Trump Heeds Wall Street by Picking Scott Bessent as Treasury Secretary
In the end, the drama-filled search landed where it started — with a hedge fund executive who’d spent months methodically laying the groundwork for a nomination.
Scott Bessent was in Asheville for a campaign event with Donald Trump in August.
Photographer: Matt Kelley/AP PhotoWith one cabinet pick after another, President-elect Donald Trump has shown willingness — even eagerness — to flash contempt for the establishment. His nominees have amounted to sneers at US military brass, public-health experts, or even lawmakers in his own party.
But there’s at least one institution that Trump is reticent to rile: Wall Street.
Trump said Friday that he had chosen Scott Bessent for Treasury secretary, turning to the hedge fund executive to serve in a post with oversight of the massive US government debt market, tax collection and economic sanctions.
Bessent has deep familiarity with global financial systems and currency markets — traits that made him palatable to investors as America’s chief bond salesman and lead minder of the US dollar. And while he’s indicated he’ll back the president-elect’s tariff plans and fight to extend Trump’s tax cuts, Bessent isn’t known as an ideologue, spurring Wall Street expectations that he will prioritize economic and market stability over scoring political points.
Here's Why Bitcoin Investors Love Trump's Win
Listen to the Here’s Why podcast on Apple , Spotify or anywhere you listen .
Yet Bessent is also untested in the sludge of Washington bureaucracy, and relatively new to the often-chaotic rhythms of Trump’s inner circle, making for potential obstacles to his success and influence.
And as the top economic official in Trump’s cabinet, he could use his perch to advocate for a highly unusual approach for nominating the next Federal Reserve chair: Bessent has mused previously that person could be named long before Jerome Powell’s term expires, effectively turning that waiting-in-the-wings leader into a shadow Fed chair.
The selection process for the Treasury post dragged on longer and had a far heavier dose of drama than that of any other high-profile Trump cabinet pick. The president-elect expanded the slate of candidates when he became disenchanted with the infighting between Bessent and another contender, Howard Lutnick, the Cantor Fitzgerald LP chief executive who was tapped earlier this week to head up the Commerce Department.
In the end, the search landed where it started — with Bessent, who’d spent months methodically laying groundwork for a nomination. Trump announced his pick of the Key Square Group CEO a day after one of his riskier nominations, Matt Gaetz, withdrew from consideration for attorney general amid heavy scrutiny over investigations into allegations of sexual misconduct.
The Gaetz saga was a glaring signal to Trump’s transition team that controversial cabinet selections can backfire.
Settling on Bessent took so long in part because of the difficulties presented by Trump’s clashing desires: The president-elect wants a Treasury secretary who will aggressively embrace his plans for sweeping new tariffs, and he also relishes being able to claim credit for a roaring stock market. But any candidate who appeared particularly zealous on Trump’s trade agenda would likely have spooked investors, who fear it would create fresh inflationary pressures and drag on the global economy.
In a nod to the importance of Trump’s trade views, his Friday announcement said that Bessent “will support my policies that will drive US competitiveness, and stop unfair trade imbalances.”
Bessent checked more boxes than other contenders, including that he has touted the merits of Trump’s policies and has helped craft some of Trump’s economic speeches. Those gestures are viewed in Trump World as showing a certain fidelity to the president-elect.
Longtime Trump adviser Steve Bannon said before the pick was finalized that “Bessent has a skillset that’s perfect for this moment in history. He’s proposed to President Trump that this is the last chance for a pro-growth, supply side, economic plan for the United States, and that’s why I’m supporting him so strongly.”
It didn’t hurt that Bessent also had the approval of the financiers Trump likes to impress.
Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., thinks highly of Bessent, though he didn’t consider him the only good pick, according to a person familiar with his thinking.
“Scott is a fiscal hawk and he definitely will be positive overall for the economy and the markets. He wants to rein in spending. Bessent wants to get the secretary of the Treasury back in line with the markets,” said Glen Capelo, who spent more than three decades on Wall Street bond-trading desks and is now a managing director at Mischler Financial Group.
Now, Bessent’s challenge will be to prove himself to a president-elect who spent days casting around for a splashier alternative.
