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Donald Trump has nominated gay billionaire Scott Bessent to serve as secretary of the Department of the Treasury, in case you needed further proof that representation does not, by any means, equal liberation.
The president-elect announced his latest Cabinet picks on Friday, via a statement provided to media outlets including CNN. According to the Associated Press, if confirmed, Bessent would be the first out gay treasury secretary and the first out LGBTQ+ Senate-confirmed Cabinet member in a Republican administration (which, again, does nothing for gay liberation). Current transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg became the first out Senate-confirmed Cabinet member when he was nominated in 2021.
Bennett, who is 62, founded the hedge fund Key Square Capital Management. He previously was the chief investment officer at Soros Fund Management, working for George Soros on and off since 1991, per The Advocate. As the LGBTQ+ publication notes, that background may raise eyebrows among particularly conspiracy-minded Trump supporters, as Soros, a philanthropist known for funding progressive causes, has been a target of the far-right for years. In fact, as the BBC noted in a 2019 article, the right wing’s attacks on Soros accelerated during Trump’s first presidency. After neo-Nazis marched on Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, resulting in the murder of counterprotestor Heather Heyer by James Alex Fields Jr. who drove his car into a group of counterprotestors, right-wingers claimed that the violence resulted from Soros-funded outside agitators, in an attempt to smear Trump.
However, over the past year, Bessent has served as a close economic adviser to Trump, per Politico. In fact, some of Trump’s allies told CNN that the president-elect was drawn to Bessent because he “converted to the MAGA movement” after working for Soros. Bessent recently wrote an opinion piece for Fox News defending Trump’s promise to impose heavy tariffs on all imported goods, including a proposed 60% blanket tariff on Chinese goods. This is despite the fact that in June, 16 Nobel Prize-winning economists wrote an open letter warning that Trump’s proposed economic policies could reignite inflation.
The New York Times noted that in addition to Bessent’s Soros connections, he was also a donor to Democrats like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Barack Obama. But a closer look at this politics shows that his pivot to MAGA may not ultimately be that big of a pivot after all — as a student at Yale University, he wrote in the newspaper that as a Southerner, he was “heartbroken when George Wallace decided not to run for president.” Wallace served three terms as the governor of Alabama, most notably advocating for “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” a line written for him in his inaugural address by Asa Carter, a right-winger who founded his own Ku Klux Klan organization, per PBS.
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