Since Howard Lutnick was tapped to serve as President Trump’s commerce secretary, executives from some of the world’s largest companies have been trying to win him over.
Leaders of Nvidia, Facebook, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Alphabet have visited his newly purchased $25 million property in Washington — a 16,250-square-foot mansion that Mr. Lutnick, a billionaire, recently quipped would be “big enough for my ego” — to persuade him to adopt a business-friendly agenda.
As Mr. Trump ratcheted up tariffs to levels not seen in a century, Ford, General Motors and other companies that have built their businesses around international trade reached out to Mr. Lutnick in the hope that he could persuade the president to take a less aggressive approach. Some chief executives have put in calls to the commerce secretary at midnight.
Mr. Lutnick, 63, heads a department that both promotes and regulates industry and he has been put in charge of overseeing trade. As a result, he has found himself in a position of incredible influence, as the go-between for a president imposing sweeping tariffs and the industries being crushed by them.
A former bond trader who amassed billions on Wall Street, Mr. Lutnick has become one of the loudest salesmen for tariffs in an administration generally unified on their benefits. He has publicly echoed the president’s message that big tariffs are needed to revive American industry, and that if companies don’t like them, they should build factories in the United States.
But in internal conversations in the administration, he has often been a voice for moderation. He argued in favor of Mr. Trump pausing his global tariffs for 90 days after they sent convulsions through the stock and bond markets. And he has made the case to the president to grant relief to certain favored industries, helping them to win exemptions from billions of dollars of levies.
After the country’s biggest car companies argued to Mr. Lutnick that tariffs on Canada and Mexico would hurt the competitiveness of U.S. auto factories, Mr. Lutnick lobbied the president to secure a major exemption in March.
In April, Mr. Lutnick helped to push through exceptions that saved electronics companies from severe China tariffs, after he and other officials received calls from executives like Tim Cook of Apple and Michael Dell of Dell Technologies.
Mr. Trump appears to regret granting such exclusions. He has groused to associates that he did not want to do them in the first place, and wrote on Truth Social in April that “NOBODY is getting ‘off the hook,’” saying that electronics would be subject to other tariffs in the future.
Companies have been left deeply confused about the direction of trade policy but more determined than ever to lobby for lucrative exemptions.
Mr. Lutnick did not respond to a request for an interview. A spokesman for the Commerce Department declined to comment. The New York Times spoke with more than three dozen corporate executives and current and former employees of the Commerce Department, the White House, Mr. Lutnick’s former Wall Street firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, and others.
Mr. Lutnick is not always on the side of helping industry. Often he has employed the threat of tariffs or other aggressive tactics against businesses to encourage them to invest more in the United States.
For example, Mr. Lutnick has paused disbursements to companies from the CHIPS program, a bipartisan, multibillion-dollar effort to rebuild America’s semiconductor industry. Mr. Lutnick put pressure on some executives to increase their U.S. investments if they want to receive their funds, even though companies have already signed contracts for those payments, according to three people familiar with the conversations.
He has also given companies the impression that they may get tariff relief by investing more in the United States, and discussed holding tariffs paid by companies in escrow, returning it if they make U.S. investments. Companies including Apple, TSMC and Nvidia have announced investments since Mr. Trump began threatening tariffs.
As a former investment banker, Mr. Lutnick seems particularly interested in novel ways to shore up government finances. He has backed Mr. Trump’s plan of selling citizenship to wealthy foreigners with a “gold card,” and talked about the government taking a cut from patents and innovations.
Mr. Lutnick has floated renaming the Department of the Interior “the Department of American Assets” and using tariff revenue to finance a new sovereign wealth fund. He has also spoken passionately about establishing a new “investment accelerator” that aims to cut red tape for investors.
Mr. Lutnick’s supporters say he brings fresh thinking that is badly needed in Washington. But executives and foreign officials have described some of his proposals as zany or harmful, and come away from conversations deeply unsettled, half a dozen people familiar with the exchanges say.
And despite overseeing a sprawling government agency, Mr. Lutnick is working to further expand his reach.
He has been moving to take control of the customs service in order to make Mr. Trump’s “External Revenue Service” — which would collect import taxes — a reality. Mr. Lutnick has also expressed interest in gaining authority over the U.S. Postal Service. After Mr. Trump gave him “a whole 24 hours,” in Mr. Lutnick’s words, to figure out how to fix the post office’s finances, Mr. Lutnick suggested merging it into the Commerce Department and using mail carriers to do the national census.
As a go-to adviser for the president, Mr. Lutnick has helped fan Mr. Trump’s impulses and instincts. After Mr. Trump expressed concerns about the United States losing influence over the Panama Canal, Mr. Lutnick had a friend set up two iPhones to record video of ship traffic through the canal, he told an audience at a conference in Washington in March. Mr. Lutnick shared the videos with Mr. Trump, and they lamented how much Chinese writing was on the side of the boats and shipping containers. “The Panamanians had sold out,” he said.