Cutthroat Competition
The competition for the Treasury job has been the most cutthroat of any of Trump’s cabinet positions.
Bessent had been in Palm Beach on election night and remained there for several more days. When he left Florida, the job was looking like it could well go to him.
Enter Lutnick, who’s been ensconced in a Mar-a-Lago war room he set up for Trump where the team could weigh in on candidates for various jobs. For months Lutnick had batted away questions about his ambitions for a role in the administration — even as he donated millions of dollars to the campaign.
Yet he had his own name in the mix for Treasury and told Trump that Bessent would be soft on key protectionist pledges, including tariffs, according to people familiar with the matter. Lutnick’s interest in the role appeared to catch Trump off guard, people said.
Some Trump allies described the move derisively as “pulling a Cheney,” referring to former Vice President Dick Cheney, who ran a search for George W. Bush’s running mate, and ended up taking the job himself.
The process began grinding to a slower gear as key Trump allies split over the pick, with some preferring Bessent, and Elon Musk championing Lutnick while deriding Bessent as a “business-as-usual choice.”
The situation left Trump irritated and contributed to him opening the door to a wider slate of candidates, people said, including former Fed governor Kevin Warsh and Marc Rowan of Apollo Global Management, who each made pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago in recent days.
After Lutnick had gotten the Commerce Department nomination — a position that will test tensions between him and Bessent as their departments work together — Trump’s top aides made the argument that Lutnick should not sit in on meetings about the Treasury job, given he’d been passed over. That paved the way for Trump to meet again with Bessent without a onetime rival for the job in the room.
Meanwhile, Warsh made clear that he’d prefer to be tapped as Fed chair when Powell’s term expires, rather than helm Treasury, according to people familiar with the matter. And Trump’s advisers had concerns that Rowan, who comes from the world of private equity rather than traditional banking, didn’t have the right experience, people said.
Steven Cheung, the incoming communications director for the Trump White House said, “both Mr. Lutnick and Mr. Bessent will implement the President's America First economic agenda,” adding that “Any assertion of disagreements between the two are totally unfounded and peddled by individuals who are trying to undermine the Trump Administration.”
A spokeswoman for Lutnick declined to comment.
Mnuchin’s Shadow
While Trump’s first term was often tumultuous — with no shortage of surprise policy pronouncements and hasty firings of top aides who lost his favor — the Treasury Department then was a relative island of stability. His Treasury secretary that time around, Steven Mnuchin, stayed for the duration of Trump’s term.
But Trump and those around him now look back on Mnuchin’s tenure with some regret. It was Mnuchin who encouraged Trump to make the Powell nomination that the president-elect later came to find displeasing.
And Mnuchin was seen by many core MAGA advisers as too much of a globalist. He often served as a bulwark against Trump's more unorthodox protectionist proposals, like enacting heavy tariffs on allies and his desire in 2019 to aggressively intervene in foreign-exchange markets to try to weaken the dollar for political gain.
The desire to avoid a repeat of Mnuchin shaped the slate of candidates Trump considered this time.
“The main, lasting thing of this process could be requiring whoever gets the job to be more serious about tariff increases than they might otherwise have been. This process is reinforcing how serious this president-elect takes tariffs,” said Jason Furman, who served as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers during Barack Obama’s presidency, before the pick was announced.
Treasury secretaries are only as powerful as their bosses give them the authority to be, and as much as their management style allows. Bill Clinton, for example, created the White House National Economic Council, and its first director, Bob Rubin, amassed huge credibility through his style and markets know-how. The Treasury chief at the time was former Senator Lloyd Bentsen, who had comparatively less influence. Rubin went on to be a very powerful secretary himself.
Trump has not yet announced who he’ll tap to lead the NEC. But whoever it is, the shadow of Mnuchin may loom large for Bessent.
“Of all the names that were floated as frontrunner for Treasury secretary under Trump, I think Bessent was the best person. I don’t think anyone is going to do as good a job as Mnuchin did, but he doesn’t want the job,” said Andrew Brenner, head of international fixed income at NatAlliance Securities.
