(AFP) – US President-elect Donald Trump nominated Howard Lutnick, the co-chair of his transition team, as his commerce secretary on Tuesday — a choice set to bring a tougher stance on China from the incoming administration. Lutnick will also lead the country’s tariff and trade agenda, with “additional direct responsibility for the Office of the United States Trade Representative,” Trump said in a statement. Tariffs are a key part of Trump’s economic agenda and he has promised sweeping duties on all imports when he returns to the White House.
Lutnick is chief executive of financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald and a Trump ally originally tipped as a front-runner for treasury secretary. But he was instead named to helm Commerce, a smaller department that works to boost American industry and has a key role in policy to shore up the US semiconductor sector and reduce reliance on Asia. Under President Joe Biden, the Commerce Department stepped up export controls on critical technologies like quantum computing and semiconductor manufacturing goods, taking aim at access by adversaries like Beijing. Trump’s administration could harden this stance.
Lutnick has expressed support for a tariff level of 60 percent on Chinese goods alongside a 10 percent tariff on all other imports. Both are among proposals that Trump has floated, with the Republican taking aim at countries which have been “ripping us off for years.” In Trump’s first term he engaged in a tariffs war with China, with the US Trade Representative’s office issuing duties on imports from the world’s second-biggest economy. Lutnick also previously lamented the loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States and offshoring to China. “I’m all in with Donald Trump,” Lutnick told podcaster Anthony Pompliano last month. In the same interview, he slammed electric cars as “coastal elite nonsense” and blamed China for being the source of fentanyl in the United States. The deadly drug, many times more powerful than heroin, is responsible for tens of thousands of overdose deaths a year. “China is attacking America from its guts,” he charged.
– Crypto support –
Lutnick was initially tipped to head the Treasury Department but a tussle over the position spilled into the public eye last weekend. Trump’s health secretary pick Robert F. Kennedy Jr. expressed support for Lutnick, saying on social media that “Bitcoin will have no stronger advocate” than him. The world’s richest man Elon Musk also threw his support behind Lutnick for Treasury chief while calling the other top contender, hedge fund manager Scott Bessent, “a business-as-usual choice.” “Business-as-usual is driving America bankrupt, so we need change one way or another,” said Musk, who Trump has tapped to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency.
Lutnick recalls losing hundreds of employees in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, a tragedy he narrowly avoided as he was taking his son to school. Besides Cantor Fitzgerald, Lutnick heads financial technology firm BGC Group and real estate services firm Newmark Group. He graduated from Haverford College and has a degree in economics, according to his biography on Cantor’s website. As co-chair of Trump’s transition team, Lutnick has been identifying new hires for the president-elect’s administration.
– Beiyi SEOW
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