be seen whether or not all boats rise with theirs.

    Once upon a time, Kyle Lutnick was an aspiring rapper who performed under the name “Kxtz.” Though it appears he’s moved on, one residual lyric still seems relevant: “Until I run the game, I’ve got everything to gain.” But now Kxtz has put aside childish things. In November, Bloomberg reported that Cantor Fitzgerald was about to post a 2025 annual revenue of $2.5 billion, an all-time high and 25 percent more than the previous reporting period. “When you have a titan of industry and an indomitable personality like Howard, who was here for 40 years and ran the firm for 30 years, it can leave a significant vacuum when he leaves,” a Cantor official said. “The whole firm stepped up… and that’s because of Brandon. That’s because of Kyle as well.” The rich, it seems, are getting richer.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • Elon Musk is in exile

    Elon Musk is in exile

    Elon Musk is in exile. He’s forgotten by friends, embattled by enemies. He now quietly (for him) goes about his business, fighting non-government battles after those strange few months he spent standing behind the President’s desk with his toddler son X, who punched Musk in the face while he was seemingly running the country.

    Musk’s fate is a case study in what happens when Donald Trump rolls up the red carpet. Trump operated his first term as President more like a season of The Apprentice and less like an administration. It was a revolving door of exile. Reality-show worthy characters like Omarosa Manigault Newman and Anthony Scaramucci came and went with drama that fell just short of an episode-ending boardroom ceremony.

    The second attempt has been more controlled and disciplined. Trump’s original cabinet is more or less intact eight months into the term. There has been a little fraying around the administration’s edges, with the sudden dismissals of IRS head Billy Long after two months and CDC head Susan Monarez after a few weeks, but considering the man in charge, it’s been pretty much business as usual, with no major exiles from his court.

    With one notable exception: Elon Musk. Musk’s brief turn as shadow co-President already seems a distant history. But it filled our lives with intrigue. Who can forget his “Nazi salute” the day before Trump’s inauguration, accompanied by the very un-Nazi-like utterance “my heart goes out to you”? That induced a moral panic unlike any other we’ve seen in our time. Then in February, wearing sunglasses and a black baseball cap bearing the “Make America Great Again” slogan in gothic lettering, Musk waved the “chainsaw for bureaucracy” on stage, causing millions of angry liberals to soil their adult diapers.

    Musk has learned the hard way that America, like a Tesla robotaxi, can pretty much drive itself

    For months, the world’s richest man functioned as Trump’s useful idiot, his ketamine-huffing court jester, making showy noises about reducing the size of government through his newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DoGE), introducing us to sub-jesters like “Big Balls,” sleeping on a cot in his makeshift DC headquarters, and causing USAID and State Department employees to weep into their potted plants on the way out the door. While Trump began enacting his aggressive second-term agenda, Musk drew much of the flak. Angry vandals and protesters set Teslas on fire and scratched swastikas into their doors. We didn’t elect this man, the people (some people) screamed. Get him away from our Social Security numbers!

    Then, weeks before the summer solstice, it was over. On Memorial Day weekend, Trump said a fond goodbye to Musk, who was wearing a black T-shirt that read “The DOGEFATHER,” in the Oval Office. Trump said that Musk had brought about a “colossal change in the old ways of doing business in Washington.” It was the “most sweeping and consequential government reform effort in generations.” Also, Trump added, Elon was “really not leaving.” “This will be his last day, but not really, because he will, always, be with us, helping all the way,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Elon is terrific!”

    “DoGE is a way of life,” Musk told reporters. “Like Buddhism.”

    Immediately after, Musk veered off the eightfold path. He started criticizing Trump’s tariff policies and called the Great Big Beautiful Bill “a disgusting abomination.” In response, Trump threatened to sell the “everything is computer” Tesla that he’d purchased in a showy Rose Garden ceremony. He called Musk “the man who has lost his mind.” Musk, in response, said he was starting a third political party, the “America party,” and said that Trump was named in the Epstein Files.

    After a few brief détente tweets, the Musk administration was over, and the Musk Exile had begun. By July, the Wall Street Journal was reporting that Musk was “burning through executives.” Around the time that Musk’s Grok AI on X transformed itself into “MechaHitler,” Musk announced that Linda Yaccarino, the head of X, was leaving. “Thank you for your contributions,” Musk said, in a decidedly non-Trumpian way. Around the same time, Omead Afshar, head of sales and operations for Tesla North America, also left Musk’s orbit. In order to stabilize matters, Tesla’s board of directors offered Elon a $29 billion stock package to stay on at the company, and to stay focused, an amount of money that, even for Musk, had to reduce his attention deficit.

    As for the “America party,” it appears that will never get off the ground. The Wall Street Journal reported in late August that “Musk and his team haven’t engaged with many prominent individuals who have voiced support for the idea of a new party or could be a crucial resource to help it get off the ground, including by assisting with getting on the ballot in crucial states.” That doesn’t seem promising. “It’s almost an eerie silence,” said a previously hopeful Libertarian party official.

    Instead, rumors abound that Musk, who spent $300 million to help Trump get re-elected, including handing out random million-dollar checks to voters, is planning to throw his support behind J.D. Vance’s 2028 campaign. The world’s richest man, no longer allowed at Trump’s court, is back to courting favors with his checkbook again. Meanwhile, Trump has quietly not cut any of Musk’s government contracts, and Musk himself has been relatively silent in public. His X feed has been reduced to endless complaints about the world’s declining birthrate and wan retweets of “England has fallen” threads.

    The most manic episode in American history is over. Elon Musk has gone from shadow President to shadow-banned, but the “I bought this car before he went insane” bumper stickers remain on Teslas all around blue ZIP codes. It’s time for Elon to get back to colonizing Mars. He’s learned the hard way that America, like a Tesla robotaxi, can pretty much drive itself.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.