(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
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Donald Trump’s Tariff Dealmaker-in-Chief [1]
['Antonia Hitchens']
Date: 2025-07-28
When Howard Lutnick moved to Washington, earlier this year, to become the Secretary of Commerce, he painted one wall in his new living room gold. It was the only significant modification he made to the house, a château-style mansion purchased for twenty-five million dollars from the Fox News anchor Bret Baier. On a recent Sunday afternoon, Lutnick was in the living room, flipping through a commemorative coffee-table book designed by his family which pairs photographs of him with some of his favorite sayings. “It’s between me and the mirror,” one read. He turned the page: “You are either in or you are out.” Lutnick’s dog, a Havanese-poodle mix named Cali—three of his four children went to college in California—kept nosing her way through a gate to come sit with us. Lutnick was about to fly to London for a round of trade negotiations with China, whose restrictions on the sale of rare-earth metals were threatening to render parts of the American economy nonfunctional. Several suitcases were packed and waiting in the entryway, next to a gold Pop-art sculpture by Robert Indiana that spelled the word “LOVE.” Later, Lutnick led me from room to room to point out a few more works from his personal collection: Rothko, Diebenkorn, Lichtenstein, de Kooning.
A staffer gently reminded Lutnick that he had to leave for the airport, but he was in the middle of a story. Lutnick’s anecdotes, much like those of his boss, tend to meander. A billionaire who became the head of a major bond-trading firm at twenty-nine, he radiates a brash, ebullient energy that is often referred to as “scrappy” or “outer borough.” He likes to dish. He talks with his hands and emphasizes his points with catchphrases such as “How about no” or “How about we don’t.”
Lutnick and President Donald Trump speak on the phone most nights, at around one in the morning, just after Lutnick gets in bed. They talk about “real stuff,” like Canadian steel tariffs, Lutnick told me, and also about “nothing,” which he summarized as “sporting events, people, who’d you have dinner with, what was this guy like, can you believe what this guy did, what’s the TV like, I saw this on TV, what’d you think of what this guy said on TV, what did you think about my press conference, how about this Truth?” Of course, Lutnick said, “Trump has other people he calls late at night.” But does he have other people he always calls?
In “The Art of the Deal,” Trump’s ghostwritten business-advice memoir from 1987, he observes, “Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.” One senses that Lutnick is animated by similar principles. The Department of Commerce, an agency with fifty thousand employees and thirteen bureaus, manages a vast and varied portfolio: the National Weather Service, the Census Bureau, the Patent and Trademark Office. It is, as one Lutnick adviser told me, “a junk drawer for everything under the sun, from red snapper to wind to ships to artificial intelligence—you name it.” But Lutnick sees himself primarily as the President’s dealmaker-in-chief. Lately, this has meant fielding pleas from companies and countries seeking relief from Trump’s tariffs, which the department sets and helps to enforce. In early April, the Administration put a baseline ten-per-cent tariff on nearly every country in the world, alongside so-called reciprocal tariffs on countries with which the U.S. has the biggest trade deficits. China, the bête noire of the President’s trade obsession, would pay thirty-four per cent. (This later skyrocketed up to a hundred and twenty-five per cent, then careened back down.) Lesotho, a country that, in Trump’s words, “nobody has ever heard of,” would pay the highest rate: fifty per cent. A number of America’s closest allies, such as the E.U. and South Korea, were also targeted, as was a group of uninhabited islands near Antarctica. Trump slapped additional tariffs on automobile parts, inciting cries of protest from American car companies. Brides-to-be posted panicked videos to TikTok, wondering whether the cost of their wedding dresses would spike. Preppers, anticipating apocalyptic supply-chain breakdowns, stockpiled hundreds of pairs of shoes.
The announcement, which was immediately followed by widespread economic chaos, soon gave way to a patchwork of concessions and carve-outs. The reciprocal tariffs were paused for ninety days, to allow the affected countries to negotiate. (Trump repeatedly suggested that Canada, one of the U.S.’s top trading partners, could avoid tariffs altogether by simply becoming the fifty-first state.) Meanwhile, corporate executives reeled. They called Lutnick. He constantly held Zoom meetings on his iPad while being driven around town; everyone seemed to know the dead spot in his driveway where the signal briefly cut out.
