Scott Bessent, the immoral opportunist who runs Treasury

The Treasury Secretary has been presented as an anchoring force, managing Trump. But Bessent is another ambitious MAGA devotee, and a gay man working for a president who's stripping LGBTQ rights.

Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, has been front and center in the Trump administration’s trade war.

His main function has been to puff Trump up, and then carry out Trump’s various cave-ins—most recently his folding to China. Bessent met with Chinese officials over the weekend, and the result was reducing tariffs (though onerous 30% tariffs remain), after Trump said he’d never back down from the 145% tariffs without concessions, which China never offered. And of course the economic impact is already underway with supply chain shortages.

Bessent’s other function is to go on television and try to spin it all as a win, though it’s been nothing but surrender after surrender for Trump on tariffs—and severe, lasting harm to the economy.

Despite the continued uncertainty, Bessent, a billionaire hedge fund manager whom the Wall Street Journal noted was previously “little-known” in the financial world (if respected by those who did know him), now has a desperate Wall Street clinging to him as the person they hope will save them from Trump’s lunacy.

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He’s using that platform—and Trump—to promote himself as somewhat of an oracle. Bessent helps drive the markets back up after they’ve plummeted, as investors buy on hope and rumor—which he supplies to them—even when both might be false. (Inevitably, the markets drop again on actual economic news and solid data, as well on Trump’s threats and actions.)

But Bessent isn’t, as the media’s portrayed him, an “adult in the room” who’s a sort of Democrat-turned-Republican, trying to do the “right thing.”

JD Vance has been Bessent’s longtime friend, which should tell you enough about his character. The WSJ reported, in a piece last year, that Bessent supported Trump in 2016, and then, even after January 6th, “decided to go all-in [on Trump in 2024] when he saw that the legal cases against Trump were helping, not hurting, his approval rating. He told people the phenomenon reminded him of a stock that rises despite bad news, a bullish sign for some investors.”

Trump, always taken in by flattery, decided that Bessent was an oracle when Bessent backed Trump over Nikki Haley, who many of Wall Street’s Republicans got behind in the primaries. Trump then invited the ambitious Bessent to a 2024 North Carolina rally to speak, and called Bessent, “One of the most brilliant men on Wall Street. Respected by everybody.”

But Bessent was previously “little-known” on Wall Street precisely because he’s not an oracle—or, apparently, that brilliant. One of his biggest predictions—which he made at that very rally in North Carolina—has in fact been turned on its head.

“Kamala Harris will start with the Kamala crash in the stock market,” Bessent warned the crowd. “Then it will be the Kamala crash in the economy.”

Of course, the “crash”—the largest market drop in years because of Trump’s trade war, which saw the Dow have its worst April since 1932—was the “Trump crash,” not the “Kamala crash.” If Harris were president, there would be no tariffs, and no chaos imposed by tariffs, in the markets or in the economy. That is simply a fact.

There’s been much made of Bessent having worked for George Soros more than a decade ago, as chief investment officer of Soros Fund Management, as well as his having held a fundraiser for Al Gore in 2000. Hence the idea that he was a gay man who supported Democrats previously.

But in fact, as the WSJ, reports, he “didn’t agree with a lot” of the causes Soros’ foundation backed, and regarding one of them—proposing to restrict the fund from investing in companies doing business with Israel—Bessent threatened to resign. The idea subsequently “was dropped.”

And the same year he held the fundraiser for Gore, Bessent gave money to John McCain. He’s mostly backed Republicans in fact—to the tune of over $15 million—but gave money to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, which, as with Gore, seemed more like making sure he, as a business person, buttered both sides of the bread more than anything else. And Bessent has been on the Trump train since it began rolling down the tracks.

In 2016, Bessent told people they were underestimating Trump’s chances. After Trump won the election, Bessent scored a big win betting on a market rally and later gave $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee.

Bessent also has taken sides in the types of culture fights Trump picks. In 2020, he lobbied to get the headmaster reinstalled at his son’s former Manhattan school, St. Bernard’s, after concerns about the school turning too liberal.

So Bessent is more MAGA—and opportunistic—than the liberal-ish adult-in-the-room he’s been portrayed as in the press. And it’s pretty appalling for a gay man, working for a president stripping LGBTQ rights while the Supreme Court Trump created is routinely carving out exemptions to LGBTQ rights for “religious liberty” reasons.

Bessent has been married to a former New York City prosecutor, John Freeman, since 2011. They have two school-aged children, and they buy, upgrade and sell mansions in posh places, and have sold at least 20 homes. Until recently, they lived in what they called the Pink Palace in Charleston, South Carolina, which they sold for over 18 million dollars a few months ago.

Bessent, according to an interview in the Yale Alumni Magazine in 2015, never imagined he’d be able to get married as a gay man, and have children via surrogacy. It’s a comment that is quite jarring considering that, a year later, he’d support Trump— and is now working for him:

In a certain geographic region at a certain economic level, being gay is not an issue. What’s fantastic is now, people in the rest of America, whether blue collar or white collar, have access to everything. If you had told me in 1984 when we graduated and people were dying of Aids that 30 years later I’d be legally married and we would have two children via surrogacy, I wouldn’t have believed you.

But who made it possible for Bessent to marry, and have children?

Not the Republicans he was supporting—nor Trump. And not the current Supreme Court Trump created, which, if the issue came to them now for the first time, would never rule for marriage equality. And everything they’re doing now is in fact chipping away at the Obergefell ruling, allowing for discrimination against gay married couples in public accommodations.

It was gay and lesbian activists, putting their own bodies on the line, who fought for Bessent’s rights, and Democrats, who finally took up the mantle that got marriage equality legalized in the states and then eventually upheld by the courts. Marriage equality was opposed by the GOP—and still is opposed among most of those Republicans in Congress, and among Trump’s powerful Christian nationalist base—and we’ve seen Trump stripping LGBTQ history from government websites, removing anything with the word “gay,” targeting queer people in attacks on DEI and ending LGBTQ health initiatives.

Bessent, who once served on the board of God's Love We Deliver, an organization founded to deliver meals for homebound people with AIDS, is now part of an administration that is literally killing people with AIDS, having stopped lifesaving HIV drug treatments for millions through the decimation of USAID. And Bessent is watching the abominable things this administration is doing to transgender people, destroying lives, denying they exist.

Bessent could have influence on Trump regarding LGBTQ rights if he wanted. Curiously, we’ve not seen, for example, the Trump administration attacking Yale University the way it is attacking Harvard. Could that be because Bessent sits on the university council at Yale? In fact, he and his sister donated the Bessent Library to Yale, and Bessent has endowed three scholarships at Yale. Sounds like he might be protecting his alma mater from Trump. But he couldn’t care less about helping his own people under attack.

Bessent got his—his money, his marriage, his children, his homes—and now, opportunistically, he’s making a name for himself helping the very president who is harming LGBTQ people and so many other minorities every day, in addition to endangering democracy and sending the economy into a downward spiral, causing hardship for millions of Americans. There aren’t enough words to describe this kind of immorality.