During a rally in Iowa on Wednesday, President Trump praised former Goldman Sachs chief operating officer and president, Gary Cohn, who is now the director of Trump’s National Economic Council:
We have Gary Cohn, who was the president of Goldman Sachs. In fact, somebody — he’s the president of Goldman Sachs — he had to pay over $200 million in taxes to take the job, right? So somebody said: “Why did you appoint a rich person to be in charge of the economy?”…I said: “Because that’s the kind of thinking we want, really, because they’re representing the country.”
During the primaries, Trump excoriated Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) over his undisclosed Goldman and Citibank loans, telling a crowd in Indiana: “Goldman Sachs and Citibank have [Cruz] totally under control, believe me.”
In April 2016, Trump advisor and speech writer, Stephen Miller, called Ted Cruz “Goldman Sachs’ favorite Senator,” and “a radical Wall Street globalist, who will rip the beating heart out of manufacturing in the United States of America.”
During a February 2016 rally in South Carolina, Trump said: “I know the guys at Goldman Sachs. They have total, total control over him [Cruz]. Just like they have total control over Hillary Clinton.”
In March 2016, Trump surrogate, Katrina Pierson, called Heidi Cruz a “Bush operative,” while noting her prior work for Goldman Sachs.
In one of his final political commercials, Trump slammed Hillary Clinton, and her ties to Wall Street and Goldman Sachs, saying: “It’s 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.”
During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised repeatedly to “drain the swamp.” That swamp presumably included members of Goldman Sachs and other “Wall Street globalists,” given his rhetoric. Now, however, the Trump administration employs four former Goldman officials.
William Faulkner may have described Trump’s apparent cognitive dissonance best: “It is a happy faculty of the mind to slough that which conscience refuses to assimilate.”