Few of the ideas that Mr. Lutnick appears most enthusiastic about fall within the traditional purview of the Commerce Department, an agency with roughly 50,000 employees that oversees business, weather monitoring, fisheries, artificial intelligence and commercial space activity.
Within the department, employees say morale has plummeted, as the administration has piled on work and slashed hundreds of jobs. Technologists and scientists who have devoted their careers to making the United States more globally competitive — one of the Trump administration’s stated goals — say they have been left rudderless.
Some Commerce employees said that Mr. Lutnick, unlike past secretaries, did not send a welcome email or give a welcome address, and that they did not know his email or see him in person for a month after his confirmation. Mr. Lutnick has told others that he planned to spend a majority of his time at the White House.
Many employees believe Mr. Lutnick is focused on an audience of one: the man he refers to as “DJT.” Mr. Lutnick often speaks of the president’s intuition, wisdom and prescience, has boasted of having regular Friday night dinners with Mr. Trump and describes any day that he speaks to the president as a “good day.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, said Mr. Lutnick had a “unique chemistry” with the president and “an instinct for finding hidden levers of power to implement policy.” He described Mr. Lutnick as “garrulous, funny and irrepressibly buoyant.”
“I think if you cut his head off, he’d still be smiling,” Mr. Kennedy said.
Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, described Mr. Lutnick as “relentless” and said they were “very close partners” in developing and executing trade policy. “The country is extremely fortunate to have him in public service,” he said.
At a dinner in the Australian embassy in February where he gave the keynote speech, Mr. Lutnick said he had first brushed with Mr. Trump decades ago at New York charity dinners, after which they would go out and “chase the same girls.” The line was met with awkward silence, a person in attendance said.
Mr. Lutnick told the group of foreign dignitaries and investors that the U.S. economy was greatest at the turn of the 20th century, when it had high tariffs on foreign products. He said Mr. Trump planned to construct “a tariff wall” around the United States and urged foreign countries to be on the right side of it.
Some foreign governments that have negotiated with Mr. Lutnick have described him as brash and aggressive. Canadian officials say he issued a series of devastating threats in a February phone call, warning that Mr. Trump could eject Canada from the intelligence sharing group the Five Eyes and review the defense system that shields both countries from foreign missiles.
Mexican officials, in contrast, described Mr. Lutnick as tough but engaging, and said he was receptive to their arguments that automotive supply chains that run between the countries can be beneficial for U.S. factories.
“With us, he was constructive,” said Luis Rosendo Gutiérrez Romano, the Mexican deputy secretary for trade.
Mr. Lutnick seems to be relishing his role in Mr. Trump’s orbit. He threw himself a lavish confirmation party in February at his Washington home. Mr. Lutnick and his wife, Allison, mingled with senators, Wall Street traders and executives like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg.
He has also embraced the media spotlight. Some of his near-daily TV appearances have set off alarm among Trump officials and allies, as well as charges from Democrats that Mr. Trump’s billionaire cabinet is out of touch.
In late March, Mr. Lutnick said in an interview that only a “fraudster” would complain about missing a Social Security check, and that his 94-year-old mother-in-law “wouldn’t call and complain.”
In April, Mr. Lutnick said in a TV interview that “the army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones — that kind of thing is going to come to America.”
While new to Washington, Mr. Lutnick served for more than 30 years as the chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, the New York brokerage firm, and carved out a substantial fortune in a brutally competitive industry. He also led BGC Group, a broker dealer, and was a top executive at Newmark, a commercial property firm.
Mr. Lutnick’s life was tinged with tragedy that made him more protective over friends and family and encouraged him to build an empire of wealth around them. He lost both his parents suddenly as a young man. And Cantor Fitzgerald lost hundreds of employees, including Mr. Lutnick’s brother and best friend, during the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center, where its offices were located.
Some former employees said Mr. Lutnick had treated them like family, taking them to Six Flags and the circus and buying them popcorn and cotton candy. Others recalled that Mr. Lutnick would leave the office to eat dinner with his family, then come back for meetings at 10 p.m., which he expected employees to attend.
Jimmy Dunne, the vice chairman of Piper Sandler, an investment bank that has worked with Cantor, described Mr. Lutnick as “very intense and very tough.”
“You go to battle with him or against him, you better be pretty secure because he’s going to test you,” Mr. Dunne said. “He doesn’t shy away from a fight.”
Mr. Lutnick described himself as a fiscal conservative and social liberal, and he has a history of supporting both Republicans and Democrats. But his strong support for Israel and conservative economics helped sway him toward Mr. Trump.
Employees who had known Mr. Lutnick for a long time were surprised in 2020 to hear him question the results of the presidential election. In 2024, Mr. Lutnick was a major donor to Mr. Trump and then co-chair of his transition team. Mr. Lutnick vied to become Treasury secretary, but lost out to the hedge fund manager Scott Bessent. The hostility between the two men has not abated, despite both working together to persuade Mr. Trump to pause some of his tariffs.
Lauren Hirsch, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, Maureen Farrell, Tripp Mickle and Matina Stevis-Gridneff contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
