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Trump Picks Third Goldman Sachs Alum, Gary Cohn, for Government Role

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By Daniel J. Solomon December 9, 2016

President-elect Donald Trump has stocked his stable of advisers with one more Goldman Sachs alum, appointing company president Gary Cohn to lead the National Economic Council in a stark departure from his campaign promise to “drain the swamp.”

Cohn will become the third Goldman pick to closely advise Trump, following the choice of Steve Bannon as chief White House strategist and Steven Mnuchin as Treasury Secretary. According to the Independent, he has given speeches in which he calls for the repeal of the Dodd-Frank financial reform, implemented after the Great Recession and intended to prevent the country’s largest banks from taking on too much risk and imperiling the economy. Cohn has a mixed record when it comes to the Republican Party, much like Trump himself; both have a record of donating to members of both parties.

Trump’s inclusion of three former or current Goldman executives in his cabinet seems to be at odds with his campaign rhetoric, in which he attacked the banking sector as a threat to the country and cut a last-minute commercial that was seen as trading on the stereotype of Jews as moneychangers. Showing images of Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein, Federal Reserve chairwoman Janet Yellen and billionaire investor George Soros, the Trump ad implicated all these figures as part of “a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.”

Contact Daniel J. Solomon at [email protected] or on Twitter @DanielJSolomon(www.twitter.com/DanielJSolomon)

Daniel J. Solomon is the former Assistant to the Editor/News Writer at the Forward. Originally from Queens, he attended Harvard as an undergraduate, where he wrote his senior thesis on French-Jewish intellectual history. He is excited to have returned to New York after his time in Massachusetts. Daniel’s passions include folk music, cycling, and pointed argument.

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