As some of you may have heard, Steven Mnuchin, the man who Donald Trump recently picked to serve as his Treasury secretary, spent 17 years working at Goldman Sachs and more than five years as the head of OneWest, a group he created for the sole purpose of scooping up subprime real estate assets during the financial crisis for pennies on the dollar. Mnuchin turned the lender into a “foreclosure machine,“ and flipped it in 2015 after more than doubling his money.
Those twenty-two years constitute a fair amount of Mnuchin’s work history. But according to the G.O.P.’s “Meet Steven Mnuchin” biography, his time at Goldman and OneWest were a blip not worth mentioning when discussing his résumé. As Business Insider notes, the only companies that got a direct shout-out are Mnuchin’s hedge fund, whose name (Dune Capital) evokes the gentle sound of waves crashing on a beach, and his movie-backing business:
Mr. Mnuchin has decades of experience with financial and monetary matters. His experience includes serving as finance director of President-elect Trump’s campaign, Former C.E.O. of Dune Capital Management, and co-founder of RatPac-Dune Entertainment which produced films such as Avatar, American Sniper, and X-Men.
That the G.O.P. would not want to bring up the years Mnuchin presided over a lender that foreclosed on 36,000 people, including a 90-year-old woman who owed it 27 cents, is not surprising. What is surprising, though, is that they felt the need to omit his time at the investment bank, which we maintain is the least evil thing about him. Could the exclusion have anything to do with the fact that Trump claimed Hillary Clinton’s ties to Goldman made her (and Ted Cruz, months earlier) wholly unelectable? And that he had said Goldman’s C.E.O., Lloyd Blankfein, is part of a “global power structure” whose mission in life is to screw over the working class? (This was before he hired Gary Cohn.) Or maybe they really, truly believed that listing the near two decades he spent at the bank weren’t worth mentioning, like a three-week lifeguard gig in the summer of ‘76. We may never know!