Howard Lutnick, chairman and chief executive officer of Cantor Fitzgerald LP, arrives for a campaign event with former US President Donald Trump, not pictured, at Madison Square Garden in New York, on Sunday, Oct. 27, 2024. Photo by Adam Gray/Bloomberg via Getty Images

By Lauren Markoe November 19, 2024

Howard Lutnick, Wall Street heavyweight and megadonor to Jewish and Israeli causes, is president-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Commerce Department, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, quoting people familiar with the matter. Lutnick was in the running to head the Treasury Department.

Lutnick, CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial services company, now co-directs Trump’s transition team, a job he got this summer, shortly after he invited 130 friends to his house in the Hamptons in August and raised $15 million that night for Trump’s election campaign.

Over the course of the election, Lutnick raised $75 million for Trump’s campaign, not including the $10 million he personally donated.

Lutnick at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, the Ohel

Lutnick addressed the Madison Square Garden crowd who came out to cheer Trump nine days before Election Day. He is now sorting through resumes, trying to figure out who will help the President-elect lead the country. In addition to Commerce and Treasury secretary, Lutnick has been mentioned for ambassador to Israel, but said he would decline the post.

The billionaire said on Fox and Friends last week that he speaks “every day” to Trump, who he has known since the turn of the century, when they both attended some of the same New York charity galas. He once appeared on Trump’s “The Celebrity Apprentice.”

Last week, he accompanied Trump to the Ohel, where  Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, is buried; it’s a frequent stop for candidates trying to show respect to the Orthodox Jewish community.

In the past few months Lutnick has served as Trump’s most enthusiastic liaison to the business world. He’s appeared on financial news shows, at the Garden and at fundraisers to pitch the former president’s plan for tariffs and tax cuts.

But this is not the first time that Lutnick, 63, has commanded national attention. Though many may not recognize his name, they may remember a Wall Street tycoon weeping on national television in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

Lutnick leads Cantor Fitzgerald through 9/11 tragedy

On Sept. 11, 2001, Lutnick was CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, a company that does trillions of dollars of bond market trades daily and who made its New York headquarters in the North Tower of the World Trade Center, on floors 101 to 105.

Cantor’s brother Gary died in the 2001 terrorist attack on the buildings, which killed more Cantor Fitzgerald employees, 658, than employees of any other business. Lutnick himself survived because he took his son to his first day of kindergarten that day before going to work.

He cried through most of his Sept. 13 interview with ABC’s Connie Chung, winning the respect of millions of viewers when he said that he searching hospitals for every missing employee, not just his brother.

“Here’s my list, here’s everybody I got. Find somebody on this list,” he said while there was still hope of finding survivors. ”Because if you find someone on this list, then I get to call them, and I get to give somebody else some hope, some dream, maybe, maybe they get to kiss their kids. I’d love to find my brother, but I’d love to find their brother, or their wife, or their husband.”

“Howard Lutnick, a personality this country will not forget,” ABC News anchor Peter Jennings told viewers when the interview was over.

The country may have forgotten Lutnick in the intervening years, but he’s once again on their screens.

At the Madison Square Garden rally for Trump, he talked about his brother and the Cantor Fitzgerald employees who died on 9/11. He told people how the company gave $180 million to support those employees’ families. (Lutnick also took flack after the show when several 9/11 widows said their husband’s paychecks had stopped coming just days after the attack.)

He followed up at the rally by screaming himself hoarse, decrying the North American Free Trade Agreement, promising a balanced budget and “the greatest team to ever walk into government.”

“We must elect Donald J. Trump president because we must crush jihad!” he yelled to cheers at the Garden.

Family tragedies, campus protests

Lutnick was raised in Jericho, on New York’s Long Island with his younger brother Gary and older sister Edie.

His mother died of lymphoma when he was a senior in high school. His father died after a nurse accidentally administered 100 times the chemotherapy dose he was supposed to receive; Lutnick was in his first year at Haverford College at the time. Haverford then gave Lutnick a full scholarship. In return, he has become the small Pennsylvania liberal arts school’s largest donor.

This past year, pro-Palestinian protests against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza rocked many U.S. campuses. Lutnick said he thought Haverford could have done a better job protecting Jewish students.

“I cannot lose my love for Haverford College — it’s not possible,” Lutnick told The Philadelphia Inquirer. “But I can express my utter disappointment at the lack of moral clarity of their leadership.”

Lutnick in 1994 married Allison Lambert, who earned her law degree from Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law. Their wedding, at New York’s Plaza hotel, was presided over by David Benedict, the now deceased former cantor of Temple Israel, a Reform congregation on Long Island.

Donations to Harris, Jewish and Israeli institutions

In the past, though not recently, Lutnick had donated to both Democrats and Republicans. Allison Lambert, now Allison Lutnick, donated to Kamala Harris’ 2016 Senate campaign. Asked about that donation on Bloomberg television in July, Lutnick said his wife has become a strong Trump supporter because of Israel, which he called “her number one issue.”

The Lutnicks have four children, one of whose bar mitzvah became tabloid fodder.

Ryan Lutnick had his bar mitzvah party six years ago at the Metropolitan Museum’s Temple of Dendur, the New York Post’s Page Six gossip column reported. It quoted an insider who said a performance by rapper Rich the Kid at the event probably cost “between $200,000 and $300,000.”

On the guest list, according to the tabloid: Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson, Melania Trump’s former adviser Stephanie Winston Wolkoff and publicist Alison Brod.

Lutnick has long supported Jewish organizations.

Among them: Park Avenue Synagogue; the Synagogue of the Hamptons where he is an honorary trustee, and United Hatzalah, a Jerusalem-based Israeli emergency medical response group. Lutnick and his wife chaired United Hatzalah’s annual gala in New York this year, the first since Oct. 7, organizers noted, connecting Lutnick’s loss of his brother, friends and employees in the 9/11 terror attack to Hamas’ terror attack on Israel.

Lutnick has said that while he gave to Trump in past election cycles, his enthusiasm for the former president soared this year, in part, he told The Philadelphia Inquirer, because of Israel.

“That was huge to me,” he said.

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