What To Know About Scott Bessent: Trump's Pro-Tariff Treasury Pick

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

63% : Bessent said his approach to identifying investment opportunities is "to start with an abstract concept and then look at the empirical data, as a good journalist would do."A "nice-looking guy," Bessent is "one of the most brilliant men on Wall Street" and is "respected by everybody," declared Trump on the campaign trail.
57% : Bessent, who lives primarily in Charleston, S.C., with his husband John Freeman and their two children, according to the Wall Street Journal, could be the first Senate-approved LGBTQ+ member in a Republican cabinet (Richard Grenell became the first openly gay acting cabinet member when Trump tapped him as the acting director of national intelligence in 2020).
53% : Bessent also has called for Trump to appoint the next Federal Reserve chairman next year, a year before the expiration of Fed chief Jerome Powell's term.
52% : Elon Musk, tapped by Trump to lead the Department of Government Efficiency, wrote on X that Bessent would be a "business-as-usual choice" for treasury secretary, whereas Lutnick would "actually enact change.
48% : The Treasury Secretary and Fed chairman are the two most important economic policy roles in the U.S., and Trump has often jabbed at Powell, who was a Trump appointee during his first term.
44% : Bessent was part of a crowded field of potential Treasury Secretary picks for Trump, including private equity billionaire Marc Rowan, Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick (Trump's pick for commerce secretary) and Kevin Warsh, a member of the Federal Reserve's seven-person Board of Governors from 2006 to 2011.
33% : Specifically, Bessent called for an overhaul of bank regulations, "preserving" the U.S. Dollar, reforming the Inflation Reduction Act and a "renaissance in American energy investment" and "free and fair" trade, a nod to the controversial tariffs backed by Trump.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.