Blankfein: I try to be honest about these things. I didn’t support Trump – I was shooting him – so I don’t feel that way personally, but I think as a group, that’s what was happening: for Wall Street, it was lower taxes, less regulation. He was delivering what “we” wanted. We put a clothespin on the nose. We did not ignore the type of risks we took. We suppress them.
So do you think the risks have been well understood?
No one who came to the presidency was more transparent and better understood than he. Minutes before he was elected, those NBC tapes were released. Didn’t people believe the 20 women who performed? Do people think he paid his taxes all the time? And certainly for the second election – what was there to know about him?
So, people knew what they were doing. They did this because of their self-interest. Think of another historical example: And those plutocrats in Germany in the early 1930s who liked the fact that Hitler was rearming and industrializing, spending money and pulling them out of recession and boosting the economy through their stimulus spending on material of war? I don’t want to go too far with this, but just to show how I’m thinking about it.
So, yes, they supported him. And I think that support is not undone by some one-minute deathbed confession until midnight that “Oh my God, that was too much for me.”
What do you think of the people who worked in the Trump administration? Several of them were former Goldman students, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Gary Cohn, who was a leading economic advisor.
I did not vote for him, but at the beginning of the administration I had hopes and expectations that this would go to the high side, as most people do when they enter that office and sit behind that desk. So I don’t blame anyone for arriving early, like my friends at Goldman.
And once inside, I don’t really blame people for staying, because as soon as you get in, I’d rather they be there than not. I don’t think we would be better off if Mnuchin had resigned.