Buchanan: Goldman Sachs Influence ‘Fatal’ to Trump Presidency

Conservative political commentator Pat Buchanan warned President Donald Trump “the game is over” if he allows pro-globalist Establishment figures to lead his administration down “the Goldman Sachs route” during an interview Monday on “The Laura Ingraham Show.”

Buchanan, a former senior adviser to President Reagan, said he was troubled by a Washington Post report published Saturday titled, “Inside Trump’s White House, New York moderates spark infighting and suspicion.” The article describes skirmishes between the voices of conservative populists and more globalist-minded Establishment figures and suggests the clashes have forced White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon to grow closer to Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, “in part to counter the New Yorkers” and their influence.

“If [Trump] decides to go with the old Goldman Sachs route, the globalists, then the game is over. And all the effort is in vain.”

“If [Trump] decides to go with the old Goldman Sachs route, the globalists, then the game is over. And all the effort is in vain,” Buchanan said.

The conservative populists in the Trump administration seem to be clashing most intensely with the vision held by presidential advisers Gary Cohn and Dina Powell, both of whom are former Goldman Sachs executives with ties to both Democrats and Establishment Republicans. The Post reported the Goldman Sachs influence has already clashed with Trump’s signature campaign platform and policies. The Post said it interviewed 18 “top White House officials, confidants of the president and other senior Republicans with knowledge of the relationships.”

“So Bannon and Priebus are now as thick as thieves because it’s the Republicans vs. the Democrats in the White House,” LifeZette Editor-in-Chief Laura Ingraham said. “You want closest to you the people who saw the light politically — not the people who are going to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic and go back to the old way.”

“You know who’s smiling? Jeb Bush is smiling,” Ingraham said of Trump’s former primary rival — an opponent Trump often labeled as “low-energy Jeb.”

“‘Low-energy’ now has some power,” Ingraham added. “There are number of people who’ve been put into key positions of power, both inside the White House and outside the White House, who could have an outsized effect on U.S. domestic policy and U.S. foreign policy.”

Trump made waves throughout the Republican presidential primary and the general election for railing against Goldman Sachs. In particular, Trump labeled former Republican rival Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton as “pawns” of Goldman Sachs.

Ingraham said Trump needs to stay on the issues “that grounded him really strongly in the economic nationalist sentiment” if he hopes to stay true to his “America First” campaign promises emphasizing trade, immigration, economic nationalism, and a “more judicious and pragmatic foreign policy.”

“On all of these issues, I think regular folks said, ‘Wow, this is a new way of doing business. He’s going to actually do what the people want done,'” Ingraham said. “‘He’s going to actually be a politician different from the rest because when you drain the swamp, you don’t give power to the swamp monster. You vanquish the swamp monster.'”

“And from what I’m hearing, from what I’m understanding is happening in the White House, the very people who gave Donald Trump the right and best advice — Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller and others in that intellectual framework — that they’re having to do battle with people who were either loyal to Hillary Clinton or loyal to George W. Bush,” Ingraham added.

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Buchanan warned of the toll these “ideological and political battles” inside the White House will take on the country and on Trump’s loyal supporters.

“But if the agenda is going to be implemented, it’s going to rely more and more heavily on Donald Trump himself, who presumably understands what got him here and believes these things,” Buchanan said, noting that the Goldman Sachs advisers “are interested in the globe.”

“And these are the folks that really cost the Republican Party and cost the country and denuded it of its manufacturing,” Buchanan said. “If Trump abandons that, things are going to continue the way they are, and they are not going to restore American manufacturing.”

“That would be fatal for the Trump presidency, but these issues are going to come back again and again because they came up from the people,” Buchanan concluded. “They came up from what’s happening in the country. And I don’t think the American folks who voted for him are going to go away.”