Goldman Sachs CEO Just Publicly Mocked Incompetent Trump
Deep-down, Donald Trump is just a kid from Queens who, more than anything else, wants all the cool kids from Manhattan to like him.
That’s one of the theories about what motivates Donald Trump in business, in his obsession with celebrity, and now, in politics. People who have followed Trump’s well-documented rise say this, more than anything, explains nearly all of the President’s pursuits to this day.
And so it must be a particularly humiliating spectacle when someone from Wall Street – the cool kids table in the Manhattan cafeteria – dumps spaghetti on his head in front of everyone. That’s exactly what Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein just did on Twitter this afternoon.
Just landed from China, trying to catch up…. How did "infrastructure week" go?
— Lloyd Blankfein (@lloydblankfein) June 9, 2017
Blankfein is referring to the laughably transparent label the White House gave the week of June 5-9. The plan was to spend the week announcing and touting the Administration’s initiatives to rebuild roads, bridges, airports and other transportation links across the country. As with just about every purported policy “roll-out” this White House has tried to execute over its 6 months in power, however, “Infrastructure Week” never had a chance.
The week started well, with a snazzy ceremony in the East Wing on Monday complete with official-looking orders to sign and even some detail (by Trump standards) to overhaul the nation’s air traffic control system.
By Tuesday, Trump was already off message, and the charade of the previous day’s ceremony was painfully obvious. “The ceremonial signing was pure theater,” Derek Thompson of the Atlantic reported Wednesday. “The president, flanked by politicians and businesspeople smiling before the twinkling of camera flashes, signed a paper that merely asks Congress to work on a bill.”
Any chances the President had of getting back on message were dashed by his own self-inflicted distractions on Twitter. In due course, he extended his feud with the London Mayor, continued to blast his own Justice Department for his failed travel ban, and found a way to isolate both his own State Department and our Arab allies in the deteriorating situation in the Persian Gulf, and jeopardized the lives of 11,000 American troops stationed in embattled Qatar in the process.
It was also quite ambitious to expect even a well-executed “Infrastructure Week” to grab the public’s attention when James Comey’s much-anticipated testimony before congress was on the calendar.
Still, though, Blankfein’s trolling has to burn. Even after winning the presidency and surrounding himself with former Goldman Sachs executives in the White House, the cool kids are still poking fun at him.
