Trump Needs a Genius for Treasury Secretary to Stave Off National Bankruptcy. Enter Scott Bessent

Economics isn’t my beat. You could sum up my priorities in the bumper sticker I once had printed up: “Arm the Unborn to Guard the Border.”

It didn’t sell, just as the social issues really didn’t really sell in the recent election as much as the economy and border security did. I was as dismayed as most of you that the pro-life movement proved to be ineffective and unpopular, leading the GOP to shove its priorities if not quite under the bus, certainly to the back of it. Issues of life, sexual politics, and even religious liberty didn’t move the needle for most voters.

But their day-to-day misery and sense of national collapse had more of an impact. The same Democrats who want to castrate kids and abort fetuses on the very brink of birth also want to open the borders to tens of millions of high school dropouts, strangle our energy industry, and waste uncounted trillions on corrupt or crackpot boondoggles — from high-speed railways to nowhere to Potemkin infrastructure projects, and the Green New Deal’s plan to Make the Dark Ages Real Again.

Let us thank the good God that their Gadarene madness wasn’t selective, that the same spirits which sow chaos and violence in the bedroom cause poverty and ruin in the marketplace. If you can’t smell the spiritual decay, you get the drift from all the hobo poop piling up along the sidewalks.

It’s the economy, stupid. Most people, as surveys showed, voted with their pocketbooks. They remembered that they were doing pretty well under Donald Trump, and saw nothing but ruin at the end of the Democrats’ primrose path.

Man Does Not Live by Bread Alone. Nor Can He Live Without Any.

Should that make us tut-tut at all those voters, look down on them as materialistic and worldly? Absolutely not. We live as embodied creatures in a fallen world, where we earn our bread by the sweat of our brows. The Old Testament is rife with God promising material, economic benefits as the fruit of spiritual blessings. In the gospels, Jesus forgives sins and feeds the multitudes, drives out demons, and heals the sick. There’s no radical break between the material and the spiritual; the two are intertwined inextricably, just as water is needed for baptism and wheat for Holy Communion.

If you support an economy with exploding inflation, wages flattened by an endless influx of cheap labor and outsourcing to sweatshops, with innovation and efficiency strangled by an apocalyptic climate cult, then you don’t love your neighbor. Full stop. Whatever utopia you treasure inside your head, you love that more than the actual human beings who live all around you. And you don’t belong in government.

Who does? People who care about the actual, concrete well-being of their fellow citizens, who’ve done the brain-bleeding work of closely studying the market economy in its present, post-modern form — and who’ve proven that by succeeding in the highest realms of finance while still supporting sound, patriotic policies. Policies aimed at promoting the common good, not the interests of their fellow high-flying jetsetters.

It seems as if Donald Trump has found someone to take the most consequential economic seat at his table as Secretary of the Treasury. A leading candidate for that job is the brilliant Scott Bessent, who’s currently the frontrunner, news sites report. What’s so special about Bessent? I’ll take the word of one of the most trustworthy, fearless journalists still working, Darren Beattie. He writes:

Bessent’s international career has brought him into contact with central bankers, finance ministers, and heads of state from around the world. His long experience with international bond and currency markets means that no contender for the U.S. Treasury’s top spot understands the contours of the international financial system and the weaknesses of other countries’ financial and trade networks better than Bessent. Unlike the other contenders for the role, Bessent supported Trump’s immigration and tariff policy. He is perhaps the only potential player at the U.S. Treasury who could plausibly implement these policies without destroying the global trade system. If the U.S. implements an across-the-board tariff, preventing retaliation from our major trading partners will be key, and Bessent is the only candidate for the Treasury Secretary position who has given serious thought about how to do this.

Unlike much of the economic team in Trump’s first term, e.g., Gary Cohn and Dina Powell, Bessent broke with Wall Street in 2016 to raise $1 million dollars for President Trump’s first presidential inaugural committee and several million dollars for his second successful campaign. He advised Trump in the 2024 election and, it almost goes without saying, has been on the record as opposing Biden’s inflationary central planning proposals, including green energy and DEI mandates across the federal government.

Beattie notes that Bessent came from modest means. He graduated from Yale in the same class as Eric Metaxas and Naomi Wolf — worthy company. Then he went on to a brilliant career in international finance, even at one pointing working for George Soros — back when Soros wasn’t really political, and was still amassing the billions he would later employ for evil purposes. That might make you nervous, until you think about this: We need people of Soros’s caliber who understand his methods if we are going to beat him. You don’t bring Forrest Gump to a chess tournament.

Bessent is one of the few top economists to take with grim seriousness our insane, debt-fueled spending which daily impoverishes our grandchildren, or guarantees an Argentina-style national bankruptcy and Weimar-level hyperinflation. He’s not just on board with Trump’s policy ideas; he’s personally loyal and extraordinarily able. That’s why he’s backed by Steve Bannon, Ralph Reed, and a long list of other longtime MAGA activists.

If Trump picks Bessent, he will continue his mostly stellar list of announced and likely Cabinet appointments, such as Tulsi Gabbard, Matt Gaetz, Stephen Miller, and many others. (We’ll have to give Trump a Mulligan for picking Kristi Noem. He’s a sucker for a pretty face.)

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.