Donald Trump's Pick for Treasury Head is a Gay Billionaire

Donald Trump has announced billionaire investment manager Scott Bessent, a gay man and recent MAGA convert who has supported Democrats in the past, as his choice to serve as Treasury secretary.

CNN profiled the nominee, writing that "Bessent would be the first out gay Treasury secretary, as well as the first LGBTQ Senate-confirmed Cabinet member in a Republican administration, according to The Associated Press."

Trump appointed Scott Grennell as acting director of national intelligence in 2020, but the Senate did not confirm that appointment.

"In 2021, Biden administration Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg became the first out gay Cabinet member confirmed by the Senate," CNN went on to note.

Bessent has not been shy about declaring who he is. The Associated Press recalled that, "In 2015, Bessent told the Yale Alumni Magazine: 'If you had told me in 1984, when we graduated, and people were dying of AIDS, that 30 years later I'd be legally married and we would have two children via surrogacy, I wouldn't have believed you.'"

Bessent "lives in South Carolina with his husband, John Freeman, a former prosecuting attorney in New York City," The Advocate detailed. "They have two children."

Something else that might raise MAGA hackles: "Before becoming a Trump donor and adviser, Bessent donated to various Democratic causes in the early 2000s, notably Al Gore's presidential run," the AP recalled. "He also worked for George Soros, a major supporter of Democrats."

When it comes to his fiscal philosophy, Bessent seems to be tacking against prevailing sentiments from economic experts; the AP noted that he "has backed extending provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which Trump signed into law in his first year in office, though estimates from various economic analysis of the costs of the various tax cuts range between nearly $6 trillion and $10 trillion over 10 years."

Bessent has blamed the Biden administration for the soaring deficit – though the nation's debt soared during Trump's first term – but has acknowledged that the country's "debt and deficit is going to be the big issue of the day." His solution, the AP relayed, is "spending cuts and shifts in existing taxes to offset the costs that the tax extension would add to the federal deficit."

Announcing Bessent as his pick for the post, Trump said in a Nov. 18 statement that "Scott has long been a strong advocate of the America First Agenda," and declared, "On the eve of our Great Country's 250th Anniversary, he will help me usher in a new Golden Age for the United States, as we fortify our position as the World's leading Economy, Center of Innovation and Entrepreneurialism, Destination for Capital, while always, and without question, maintaining the U.S. Dollar as the Reserve Currency of the World."

The Advocate warned that "Trump's pick of a gay man as Treasury secretary doesn't mean his new administration won't be a threat to LGBTQ+ people, especially transgender people."

The publication noted that on the same day he named Bessent, Trump "chose Russell Vought as director of the Office of Management and Budget," and pointed out that "Vought is a coauthor of the deeply anti-LGBTQ+ Project 2025, a blueprint for conservative government that Trump has claimed to know nothing about."

Project 2025 explicitly presses for the repeal of marriage equality and goes so far as to seemingly recommend that accounts of the transgender experience be categorized as "pornography," with anyone disseminating such stories labeled as "sex offenders."

As MSNBC noted in an article on Project 2025, the 900+ page manifesto declares that, "Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children" whose "purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women."

The relevant section of the document declares, "Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered."

MSNBC noted that "'transgender ideology' is a broad enough term to not just cover specific books that some parents might find objectionable, but the very idea that people can be transgender."