PITTSBURGH — It should come as no surprise that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declined to be the next Federal Reserve chairman. Spend any time listening to Bessent talk, and it is clear he is laser-focused on one thing, something he can only accomplish in his current job: lifting America’s economy into a position where both Main Street and Wall Street are performing equally robustly.
The 79th treasury secretary also loves working with President Donald Trump, something that became very evident when I was a fly on the wall on Air Force One at the end of May. That’s when Bessent traveled with the president to the U.S. Steel Mon Valley Works–Irvin Plant in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania. The banter, trust, and respect that went both ways between the men were tangible.
Bessent was considered a leading candidate for the Fed job. But Trump told CNBC earlier this month that he had narrowed the field of possible future Federal Reserve chairmen and that Bessent was not on the list. Not because of any falling out, but quite the opposite.
“Well, I love Scott, but he wants to stay where he is,” Trump said during a Squawk Box interview.“I asked him last night, ‘Is this something you want?’”
Trump explained that Bessent said, “’Nope, I want to stay where I am.’ He actually said, ‘I want to work with you. It’s such an honor.’”
Bessent has become a central figure in promoting Trump’s economic agenda, from tax cuts and deregulation to the tariffs now kicking in globally.
A man with a purpose
In mid-July, Bessent was standing in a sunlit hallway at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He had just finished a panel at the inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit that Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA) organized, bringing together stakeholders in energy, the trade unions, and artificial intelligence.
Bessent said in an interview with the Washington Examiner he was thrilled with the possibilities coming from the event, opportunities he says cross all sectors in the American economy.
“It’s what I call parallel prosperity, capital and humans, and both sides can do great,” Bessent said. “People can make money, workers can have a great future.”
After spending the bulk of the time there talking to people attending the event, Bessent said he was left with the sense it had been a wild success.
“People are over the moon,” he said. “I mean, I’ve never seen anything like this.”
It was his third time in Western Pennsylvania in under a year. The first was election eve at Trump’s penultimate event at PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, which was filled with young people, such local luminaries as Roberto Clemente Jr., and a surprise endorsement from podcaster Joe Rogan.
Bessent’s second visit to the state was in May at the Irvin Plant, where Trump singled him out during his speech for getting the deal between U.S. Steel and Nippon Steel over the finish line. The president also ribbed him for not being as beefed up as the union steelworkers in attendance.
“This is on behalf of Scott, the secretary of treasury … and all the great geniuses and people we have working, and they are smart, but I don’t think you’d be a good steelworker,” Trump said deadpanning as he looked at Bessent, adding, “Scott, I’m sorry. I’m going to have to put a little more muscle content into that guy, but he’s great. He’s great at what he does.”
For his part, Bessent did a pretty good job of feigning incredulousness.
The U.S. Steel-Nippon Steel deal and the growth of the energy and AI industries take the cyclicality out of the Pittsburgh economy and bring in stability.
“It brings back the communities and fulfills the promise of this administration to Main Street America,” Bessent said.
From Main Street to Wall Street
Bessent grew up in a small fishing town in South Carolina called Little River. His father, who was in real estate, fell on hard financial times. His mother was a homemaker who often worked in the family business to help out. His parents were married to each other twice. His mother married again three more times.
“My dad was a real estate developer, and then my mom mostly stayed at home,” he explained. “And then my dad had some financial troubles and substance abuse problems, and she ran his business for a while.”
The financial hardship led Bessent to work two jobs at the age of 9, he said. He set up the umbrellas on the beach and was the busboy at the cafeteria — jobs that led him to be very supportive of Trump’s “no tax on tips” pledge during the campaign last year.
“No tax on tips is very personal for me,” he said.
Bessent said he was very interested in the world as a child and knew he wanted to be in the thick of it.
His father had the biggest science fiction collection in South Carolina, so much so that his go-to line is that, as a child, he could point to Alpha Centauri on a map before he could point to Chicago. It was a hobby Bessent said he could never quite figure out because his father never liked leaving home.
“We lived in the house he was born in, that had been in the family, however many generations,” Bessent said. “He loved serving the country in the Army, but he never wanted to leave home.”
