President-elect Donald Trump says he’ll nominate Howard Lutnick, head of brokerage and investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald, to be commerce secretary, a position in which he’d have a key role in carrying out Trump’s plans to raise and enforce tariffs.
Trump announced his pick Tuesday in a social media post.
Lutnick is a co-chair of Trump’s transition team, along with Linda McMahon, the former wrestling executive who was the Small Business Administration administrator in Trump’s first administration. Both are tasked with putting forward candidates for key roles in the next administration.
Lutnick has also donated millions to the effort to re-elect Trump and other Republicans. He hosted a fundraiser for Trump in August that raised $15 million and also gave $5 million to the Make America Great Again PAC, according to Federal Election Commission records.
As commerce secretary, Lutnick, if confirmed, would be in charge of a sprawling Cabinet agency that is involved in funding new computer chip factories, imposing trade restrictions, releasing economic data and monitoring the weather. It is also a position in which connections to CEOs and the wider business community are crucial.
An advocate for imposing wide-ranging tariffs, Lutnick told CNBC in September that “tariffs are an amazing tool for the president to use — we need to protect the American worker.” During his campaign, Trump proposed a 60% tariff on goods from China — and a tariff of up to 20% on everything else the U.S. imports.
“I think we’ll make a bunch of money on the tariffs,” Lutnick said, “but mostly, everybody else is going to negotiate with us, and we will be more fair.”
Mainstream economists are generally skeptical of tariffs, considering them a mostly inefficient way for governments to raise money and promote prosperity.
During the campaign, Trump campaign allies, including Lutnick, were asked about Project 2025, the multi-pronged initiative overseen by the conservative Heritage Foundation that includes a detailed blueprint for the next Republican president to usher in a sweeping overhaul of the executive branch.
Trump and his campaign worked to distance themselves from Project 2025 in the months leading up to Election Day, with the former president going so far as to call some of the proposals “abysmal.” Lutnick told CNBC he had read Project 2025 but had not met with any of its authors.
“I won’t touch them. They made themselves nuclear,” Lutnick said in September.
Lutnick, who’s worked on Wall Street for over 30 years, has been with Cantor Fitzgerald since 1983 and became its president and CEO when he was 29 years old, in 1996. On 9/11, Cantor Fitzgerald lost about two-thirds of its New York-based workforce in the terrorist attacks, 658 employees in all, including Lutnick’s brother. Lutnick survived the attack because he was late to work that day, dropping off his young son at his first day of school. In the years since the attack, Lutnick and the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund have donated $180 million to 9/11 families, according to Trump’s social media post on Lutnick’s selection.
Lutnick, who is also a cryptocurrency enthusiast, was also under consideration for treasury secretary, a role that has been at the center of high-profile jockeying within the Trump world. At the same time, the treasury position is closely watched in financial circles, where a disruptive nominee could have immediate negative consequences on the stock market, which Trump watches closely.
Billionaire Elon Musk and others in Trump’s orbit were calling on Trump to dump the previous front-runner for treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, in favor of Lutnick. Musk said in his post that “Bessent is a business-as-usual choice, whereas @howardlutnick will actually enact change.”