One surprise election result and a mountain of jubilant #draintheswamp hashtags later, Donald Trump has filled his White House with, you guessed it, Goldman veterans.

His chief strategist, the unabashed white-supremacist loon Steve Bannon, is a former Goldman banker, as is adviser Anthony Scaramucci. Steve Mnuchin marks the fourth Goldman-pedigreed treasury secretary in the last four presidencies, after Bob Rubin, Lawrence Summers and Hank Paulson.

But the real shocker is the recent appointment of Goldman Chief Operating Officer Gary Cohn to the post of director of the National Economic Council. Bannon and Mnuchin were former, past Goldmanites. Cohn, meanwhile, is undoubtedly at least the number-two figure at the world's most despised bank, if not the outright co-head with Blankfein. He has been at the center of many of its most infamous episodes, including the Greek affair.

Goldman's higher-ups ended up having a great year. While the whole financial world was collapsing due in large part to behaviors like that of his own bank, Blankfein made $68.5 million, a record for a Wall Street executive. Cohn made $67.5 million. The two were the McGwire and Sosa of the profiting-off-others'-misery era. The bank, meanwhile, would lay off 3,200 lower-level employees within a year.

Goldman probably should have gone out of business in 2007-2008. Two little-discussed acts of government welfare in September of 2008 helped save the company.

First, there was the infamous emergency granting of Commercial Bank Holding Company status to Goldman. Have you ever seen a Goldman branch or a Goldman ATM? Probably not, because it isn't a commercial bank. But on September 21st, 2008, the government gave it permission to call itself one.

This move, so desperately needed that it was executed on a Sunday night, allowed Goldman access to mountains of life-saving cash from the Federal Reserve.

The other key move was a decision by the SEC to ban short-selling of financial stocks. This nakedly anticapitalist maneuver allowed Goldman to fend off attacks by speculators who correctly sensed the company was in deep trouble.

Apart from the SEC order, major shareholders like pension funds in New York and California also agreed to stop lending shares of Goldman and Morgan Stanley to short-sellers, essentially protecting these two banks in particular from the forces of the market. Notably, they were the two top-five investment banks that survived 2008.

Blankfein was initially opposed – "I'm for markets," he reportedly said – but as things worsened, he agreed with Morgan Stanley chief John Mack that they needed their government Daddy to save them.

"You're right. We have to do something about this," he said. He later called the decision "tricky."

Yet even with the SEC ban on short-selling, Goldman's stock price continued to plunge, from $207.78 in February 2008 to $47.41 in November. Cohn claims not to have been worried. "It wasn't scary at all," he said.

Vanity Fair found a colleague who scoffed at Cohn's assessment. "Complete and utter nonsense," the person said. For all their brains and humility, these geniuses needed the government to halt the free market on their behalf to survive.

Goldman deserves its villainous reputation. The bank symbolizes all the worst aspects of the modern "financialized" economy. The crash era was the ultimate example.

Banks like Goldman mostly didn't create anything of value during this time. Mostly what they did was engineer new ways to create credit that led to millions of people buying homes they couldn't afford, creating the mother of all financial bubbles.

When it all went bust, as it necessarily had to, they scrambled by hook or crook to dump the damage on other people. Clients ate their losses and they ran weeping to the taxpayer for rescue – Goldman got $12.9 billion alone just from the AIG bailout, which of course was engineered by former Goldman chief Hank Paulson. In the middle of all of this, people like Blankfein and Cohn paid themselves record amounts of compensation. They are scum, and it's absolutely fitting that so many of them will end up serving the Trump administration.