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Bessent, if confirmed, would be the first out member of the LGBTQ+ community to lead the department. His nomination still doesn't mean Trump is an ally, however.
Donald Trump has nominated Scott Bessent, a billionaire investment manager who is gay, as secretary of the Treasury.
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Bessent, if confirmed by the U.S. Senate, would be the first out member of the LGBTQ+ community to be Treasury secretary and one of only a few to ever hold a Cabinet or Cabinet-level position.
“Scott has long been a strong advocate of the America First Agenda,” Trump said in a statement Friday, confirming earlier reporting by several major news outlets that Bessent would be the Treasury nominee. “On the eve of our Great Country’s 250th Anniversary, he will help me usher in a new Golden Age for the United States, as we fortify our position as the World’s leading Economy, Center of Innovation and Entrepreneurialism, Destination for Capital, while always, and without question, maintaining the U.S. Dollar as the Reserve Currency of the World.”
Bessent, 62, is the founder of Key Square Capital Management, a hedge fund. His background may upset some of the MAGA crowd, however. From 2011 to 2015, before starting Key Square, he was chief investment officer at Soros Fund Management, a hedge fund founded by George Soros, and Bessent had worked for Soros’s firm at various times since 1991. Soros is a major donor to Democrats and a bête noire of the far right. Some right-wingers claim — falsely — that Soros pays protesters who turn out to support liberal causes. But “Trump liked [Bessent’s] billionaire bona fides and the fact that he converted to the MAGA movement after working for Soros,” CNN reports.
Bessent donated to Trump’s presidential campaign and advised him on economic policy. He has contributed to some other Republican politicians and is a longtime friend of Vice President-elect JD Vance, but he also has donated to Democrats, including Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. He hosted a fundraising event for Gore’s presidential campaign in 2000.
Bessent “could earn bipartisan support,” the Associated Press reports, but some Democrats have already expressed skepticism about him. “Donald Trump pretends to be an economic populist, but it wouldn’t be a Trump Treasury Department without a rich political donor running the show,” Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, told The New York Times. “When it comes to the economy, the government under Trump is of, by and for the ultrawealthy.”
Bessent has “signaled support for a more gradual approach to tariffs” than that of Trump, who has called for a 60 percent tariff on goods from China and 10 percent to 20 percent on those from other countries, CNN notes. Many economists oppose across-the-board tariffs, as the cost will be passed on to consumers and raise prices.
The nominee also wants to lower the national debt but favors extending some parts of Trump’s tax cut legislation, most of which are set to expire at the end of 2025. “Estimates from different economic analyses of the costs of the various tax cuts range between nearly $6 trillion and $10 trillion over 10 years,” the AP reports.
He lives in South Carolina with his husband, John Freeman, a former prosecuting attorney in New York City. They have two children. Bessent is the nephew of the late U.S. Rep. John Jenrette, a progressive Democrat from South Carolina who was disgraced in the mid-1980s scandal known as Abscam. It was "a two-year sting operation that videotaped politicians and others taking bribes from federal agents pretending to be rich Arabs looking for favors," The New York Times explained in its obit of Jenrette in 2023. Jenrette was convicted of conspiracy and violating the federal law against bribery, and he served 13 months in prison.
Bessent would be the first gay Senate-confirmed Cabinet member in a Republican administration. Richard Grenell, a gay Republican and longtime Trump ally, was acting director of national intelligence in Trump’s first administration after having been ambassador to Germany. The director of national intelligence is not part of the Cabinet but is considered Cabinet-level, so Grenell was the first out gay person to achieve that. Because of the interim nature of his post, he did not need Senate confirmation. Pete Buttigieg, secretary of Transportation in the Biden administration, was the first out Senate-confirmed Cabinet official.
Trump's pick of a gay man as Treasury secretary doesn't mean his new administration won't be a threat to LGBTQ+ people, especially transgender people. Another nominee announced by president-elect Friday is more in keeping with the Trump team's ideology. He chose Russell Vought as director of the Office of Management and Budget, a post he held in the last few months of Trump's first administration after having been deputy director and acting director. Vought is a coauthor of the deeply anti-LGBTQ+ Project 2025, a blueprint for conservative government that Trump has claimed to know nothing about.
After the end of Trump's first term, Vought founded the Center for Renewing America, which has a mission "to renew a consensus of America as a nation under God," it states on its website. "The organization has engaged in fights against so-called “critical race theory,” LGBTQ rights, immigration, and voting rights," according to Monitoring Influence, a watchdog group. Trump has raised funds for the Center for Renewing America.
Vought's previous experience includes working for Heritage Action for America, the lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation was the driving force behind Project 2025. He also worked for Mike Pence when Pence was a congressman and another Republican, Phil Gramm, when Gramm was a U.S. senator. And Vought has even said the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization that has influenced Trump's judicial choices, is not conservative enough, The New York Timesnotes.