Bessent left small-town South Carolina for Yale University after high school. He explained that he came from a very diverse part of South Carolina and that New Haven, Connecticut, was not so different.
“Plus, South Carolina has a big Yale tradition, and family has gone there,” he added.
His academic goals were journalism or computer science.
“I liked writing narratives and all that, and then always very good at quantitative things,” Bessent said. “And then I did a summer internship in investing, and it turned out that was a good combination of both.”
He still deeply loves journalism.
Funny, how?
Bessent has a way of using deadpan humor to discuss serious issues. If you are really paying attention, it is very funny. It’s something Andrew Ross Sorkin at CNBC noticed just recently at a Sun Valley Conference.
“Sorkin actually looked over at me and said, ‘I just thought you were like a professor. You are actually really funny,’” Bessent said.
“I’ve always been funny, you’ve just been grumpy,” the treasury secretary responded without missing a beat.
When I compared it to the dialogue in a David Mamet play, Bessent is thrilled. “Oh, I love Mamet, by the way,” he said.
Bessent said his humor comes from the Southern tradition of enjoying storytelling.
“Everybody always says to me, ‘You do such a great job of explaining things,’” he said. “I think a lot of it is because you explain things through stories or things that have happened or whatever. I think the other thing was important. Our family was very affluent for a couple hundred years, and then we weren’t.”
Bessent worked his way through college, holding down three jobs during summer break and at least one, if not two, jobs during the school year.
An inevitable bond
The dynamic between Trump and Bessent has a familiar feel to it despite them having worked together for only a short time. That is in large part because Bessent has known the entire Trump family for decades, even attending the funeral of Trump’s father, Fred Trump, in 1999. But that was because Bessent was best friends with the president’s late brother, Robert.
Bessent explained the family would attend New York’s Collegiate Church.
“The appeal was the pastor, Norman Vincent Peale,” he said. “So every Sunday, he got the power of positive thinking, then they went to the same Italian restaurant, and then they went and looked at every empty apartment that they had and [were] like, ‘OK, these are the repairs. This is what we got to do.’”
“So I think I understand where he’s coming from,” Bessent said of Trump. “Also, I know how smart he is, and I think my job is to try to explain to the world where he’s taking things. My job is not to tell President Trump what to do. My job is to give him options and outcomes. ‘If you do this, I believe this will happen. If you do this, I believe that will happen.’ And I understand he has a very high risk tolerance, much higher than mine.”
Bessent added that Trump “has a very high self-preservation too, and we kind of oscillate between even pushing the risk envelope.”
“He just has the most open mind of anyone I’ve ever seen,” Bessent said of Trump’s decision-making process.
So why don’t journalists who cover Trump in Washington see that?
The deadpan returns. “Oh, they don’t want to,” Bessent said. “It happens because they had no imagination, that this is the way we’ve always done it. And if you have a Ph.D. in international relations from Johns Hopkins, and the president basically turns everything you’ve been taught and the orthodoxy of 50 years upside down, and you’ve wasted your entire life.”
The walk-out list
Bessent has goals he plans to hit before he leaves this job. But the first order of business is to never let the institution own him.
“It would be very easy for the building to run you because there’s so much to do every day in terms of rolling the federal debt, in terms of all the day-to-day responsibilities,” he said. “However, there are 10 things I want to do when I walk out in January of ‘29: Establish the U.S. dollar dominance straight away out of this little mess, fix the housing market, all these other things, fix the banking system so it worked for everybody, and then having this Main Street boom.”
Did Bessent ever imagine he would be the treasury secretary?
“Not really, but a lot of the things that I ended up doing in my life for my career actually got me ready for it,” he said. “So being in international finance, in the currency market, and teaching economic history at Yale, if I hadn’t had a lot of student loans, I might’ve been a professor.”
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Bessent’s childhood may have prepared him the most, especially for how the Trump administration is covered by the press.
“I think part of it might just be the shell that I had once my dad went bankrupt,” he said. “You just kind of have a protective shell and you don’t really care what anybody says about anything.”
Salena Zito is a national political reporter for the Washington Examiner and author of the New York Times bestseller Butler: The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America’s Heartland.