Blankfein: I try to be honest about these things. I did not support Trump – I shot him – so I do not feel personally, but I think as a group it happened: For Wall Street it was lower taxes, less regulation. He delivered what ‘we’ wanted. We put a clothespin on our nose. We were not ignorant about the kind of risks we take. We suppressed them.
So you think the risks are well understood?
There was no one who ever came to the presidency who was more transparent and better understood than he was. In the minutes before he was elected, the NBC tapes came out. Did not people believe the 20 women who came forward? Do people think he paid his taxes all the time? And certainly for the second election – what else was there to know about him?
So people did know what they were doing. They did it because of their own interest. Think of another historical example: how about the plutocrats in Germany in the early 1930s who liked the fact that Hitler was rebuilding and industrializing, spending money and getting them out of the recession and the economy driving forward by its stimulating spending on war materials? With that, I do not want to go too far, but just to show how I think about it.
So, yes, they supported him. And I think support is not undone by some deathbed confession from one minute to midnight that, “Oh my God, that was too much for me.”
How do you feel about people who went to work in the Trump administration? Several of them were Goldman alumni, including Finance Minister Steven Mnuchin and Gary Cohn, who was an economic adviser.
I did not vote for him, but early in government I had hopes and expectations that it would break to the high side, as most people do when they come into the office and sit behind the desk. So I do not blame anyone for going in early like my Goldman friends.
And once I’m in, I do not really blame people for staying, because once you’re there, I’d rather have them there than not there. I do not think we would have been better off if Mnuchin had resigned.