‘Phony Sources And Jealous People’ Say Donald Trump Is Furious With Steve Mnuchin

Donald Trump is having second thoughts about whether he should have chosen Steve Mnuchin to be Treasury Secretary.

This is another one of those stories that’s either huge news or else is just par for Bedminster in an administration where the President will throw anyone and everyone under the bus depending on what kind of mood he’s in and what happens to be going on in the world on a given day.

It certainly wouldn’t be surprising if Trump is indeed dissatisfied with Mnuchin. After all, Steve is no fan of the trade war, something he’s made clear on any number of occasions.

In fact, after losing an internal struggle with Peter Navarro back in May (when the protectionist contingent in the White House prevailed upon Trump to renege on the “truce” Steve struck with Chinese Vice Premier Liu He), Mnuchin reportedly took a vow of silence in protest of the administration’s trade stance. Recall the following from a Bloomberg article out over the summer:

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is signaling his displeasure with President Donald Trump’s trade war with China by saying nothing at all.

Mnuchin decided silence was his best option after losing an internal White House battle last month to protectionists as the president considered the China tariffs, they said.

Silence is Mnuchin’s way of balancing loyalty to the president while preserving his personal credibility with financial markets, without publicizing disagreements among administration officials, the people said. They asked not to be identified describing his thinking.

I wasn’t clear what “personal credibility with financial markets” meant. Let’s not forget that this is the same Steve Mnuchin who weaponized the stock market in the service of cramming through Trump’s deficit-funded tax cuts last year. In other words, Steve may be one of the adults in the room, but he’s not exactly above taking the market hostage when it serves Trump’s purposes.

Anyway, Mnuchin is what counts as a “dove” on trade in this administration and that accounts for his notoriously contentious relationship with Peter Navarro. Part of Trump’s displeasure with Mnuchin reportedly stems from that relative dovishness.

According to the Wall Street Journal (which originally reported the President’s dissatisfaction with his Treasury chief), Mnuchin’s unwillingness to go whole hog on the trade war irks Trump.

But more than that, Trump is irritated at Mnuchin for supporting Jerome Powell, who the President blames for the stock market selloff. “[Trump] blames [Mnuchin] for the appointment of a Federal Reserve chairman who has been raising interest rates, a move Trump worries will jeopardize economic gains as his 2020 re-election campaign approaches,” the Journal says.

“If he’s so good, why is this happening?”, Trump reportedly asked, during a conversation about recent market chaos.

The irony, of course, is that the reason “this is happening” is because the trade war which Mnuchin is against has everyone worried and also because Trump’s fiscal policies have pigeonholed Powell into leaning more hawkish than he otherwise might.

And the layers of irony just keep piling up, because it is of course Mnuchin who is financing those fiscal policies by flooding the Treasury market with supply at a time when the Fed is running down its balance sheet.

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The White House issued a pseudo-denial on Friday evening.

“President Trump appreciates Secretary Mnuchin’s service as a key member of his cabinet and reports suggesting otherwise are false,” White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters said, adding that “from President Trump’s massively successful economic policies to his maximum pressure sanctions for national security, Secretary Mnuchin has been effective in carrying out the President’s agenda”.

Note that none of that really refutes the Journal’s story.

Meanwhile, Trump took to Twitter to claim this is all fake news conjured up by “jealous people.”

“I am extremely happy and proud of the job being done by @USTreasury Secretary @StevenMnuchin1”, the President tweeted, before exclaiming that “the FAKE NEWS likes to write stories to the contrary, quoting phony sources or jealous people, but they aren’t true.”

He went on to say that the media “never likes to ask me for a quote b/c it would kill their story.” And also because nobody wants to quote a raving lunatic who lies every time he opens his mouth – even the Wall Street Journal, where the editorial page morphed into a glorified Breitbart last year.

In any event, you can draw your own conclusions.