For devotees of President Trump, the first gathering on Friday of his business council, which featured 17 executives, may have looked like a colorized version of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” but for those focusing exclusively on the rapport between the two leaders, it resembled “Goodfellas.”

Sitting alongside Mr. Trump was the head of the council, Stephen Schwarzman, the chief executive of the private equity firm Blackstone Group, wearing Washington’s newly obligatory red tie. Since its founding in 1985, Blackstone has accumulated more than $361 billion in assets and made Mr. Schwartzman a fortune estimated at $11 billion — a figure that no doubt dwarfs whatever it is that Mr. Trump is worth. In 2015, Mr. Schwarzman was paid $799 million.

Mr. Schwarzman has flourished during the four decades that the people Mr. Trump purports to represent have languished. In the pursuit once known as leveraged buyouts — before some marketing genius fastened on “private equity” as a way to disguise the fact that the business still rests on a mountain of debt — Mr. Schwarzman and his brethren have become symbols for the economic inequality that Mr. Trump deplored during his campaign. They are able to borrow billions and deduct interest payments from their corporate tax bills while $75,000-a-year wage earners in Ohio, Michigan or Pennsylvania are unable to secure a mortgage and get no tax break on their monthly rent.

Just like Mr. Trump’s real-estate business, groups like Blackstone rely on enormous debt to prop up their business. The playbook for any of their acquisitions is to gain 100 percent control by financing the purchase of a company with a small down payment and a heap of debt secured not (heaven forbid) by their own savings or houses, but by the business they are looking to acquire. They then cut costs — which almost always means making sizable layoffs at the company they’re taking over — and figure out a way to reward themselves financially.