Who is Scott Bessent?

Well, he’s Secretary of the Treasury under Trump. But what about the man, not the title?

“Bessent, according to an interview in the Yale Alumni Magazine in 2015, never imagined he’d be able to get married as a gay man, and have children via surrogacy. It’s a comment that is quite jarring considering that, a year later, he’d support Trump— and is now working for him:

 

“In a certain geographic region at a certain economic level, being gay is not an issue. What’s fantastic is now, people in the rest of America, whether blue collar or white collar, have access to everything. 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.

 

“But who made it possible for Bessent to marry, and have children?

 

“Not the Republicans he was supporting—nor Trump. And not the current Supreme Court Trump created, which, if the issue came to them now for the first time, would never rule for marriage equality. And everything they’re doing now is in fact chipping away at the Obergefell ruling, allowing for discrimination against gay married couples in public accommodations.

 

“It was gay and lesbian activists, putting their own bodies on the line, who fought for Bessent’s rights, and Democrats, who finally took up the mantle that got marriage equality legalized in the states and then eventually upheld by the courts. Marriage equality was opposed by the GOP—and still is opposed among most of those Republicans in Congress, and among Trump’s powerful Christian nationalist base—and we’ve seen Trump stripping LGBTQ history from government websites, removing anything with the word “gay,” targeting queer people in attacks on DEI and ending LGBTQ health initiatives.

 

“Bessent, who once served on the board of God's Love We Deliver, an organization founded to deliver meals for homebound people with AIDS, is now part of an administration that is literally killing people with AIDS, having stopped lifesaving HIV drug treatments for millions through the decimation of USAID. And Bessent is watching the abominable things this administration is doing to transgender people, destroying lives, denying they exist.”

But Bessent’s influence begins and ends at Treasury, right?

“Bessent could have influence on Trump regarding LGBTQ rights if he wanted. Curiously, we’ve not seen, for example, the Trump administration attacking Yale University the way it is attacking Harvard. Could that be because Bessent sits on the university council at Yale? In fact, he and his sister donated the Bessent Library to Yale, and Bessent has endowed three scholarships at Yale. Sounds like he might be protecting his alma mater from Trump. But he couldn’t care less about helping his own people under attack.

“Bessent got his—his money, his marriage, his children, his homes—and now, opportunistically, he’s making a name for himself helping the very president who is harming LGBTQ people and so many other minorities every day, in addition to endangering democracy and sending the economy into a downward spiral, causing hardship for millions of Americans. There aren’t enough words to describe this kind of immorality.”

https://www.signorile.com/p/scott-bessent-the-immoral-opportunist