Steve Mnuchin may be the perfect elite avatar for our modern era. Not because he’s particularly unique; in fact, as Rebecca Burns and David Dyen make clear in Fat Cat: The Steve Mnuchin Story, almost the only exceptional thing about him is how unexceptional he is.

It’s Mnuchin’s ordinariness — the bland, smirking, technocratic style of rapaciousness he embodies — that marks him as a perfect representative of the world we now live in. In some grubby, bygone era, when a warlord wanted to rob you, he’d charge through your village, point weapons in your face, and take what he wanted; now, you just come home to find someone changing your locks and a foreclosure notice from OneWest sitting on the doormat.

Burns and Dayen (full disclosure: Rebecca is a friend) trace Mnuchin’s rise and rise through the worlds of finance and politics, spinning off Elizabeth Warren’s 2016 zinger that Mnuchin was “the Forrest Gump of the financial crisis.” Like Gump, Mnuchin seems to have been everywhere in the preceding decade, rising unforeseeably to ever-higher heights.