When Howard Lutnick moved into his new twenty-five-million-dollar mansion in Washington, he painted one wall gold. It’s a fitting choice for a billionaire bond trader turned Secretary of Commerce, a man who radiates a brash energy and speaks to his boss, President Donald Trump, almost every night around one in the morning. Their chats range from "real stuff" like Canadian steel tariffs to "nothing," which covers everything from sports to what they saw on TV.
Key Highlights
- ✓ Howard Lutnick and President Donald Trump speak on the phone almost every night around 1 a.m.
- ✓ Lutnick's most prized idea is the "Trump Card," a plan to sell U.S. citizenship for $5 million each to raise a trillion dollars.
- ✓ The Trump administration's chaotic tariff rollout on "Liberation Day" caused widespread economic confusion, with tariffs as high as 50% on some countries.
- ✓ Lutnick is a survivor of the 9/11 attacks, which killed his brother and two-thirds of the staff at his firm, Cantor Fitzgerald.
- ✓ He and Elon Musk planned a venture called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to slash the federal budget.
The President's Dealmaker-in-Chief
Let's be honest, most people can't name the last five Secretaries of Commerce. As one New York investment banker put it, "There hasn’t been an important Secretary of Commerce since Herbert Hoover." But Lutnick is determined to change that, seeing himself as Trump’s dealmaker-in-chief. He views the Department of Commerce—a sprawling agency one adviser called "a junk drawer for everything under the sun"—as his personal toolkit for reshaping global trade.
His primary mission? Fielding pleas from companies and countries desperate for relief from Trump's sweeping tariffs. In early April, the administration dropped a bombshell: a baseline ten-percent tariff on nearly every country, plus "reciprocal tariffs" on nations with big trade deficits. China got hit with thirty-four percent, and poor Lesotho—a country Trump said "nobody has ever heard of"—faced the highest rate at a staggering fifty percent. Even close allies like the E.U. weren't spared.
The announcement triggered immediate economic chaos. Corporate executives scrambled, panicked brides-to-be flooded TikTok worrying about their wedding dresses, and Lutnick became the man everyone needed to talk to. He was constantly approached by petitioners, from C.E.O.s of massive companies lingering by stairwells to people speed-walking to fall in step with him, all desperate for an intervention. He even has a sticker with his personal phone number and email on the back of his iPhone, ready for high-powered executives to snap a picture.
From Wall Street Scrapper to D.C. Power Player
Lutnick's journey is one of immense tragedy and relentless ambition. Growing up on Long Island, he lost both his parents by the time he was in his first week of college. He clawed his way up at Cantor Fitzgerald, becoming head of the firm at just twenty-nine. The trading floor culture was described as "more about ass-kicking than old-school analysis," and Lutnick, then known as Howie, developed a reputation that was "less preppy, less blue-blood."
Then came September 11, 2001. Lutnick was taking his son to his first day of kindergarten when the planes hit. Cantor's offices were on the top floors of the North Tower. Everyone there died, including his brother, Gary. In an instant, his firm lost over two-thirds of its staff. The aftermath was brutal. He faced intense criticism for stopping the salaries of missing employees four days after the attacks, a move he defended by stating, "All the people who made money were killed."
Despite the controversy, he saved Cantor, getting it trading again just two days later. This experience seems to have forged a particular kind of resilience and perhaps a defensiveness he still carries. One New York financier noted a parallel to Trump: scorned by the Manhattan elite but admired by others for his raw success. "It’s the same as it is with Trump," someone close to Lutnick said. "The middle of the country is, like, Wow, he is so rich... And then at a cocktail party in New York people are, like, Psh, who the fuck is this guy?"
A Penchant for Radical Ideas
This same unconventional, business-first mindset has led Lutnick to pitch some truly wild ideas to President Trump. He doesn't just want to manage Commerce; he wants to reinvent government. Why not, he suggests, replace the I.R.S. with an "External Revenue Service" that only collects tariffs from foreign sources? Or get rid of Census enumerators who "literally call to Lincoln, Nebraska, and ask what the price of cargo pants is"?
His crown jewel, though, is the Trump Card. It’s a concept to sell U.S. citizenship for five million dollars a pop, complete with a gold card that looks like an Amex with Trump’s face on it. "If I give two hundred thousand of them for five million dollars each, we make a trillion dollars," he explained. "You would say, ‘This doesn’t sound like government, because it sounds kind of smart.’" It’s this blend of radical oversimplification and sheer audacity that seems to resonate perfectly with the President.
Liberation Day and the Great Tariff Mess
On April 2nd, the administration held an event in the Rose Garden billed as "Liberation Day." It was the day, Trump declared, that "America’s destiny was reclaimed." What followed was a shambolic rollout of the new global tariffs. The stock market and the dollar plummeted as mainstream economists warned of a recession. The logic behind the numbers was so murky that Julius Krein, editor of the pro-economic nationalism journal American Affairs, wrote that "minor changes to transportation safety regulations undergo more thorough preparation."
Even Trump was reportedly enraged, calling Lutnick to demand how the amounts had been determined. Lutnick himself wasn't sure. No one was. Speculation ran wild that the numbers were generated by ChatGPT, a claim that emerged after some pointed out you could get similar results from the AI. The White House pointed fingers, with some blaming the Council of Economic Advisers and others blaming U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer. One person involved simply called the calculations "ninth-grade math."
Trump told Lutnick to go on TV and defend the tariffs anyway, and he did. His appearances were... memorable. On Fox News, he deflected questions by complaining that the E.U. "won’t take lobsters from America" because "our beef is beautiful and theirs is weak." He told another host that tariffs would mean "robotics are going to replace the cheap labor." The performances led veteran Trump adviser Steve Bannon to call them "an unmitigated disaster," and another MAGA operative labeled Lutnick a "carnival barker."
The Art of the Shakedown
After the initial chaos, Trump paused the tariffs and promised to produce ninety trade deals in ninety days, with Lutnick leading the charge. This set off a frantic, unprecedented series of negotiations. Trade deals typically take years—the average is 917 days—but Lutnick was operating on a radically accelerated timeline. His style is less diplomat, more enforcer. One negotiator described his approach: "He comes in guns blazing, he talks and talks and talks, he never stops talking."
The deals themselves are more like "gentlemen's agreements"—vague, nonbinding, and reversible. The single agreement reached was with the U.K., negotiated with Keir Starmer’s adviser Varun Chandra, another private-sector guy brought in because officials knew a "stiff trade negotiator" wouldn't work with Lutnick. The goal for other countries became simply to make Lutnick feel like he’d won. "We have to convince Lutnick that he can tell Trump that he’s hustled us," one negotiator admitted. There’s a sense that it’s not about policy, but performance.
Another negotiator described the process bluntly: "don’t try to make this anything but what it is, which is a shakedown." Lutnick reportedly uses veiled threats, hinting that countries might lose access to U.S. tech if they don't play ball. It’s a raw, transactional approach that flouts diplomatic norms and perfectly reflects the President’s worldview that America has been doing things "for free" for too long.
Conclusion
In the end, Howard Lutnick is perhaps the most purely Trumpian figure in the entire Cabinet. He's a brash dealmaker from New York who sees government as one giant ledger, a place for "outcomes" over process. From his audacious "Trump Card" idea to his "guns blazing" trade negotiations, he embodies the President's mercantilist instincts and raw, unbridled energy. Whether this approach is "kind of smart" or a path to long-term pain remains to be seen, but one thing is clear: the Department of Commerce will never be a sleepy "junk drawer" again.
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