During every outing I took with Lutnick, as spring turned to summer in Washington, he was approached by someone asking if he could intervene on their behalf. Petitioners speed-walked to fall in step with him; they held the handshake firmly and for a second too long after posing for a photo. One afternoon, as we left a greenroom at the InterContinental hotel, moving quickly through a thick set of curtains, the C.E.O. of one of the largest companies in the world was lingering by a stairwell. As he clasped Lutnick’s hands, I heard him say something about a supply-chain issue and two billion dollars. Lutnick, who had just wrapped up a panel discussion, was already running ten minutes late for an evening reception at the White House. They would settle this matter later. Lutnick held out his iPhone, with the screen facing down. Take a picture, he said. A sticker with Lutnick’s phone number and e-mail address had been printed with a label-maker and affixed to the back of his phone. The C.E.O. snapped a photograph.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have your ashes scattered somewhere warm, with a bustling night life and vibrant local food scene?” Cartoon by Daniel Kanhai Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
During Trump’s Presidential transition, which Lutnick co-chaired, he lobbied vigorously to be appointed Treasury Secretary, a more powerful and prestigious position. He was crushed when Trump passed him up for Scott Bessent, a former hedge-fund manager. “There hasn’t been an important Secretary of Commerce since Herbert Hoover,” the founder of a major New York investment bank told me. “Call anybody and ask them to tell you the last five.” Lutnick is determined to elevate the role. “I’m a different Secretary of Commerce,” he said. “No one’s ever cared before.” And Commerce—with its tariff-enforcement authority—is at the center of the Administration’s efforts to frantically rework the flow of global trade. Although Lutnick spent decades as the chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald, a financial-services firm that does business around the world, his most valuable asset in this endeavor may be a natural intuition for what the President wants, and a penchant for radical oversimplification. Sitting across from me one afternoon, he pinched the fabric of his gray button-down shirt between his fingers. “If I buy this shirt and it’s made in Italy or in China, it doesn’t help us,” he said. “I consumed, but I didn’t employ anybody.” He grabbed hold of his pants. “Whereas if I buy jeans and they’re made in America, then that’s good.” Lutnick believes that he and the President possess a clarity of thought that is unique among Washington types. “I’m just experienced in business in the way none of these people are—except Donald Trump,” he said. “I know him so well that I know where the puck is going.”
It’s not just tariffs. Lutnick has all sorts of ideas about how to transform the government. “If I was in the Biden Administration, they’d be staring at me like I’m from some other planet,” he told me. “But this President, he wants to make change. So I pitch these ideas, and he says, ‘Let’s do it.’ ” Why not replace the I.R.S. with an External Revenue Service, which will collect tariffs and other levies from foreign sources instead of taxing citizens? And how about we get rid of most of the government enumerators, who gather data for the Census Bureau? (They “literally call to Lincoln, Nebraska, and ask what the price of cargo pants is, as if they don’t have a computer.”) Lutnick’s most prized idea is to sell U.S. citizenship for five million dollars per person. He calls it the Trump Card, and it looks like a gold American Express with the President’s face on it. “If I give two hundred thousand of them for five million dollars each, we make a trillion dollars,” he said. “A trillion! You would say, ‘This doesn’t sound like government, because it sounds kind of smart.’ But you just want outcomes, right? It’s obvious—common sense.”
Lutnick grew up in Jericho, on Long Island, in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. He knew tragedy early in life: his mother died of lymphoma while he was in high school; in his first week of college, his father was accidentally administered a fatal dose of chemotherapy. Other relatives receded into the background, leaving Lutnick and his two siblings on their own.
After Lutnick graduated from Haverford, a small liberal-arts school in Pennsylvania known for its Quaker roots and progressive values, he moved to New York. He started working at Cantor Fitzgerald and became a protégé of Bernie Cantor, the firm’s co-founder. “I ramped up really fast,” Lutnick told me. “I was doubling and doubling and doubling.” In 1996, Cantor died, and Lutnick, after an ugly succession battle with Cantor’s widow, Iris, took control. The trading floor was “more about ass-kicking than old-school analysis,” an old friend of Lutnick’s said. Compared with other firms, Cantor Fitzgerald had a reputation that was “less preppy, less blue-blood—maybe more rumors about strip clubs.” Around this time, Lutnick, who went by Howie, bought a bar called Rex, on the Lower East Side. “It was very Tom Cruise in ‘Cocktail,’ ” the old friend told me, referring to the film about a business student and bartender who entertains patrons with tricks while making drinks. In 1998, Lutnick and his wife, Allison—the two got married at the Plaza—bought and gut-renovated a Beaux-Arts town house on East Seventy-first Street, behind the Frick Collection. (Their next-door neighbor was Jeffrey Epstein.) Lutnick started showing up to college reunions in a helicopter. “He’d always say he’s five-ten—but six feet if he stands on his wallet,” the friend recalled.
These days, Lutnick likes to tell stories from the nineties about cavorting with Trump at “rubber-chicken dinners” on the New York charity circuit and “chasing the same girls,” but the two were not especially close. Back then, Lutnick had no particular interest in government. “I was a classic New Yorker,” he told me. “I just gave money to whoever the local politician was, whatever.”
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[1] Url:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/07/28/donald-trumps-tariff-dealmaker-in-chief
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