Now the Secretary of the Treasury too?
Donald Trump was best known on the Apprentice for pretending to fire people. Now that he’s the pretend President of the United States, we’re seeing that he’s extraordinarily bad at firing people in real life. It took him two years to work up the nerve to fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions. He wanted Secretary of Defense James Mattis gone, so he pushed his buttons until he resigned in frustration. Now comes Trump’s half hearted attempt at ousting his Secretary of the Treasury.
Steve Mnuchin has been a disaster on every level as Treasury Secretary. He’s harmed the economy. It appears he’s been blocking requests for Treasury documents that Congress has made in the name of trying to get to the bottom of Donald Trump’s crimes. That means Mnuchin should be fired and arguably belongs in prison for obstruction of justice. Now Trump is finally talking about firing him, but not for any legitimate reasons.
Donald Trump has decided that, because the stock market has begun collapsing as a result of his own failures, someone in his administration must take the blame. Yesterday he publicly attacked his own Fed Chair Jerome Powell, but sent stocks plummeting further, making clear that investors are siding with Powell over Trump. So now, on Christmas Day, Trump is letting it be known that he’s considering firing Steve Mnuchin instead. There are three huge problems here.
First, this would leave the administration with no Secretary of the Treasury, at a time when it already has no Attorney General and no Secretary of Defense, making America even more unstable. Second, as hideous as Mnuchin is, no respectable candidates will want the job, meaning Trump will end up naming one of his worst flunkies as “Acting Secretary of the Treasury” and bypassing Senate confirmation hearings in the process. Third, the stock market would react even more negatively to this, as Mnuchin certainly has more understanding of the economy than Trump does.
