Give Donald Trump To his credit: he can turn almost anything into a reality show, including choosing a Treasury secretary. Media outlets followed the selection process daily, and sometimes hourly, as Trump auditioned a number of candidates in recent weeks for the top economic post of his second administration. On Friday, the “Apprentice”-style competition concluded with the choice of Scott Bessent, a sixty-two-year-old hedge fund manager who, while reasonably well-known in financial circles, has virtually no public profile. Earlier this year, Trump described Bessent as “one of the brightest minds on Wall Street,” but his bid for the Treasury post was opposed by some of the president-elect’s associates, including Elon Musk.

The choice of Bessent is interesting for several reasons, notably his personal background. He was once a Democratic donor: last weekend, the New York Times published a photograph of him co-hosting a Democratic fundraiser attended by Al Gore at Bessent’s Hamptons home during the 2000 presidential campaign. He spent many years working for Soros Fund Management, the investment firm owned by the mega -Democratic donor George Soros. And if he succeeds in winning Senate confirmation, he would be the first openly gay Treasury secretary.

Although Bessent describes himself as a “data person,” he is also a free-market conservative. Earlier this year, he became a prominent Trump supporter and advisor. Bessent donated to his campaign and helped organize fundraisers for him in New York and London. When I interviewed Besent in June, he sharply criticized the Biden administration’s spending and regulatory policies and defended Trump’s economic agenda. Underscoring the organized nature of the Trump 2024 campaign, he suggested that a second Trump administration would operate more smoothly than the first.

That remains to be seen, but whatever happens, Bessent will be in the thick of it. Given that his future boss is notoriously obsessed with the stock market, his mission will be to sell investors a economic program including mass evictions that could lead to labor shortages, tax cuts that would add to an already yawning budget deficit, and blanket tariffs on imported goods that could well lead to a new series of shocks for American consumers.

Last week, major retailers warned that if Trump decides to impose tariffs – he has spoken of levies of up to 20% on most imported products and 60% on products from China – they would be forced to increase their prices. A Walmart spokesperson said, in a statement“We are concerned that a significant rate increase could result in increased costs for our customers at a time when they are still feeling the remnants of inflation.” Philip Daniele, chief executive of auto parts company AutoZone, said bluntly on an earnings conference call, “If we get tariffs, we’ll pass them on to the consumer.”

Many in American business circles and on Wall Street hope that Bessent will exert a moderating influence on trade policy. In a interview with the Financial Times shortly before the election, he appeared to suggest that Trump’s tough talk was largely a negotiating tactic. “My overall view is that at the end of the day, he’s a proponent of free trade,” he said. “You have to escalate to defuse.” However, after Trump’s victory, Bessent issued a article on FoxNews.com, in which he argued for tariffs, saying they could be used to increase revenue for the federal government, encourage companies to move production to the United States and “reduce our dependence on with regard to the industrial production of strategic rivals.

Bessent’s views on trade policy are not entirely clear, nor is it entirely clear how much influence he will actually exert in this area. Normally, such policy is the prerogative of the U.S. Trade Representative, who operates under the auspices of the Executive Office of the President, not the Treasury Department. In the first Trump administration, the trade representative was Robert Lighthizer, a veteran business lawyer who commissioned a detailed report on China’s mercantilist trade policies, which the administration then used as justification for imposing tariffs. Shortly after the elections, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump told allies he wanted Lighthizer to serve as his “trade czar” during his second term. But, as of yet, the president-elect has not named Lighthizer to any position, nor chosen anyone else for the trade representative position.

Adding further murkiness to the water, last week when Trump chose Howard Lutnick, the chief executive of Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald, as Commerce secretary, he said Lutnick would have “additional direct responsibility » for the Sales Representative’s office. Lutnick and Bessent have a very recent history. Lutnick, who is co-chair of Trump’s transition, was widely reported to be one of the actors who tried to block Bessent’s appointment to the Treasury Department. A report in the Wall Street Journal described the internal battle between the two men as a “knife fight.” Bessent’s opponents, in an effort to discredit him, suggested that he did not really believe in protectionism and reminded Trump of Bessent’s time working for Soros, the Newspaper said.

Bessent joined Soros Fund Management in 1991 and remained there until 2000. In 1992, he was part of the Soros team that made a famous speculative bet against the British pound, which caused the currency to collapse and Britain’s fall in the European exchange rate. Mechanism. (According to media reports, this transaction brought the Soros group a profit of at least $1 billion.) For a few years, Bessent managed his own hedge fund. In 2011, he returned to Soros Fund Management as investment director. After his second departure, in 2015, he created another hedge fund, Key Square, in which Soros was a major investor.

Trump has not commented on Bessent’s historical ties to Soros. In choosing him, he appears to have adopted the view, common on Wall Street, that making money and engaging in politics are two separate enterprises, which should not come into conflict. (Stanley Druckenmiller, another former Soros associate, has supported Republican candidates including Tim Scott and Nikki Haley in the 2024 GOP presidential primary.) Bessent, for his part, has cultivated ties in MAGA circles. It would be close to J.D. Vance. Steve Bannon and Roger Stone have expressed support for getting the Treasury job.

In office, he will likely face the same kind of internecine warfare and political maneuvering that characterized the first Trump administration, and that Trump sometimes seems to relish. (Will he sit Bessent and Lutnick next to each other at Cabinet meetings?) A bigger challenge will be trying to rationalize – or gloss over – the many contradictions of plutocratic populism of Trump. The president-elect promises to help the working class by cutting taxes on big business and his fellow billionaires. It will solve the deficit by reducing public revenues. It will lower prices by introducing tariffs that will increase them.

Moreover, some of Trump’s main policy areas may well conflict with each other. He says his tariffs will reduce the trade deficit and make America more self-sufficient. But the combination of widespread tariffs, mass evictions and tax cuts could well prompt a Federal Reserve, which still fears inflation, to maintain higher interest rates, which would increase the value of the dollar and would make American products less competitive abroad. This would tend to increase the trade deficit.