Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin plans to name Monica Crowley as the new spokesperson for the Treasury Department.
Crowley, a longtime conservative pundit and author, would replace Tony Sayegh as the top Treasury communications official, according to numerous media reports.
Crowley, who holds a PhD in international relations from Columbia University, served as foreign policy assistant to former president Richard Nixon from 1990 until Nixon’s death in 1994. She subsequently wrote two bestselling books about her experience working with Nixon, Nixon Off the Record and Nixon in Winter.
She has also been a longtime commentator for Fox News. In recent years, Crowley has been one of the most effective advocates for the Trump agenda on the network.
Crowley was an early supporter of Donald Trump’s campaign for the Republican nomination and the presidency. Within weeks of Trump announcing his candidacy, Crowley predicted that Trump could win the election and said political pundits were making a mistake by underestimating him.
Crowley described her support for Trump in a December 2016 speech:
About a week or so after that [radio appearance], I went to an event that was attended by card-carrying members of the global elite, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Mark Zuckerberg, you get the picture, and I had a major Hollywood power player come up to me, and, again, this is about 3 weeks after Trump announced and I had already gone public saying he can pull the whole thing off. And this man came up to me and I got the sympathetic gaze, I got the condescending tap on the forearm and then I got the equally condescending Monica, you’re such a smart girl. You can’t possibly be for Donald Trump. In that moment, I had a decision to make and my decision was not to run away from or apologize for or explain my support for Donald Trump. I decided in that moment to own my support for Donald Trump and so I leaned into him and I said, “Are you kidding me? I freaking love Donald Trump.” The operative word there being “freaking.” I freaking love Donald Trump and if I had a thousand votes I’d case all one thousand for Donald Trump, and do you know it worked? To my great surprise, it worked because it completely disarmed him and he backed off and he said, “Oh no, no, no, don’t get me wrong. I hate her. I just don’t know that I can get with Donald Trump.” Well, in the end, we didn’t need his vote because enough Americans got with Donald Trump and owned their support for him that he is now the president-elect of the United States.
On the night of the 2016 election, when many media outlets were confidently predicting a victory by Hillary Clinton, Crowley correctly said that most models based on polls were not “operative.” Seven hours later, Trump was declared the winner.
“I for one cannot wait for the adventure of the American restoration to begin. Guys, we are the cavalry. Let’s roll,” Crowley said in her December 2016 speech.
In 2017, Crowley was mentioned as a candidate to become White House press secretary. She was also considered for a position with the National Security Council. She dropped out of contention for the NSC post after media reports accused her of plagiarizing passages of of her 2012 book What The (Bleep) Just Happened? from Wikipedia. Crowley later described that accusation as a “straight-up, political hit job.”
The selection of conservative firebrand Crowley to be the spokesperson for Treasury is likely an indication of how serious the administration is about defending its economic agenda in the run-up to the 2020 election. Her outlook is significantly more conservative than Secretary Mnuchin’s.