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IPFS News Link • Trump Administration

Trump's billionaire loyalist slapped with brutal verdict from Americans demanding he RESIGN...

• https://www.dailymail.com, By NIKKI SCHWAB

Almost half of Americans want Donald Trump's billionaire Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to resign over his ties - however tenuous - to serial pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

According to the latest Daily Mail/JL Partners poll, 49 percent of registered voters think that Lutnick needs to go despite never being accused of wrongdoing by any of Epstein's victims.

It's a politically problematic finding for Trump, who has made him one of the most powerful figures in his second-term economic team.

The former boss of financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, whose personal fortune is estimated by Forbes at $7.3 billion, has become one of the administration's most vocal champions of the 'America First' agenda, defending tariffs, reshoring and the President's hardline approach to trade. 

But newly released Epstein files and Lutnick's own closed-door testimony to the House Oversight Committee have put fresh scrutiny on the Wall Street titan's past dealings with the disgraced financier.

Opinions on whether he should leave office are split along party lines.

Two-thirds of Democrats - 67 percent - wished to see his ouster, while 46 percent of independents agreed.

Republicans were more forgiving, with only 30 percent of Republicans saying that Lutnick should resign.

But even among GOP-registered voters, support for him staying in post was hardly overwhelming: only 40 percent said he should keep his job, while 31 percent said they didn't know.

Overall, the poll found that about a third of respondents were unsure about what should happen to him.

Lutnick, 64, is one of the most recognizable figures on Wall Street.

He ran Cantor for decades and became nationally known after the firm suffered the largest corporate loss of life on 9/11, when 658 of its employees were killed in the World Trade Center. Lutnick, who survived because he was taking his son to kindergarten that morning, later rebuilt the company.

His political journey has also been striking.

Once a Democratic donor to Hillary Clinton, he later became a major Trump fundraiser, hosting events for his 2020 and 2024 campaigns before being named Commerce Secretary.

Since then, he has emerged as one of the President's loudest tariff evangelists.

Now he is facing pressure over a very different part of his past: his relationship with Epstein, who was his next-door neighbor in Manhattan.

Lutnick is in political hot water because he said he had cut off ties with the disgraced financier in 2005, though the Department of Justice document release revealed that he had visited Epstein's Caribbean island in 2012.