Commerce honcho Lutnick once called Trump ‘buffoon’ — but now talks to him every night: report

WASHINGTON — Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick once considered President Trump a “buffoon’’ — but now the pair talk “most nights,” according to a magazine writer given extensive access to the top aide.

Lutnick made the derogatory comment about Trump to a friend in 2016, adding that he was backing Democrat Hillary Clinton in the presidential race at the time — before ending up fundraising for Trump and co-chairing his post-2024 presidential transition, said New Yorker magazine author Antonia Hitchens in a new profile.

Now “Lutnick and President Donald Trump speak on the phone most nights, at around one in the morning, just after Lutnick gets in bed,” Hitchens wrote.

“They talk about ‘real stuff,’ like Canadian steel tariffs, Lutnick told me, and also about ‘nothing,’ which he summarized as ‘sporting events, people, who’d you have dinner with, what was this guy like, can you believe what this guy did, what’s the TV like, I saw this on TV, what’d you think of what this guy said on TV, what did you think about my press conference, how about this Truth?” the writer said.

Trump, 79, is well-known for requiring little sleep and for being accessible to journalists and others who have his private cell-phone number. It’s unclear whether he or Lutnick, 64, places the late-night calls.

Lutnick, the former CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, and his wife, Allison, purchased former Fox News anchor Bret Baier’s DC home for $25 million and moved to Washington this year, the profile notes. The home is adorned with pricey artworks by Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and other famed artists.

“During every outing I took with Lutnick, as spring turned to summer in Washington, he was approached by someone asking if he could intervene on their behalf,” Hitchens writes in the account, which describes the commerce chief’s role in Trump’s ongoing trade wars and his quest to be the most consequential commerce secretary since Herbert Hoover in the 1920s.

The mag’s account also describes Lutnick and Trump as being “never granted access to the most rarefied Manhattan circles” despite their extensive wealth.

“Sound familiar? It’s the same as it is with Trump,” a source close to Lutnick told Hitchens. “The middle of the country is, like, ‘Wow, he is so rich, he has a gold car, he’s so successful.’ And then at a cocktail party in New York people are, like, ‘Psh, who the f–k is this guy?’ ”