Musk Slammed Trump’s Treasury Pick. But Is Scott Bessent Really That Moderate?

Donald Trump is a master of populist demagoguery. He knows exactly when to turn up the volume on his most controversial ideas, and he knows when to dial down again and present an image of “business-as-usual.”

In throwing red meat to his base — through committing to mass deportations, promising to eliminate huge swathes of the federal government, and handing the Justice Department over to political ideologues — he promises an almost revolutionary form of political chaos. Yet, at his core, populist speeches and sadistic pledges notwithstanding, Donald Trump is an old-fashioned oligarch — a wealthy man who has spent a lifetime surrounded by other wealthy individuals, measuring his (and others’) worth and competency pretty much entirely by the dollars in their bank accounts, investment funds and real estate ventures. It appears that in Trump’s world, there is simply no room for alternative measures of value — moral integrity, say, or empathy.

During his first presidency, until COVID derailed the economy, Trump repeatedly measured his success by the value of the stock market. His first Treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin, was an unapologetic opponent of economic and banking industry regulations, working to eviscerate the Dodd-Frank Act, which imposed stricter regulations on the financial industry in the wake of the 2008 meltdown, limited predatory lending and enhanced protections for mortgage borrowers. Mnuchin was also a firm believer in tax cuts aimed mainly at benefiting the wealthiest individuals in the U.S.

The cabinet and inner circle that Trump has put together this time around reflects his oligarchical tendencies. Put simply, it is chock-full of supremely affluent people. With Elon Musk in the mix, this collection of oligarchic advisers has a collective net worth of nearly half a trillion dollars, thousands of times the financial net worth of the Biden administration.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that Trump wants to shift the Treasury Department from being run by a labor economist, Janet Yellen, to being headed by a wealthy hedge fund manager and investor, Scott Bessent, who is the founder and CEO of the investment firm Key Square Group.

Bessent is a Yale-educated economist, a man who has apparently carefully studied economic history and the interplay of economic and political forces, and who is a quintessential Wall Street insider. He is in his comfort zone crafting investment strategies for Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe. A married gay man who is raising two children with his husband, Bessent is also far from a typical social conservative and is, at best, an uneasy fit within the MAGA movement.

In the early 1990s, while working on investment strategy for George Soros — yes, the same liberal Soros who is MAGA’s favorite punching bag — he helped formulate the multibillion-dollar attack on the value of the British pound that ultimately brought down a conservative British government but, in the process, made a huge amount of money for Soros.

Soros has spent the past 30 years using the ill-gotten gains from that merciless financial bet against the British Central Bank to fund progressive causes around the world. Bessent, meanwhile, used a portion of his share of the proceeds by donating to Democratic politicians in the 1990s and early 2000s. Included among these were Al Gore, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Over the last 15 years, however, his politics have apparently shifted rightward, and in recent election cycles, he has been a reliable GOP contributor and also an increasingly vocal defender of Trump’s economic priorities — in particular, the notion of using tariffs as a bargaining tool; and of promoting tax cuts, especially for high earners and corporations, as a way to turbocharge economic growth.

In the days after the election, Elon Musk, who advocates a shock-and-awe approach to everything, lobbied for Howard Lutnick, CEO of the financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, as his choice for Treasury secretary. Lutnick, Musk argued, would come in determined to shake things up and, if necessary, to burn things down. The world’s richest man took to X to mock Bessent, by contrast, for being a “business-as-usual” figure.

Bessent built his own case more subtly, by penning an opinion piece for Fox News’s web edition, in which he touted the benefits of tariffs, Trump’s go-to solution for the U.S.’s economic woes.

The strategy worked. In choosing Bessent over Lutnick, Trump sent a signal that there is a limit to Musk’s influence; that there are things that even the world’s richest man — who bought and flattered his way to a position in Trumpland that looked almost like a co-presidency in the two weeks after the election — can’t force Trump’s hand on.

By all accounts, Bessent views tariffs as a negotiating tool rather than a central pillar of his political ideology. Used carefully and selectively, he has argued, tariffs can benefit U.S. businesses and political interests without unleashing unacceptably high inflation. In that sense, he may serve as a moderating influence on Trump, who has indicated he wants to use them as expansively as possible as a way to build up a protective wall around U.S. industry, and who seems willing, even eager, to unleash endless trade wars and international political crises in that pursuit.

On other issues, however, Bessent seems ready to march in lockstep with Trump. On tax cuts, for example, he has come out as a firm supporter of making permanent the hugely expensive cuts passed by Congress, at Trump’s urging, in 2017 — cuts that seem certain to balloon the U.S. deficit even further. He also hasn’t been averse to shedding his debonair Wall Street persona when politically expedient and resorting to the sorts of personal attacks that Trump so routinely indulges in. As the election neared, Bessent lobbed insults Harris’s way, calling her an “economic illiterate,” and aggressively defending Trump’s economic priorities.

Bessent also came out in favor of eliminating taxes on overtime, on Social Security and on tips. These Trump priorities are populist, and come off as easy, pain-free ways to channel more money to economically vulnerable individuals. But, as Bessent surely knows, fundamentally they’re a gimmick: In removing large amounts of money from the tax pool, they make it harder to fund vital social programs; taxing higher-income Social Security recipients, for example, helps shore up both the Social Security system and also Medicare. And in eliminating taxes on tipped income, the political pressure is lessened to increase the minimum wage, which would, in the long run, deliver far more bang-for-the-buck to low-income workers.

These gimmicky political moves won’t crash the economy. But nor will they deliver a long-term economic boost to blue-collar workers and retirees.

There’s no doubt that Bessent is an extremely smart financier, a man who has not just played the game of high-stakes investments for decades, but has also carefully studied economic history, and the interplay between economic and political trends over the centuries. As a shaper of national economic policies, he will probably be less likely to trigger massive economic chaos than would some of the more ideological chaos mavens circling for influence in Trumpland. There’s also little reason to think that he, personally, is a political extremist in the vein of the MAGA movement. At the same time, however, there isn’t evidence to suggest that he will risk his position to push back against the coming administration’s extremist policies.

Trump appears to be bringing Bessent on to bring respectability to his agenda with Wall Street. But anyone hoping that this somehow means that the rougher and crueler edges of Trumpism have somehow been smoothed out will likely get a rude awakening come January 20.