#DrainTheSwamp: Donald Trump's choice for Treasury secretary may be JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon

Donald Trump's populist movement looks like it's going to start well

By Matthew Rozsa

Staff Writer

Published November 10, 2016 6:45PM (EST)

  (Reuters/Yuri Gripas)
(Reuters/Yuri Gripas)

Advisers to President-elect Donald Trump are floating the notion that Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan, might be tapped as the new administration's next Treasury secretary.

Although one of these advisers acknowledged that Dimon has said as recently as September he would not be interested in the position and a spokesman for Dimon reiterated that stance when MSNBC reached out to him for comment, the speculation says a great deal about Trump's approach to running the Department of Treasury.

In addition to Dimon, one of the top names being floated is the Trump campaign finance chief, Steven Mnuchin, who formerly worked for Goldman Sachs. Trump is reported to have expressed preference for Mnuchin last Thursday.

Dimon has said that although he'd "love to be president," his throat cancer scare from two years ago has kept him away from the political arena.

"I don't necessarily assume I'm going to live for 10 years," he explained in an interview with CNN last year. "And you want to live very deliberately. You want to end every day and say, That was a good day."

Both Dimon and Mnuchin are Wall Street insiders who are unlikely to support the types of reforms that Trump's populist supporters were no doubt hoping for. Trump ran on "drain the swamp" messaging  and railed against the influence of Wall Street during the campaign.


By Matthew Rozsa

Matthew Rozsa is a staff writer at Salon. He received a Master's Degree in History from Rutgers-Newark in 2012 and was awarded a science journalism fellowship from the Metcalf Institute in 2022.

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Donald Trump Elections 2016 Jamie Dimon