Donald Trump's pick for Treasury doesn't seem to care about his own community

Donald Trump is rounding out his Cabinet, and mixed in among the right-wing Catholics and accused sexual predators (there’s some overlap there), we now have one gay man: Scott Bessent. Trump chose Bessent, a hedge fund manager, to be his treasury secretary. If approved by the Senate, Bessent would be the first openly gay Cabinet secretary in a Republican administration.

You wouldn’t know that Bessent was gay from Trump’s effusive statement selecting him, since Bessent’s husband was never mentioned. Nor were the couple’s two children.

The selection isn’t entirely a surprise. Bessent was angling for the job by sucking up to Trump during the campaign.

“Look, this is a Trump economy. This is a Trump stock market,” Bessent said in October, suggesting that the reason stocks were rising was because Wall Street was banking on Trump’s victory.

Post-election, Bessent kept up the audition, writing a column for Fox News defending Trump’s obsession with tariffs. Bessent called them a “negotiating tool with our trading partners,” when in fact by most economists’ accounts they are an inflationary bomb for which consumers will bear the cost.

Setting aside the fact that he’s gay, Bessent is not your average pick for other reasons. Bessent used to give to Democrats, even though he donated $3 million to Republicans this cycle. Worse still, he worked for years at George Soros’ fund. Soros is one of the chief bogeymen on the right because of his support for liberal causes. Soros is frequently the target of wild antisemitic conspiracy theories that flourish in the fever swamps of the right.

Trump clearly picked Bessent to signal to Wall Street that he was picking someone reasonably normal for the Treasury job (unlike a lot of other Cabinet choices). Bessent has legitimate credentials, including a degree from Yale.

What he doesn’t have is any respect for the LGBTQ+ community at large.

It’s hard to justify a gay man working in the second Trump administration. At the outset of the first administration, you could always argue that Trump was still unknown, but you can’t make that claim now. He’s a known, corrosive quantity.

Moreover, Trump has surrounded himself with some of the worst anti-LGBTQ+ figures in politics today. Pam Bondi, the attorney general nominee, would have prevented Bessent from marrying his husband if she had had her way. Kristi Noem, the pick for Homeland Security, has signed a Christian Nationalist pledge that would prevent anything LGBTQ+ being taught in classrooms. Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s choice for counter-terrorism chief, said that Teletubbies started “that whole trans thing.” Russell Vought, co-author of the notorious Project 2025, will be in charge of the federal budget office. The list goes on.

Then there’s Trump himself, who made transphobia a central element in his campaign, insisting schools were bundling children off to gender-affirmation surgery without telling parents.

Of course, Bessent is rich, and rich people have protections that the rest of us don’t. Just like Peter Thiel, Bessent doesn’t have to worry about being discriminated against because he travels in rarefied circles. He’s exactly the kind of “normal” gay that J.D. Vance predicted would vote for Trump.

This year’s election was all about money. Those who have it want even more of it. They don’t care about the collateral damage that Trump’s vicious policies are likely to create. It’s all about the bottom line.

And for Bessent, the bottom line doesn’t include his own community.

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Originally Posted Here