Meet Scott Bessent, Gay Nominee for Trump's Treasury secretary

Just came out of a coma, didja?

R1 no, dumbass. Just sharing the newly posted NYT article

R1, I didn't know. Glad we have representation at a high level.

R2 we “met” him weeks ago. Learn to read the threads.

A capitalist with a soft spot for royalty. A deep-rooted Southerner with a fondness for stylish New York locales. A gay man, married with children, who has embraced a Republican Party that has sometimes vilified elements, and individuals, of the L.G.B.T.Q. movement.

Such are the crosscurrents coursing through the biography of Scott Bessent, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick for Treasury secretary. The appointment would give him vast power over the nation’s economic plans — and place him fifth in line for the presidency, potentially the highest governmental position ever held by a gay person.

A hedge-fund titan with a formidable professional pedigree, Mr. Bessent, 62, has been a quiet presence in New York’s social scene since the 1990s, when he worked for George Soros, the liberal megadonor and financier, eventually managing tens of billions of dollars in assets.

He counts among his friends a group of elegant socialites and women of the world, Capote-ian swans of a different era, including the president-elect’s former sister-in-law Blaine Trump, Princess Firyal of Jordan and Queen Camilla, whom he once hosted at his Hamptons home — and forced to smoke her cigarettes outside. He is friends, too, with King Charles III, who has regularly hosted him at Buckingham Palace.

Mr. Bessent no longer has a home in New York City, and is instead schooling his two children, Charlotte and Cole, ages 11 and 15, in London with his husband, John Freeman, a former assistant district attorney in the Bronx, whom he married in 2011. The family also has homes in Charleston, S.C. — the state where Mr. Bessent was raised — and in Lyford Cay, a gated community in Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas, which advertises itself as “one of the Caribbean’s most elegant and exclusive enclaves.”

But Mr. Bessent’s family history is also pocked with hardships, including two bankruptcies for his father — a decade apart, in 1969 and 1979 — and the 2022 death of his younger sister, Wyn Nicole Bessent, who had worked as a public defender and seemingly lived a simpler life far removed from her brother’s glittering existence.

Mr. Bessent’s outward gentility masks an aggressive monetary mind. His rise to financial fame came as a result of a bold move: helping Mr. Soros bet against the British pound in the early 1990s, a billion-dollar wager that paid off for both him and his employer. Since then, Mr. Bessent has been a big-dollar donor to a range of philanthropic causes, though his generosity has known limits: In 2010, he sued a former romantic partner, William Trinkle, over an overdue loan worth $2 million — plus interest. The case was later settled, its terms unknown.

Once a reliable Democratic supporter, Mr. Bessent’s politics moved right as he aged. But unlike Mr. Trump’s other outspoken choices for his cabinet, he has kept a low-key public profile, with a negligible presence on social media: Mr. Bessent does not have an account on X, Instagram or Truth Social, Mr. Trump’s preferred platform.

Mr. Trump’s post on Truth Social announcing Mr. Bessent’s selection made no mention of his husband, Mr. Freeman, 62, who grew up in the Bronx. Mr. Freeman was an athlete (football, rugby) whose father died young, and he attended Fordham University and night classes at Brooklyn Law before joining the Bronx district attorney’s office.

Like Mr. Bessent, Mr. Freeman later worked in hedge funds, with postings in London, Paris and New York, before going into private practice and — in a far cry from the bright lights — agribusiness in North Dakota. The couple were married in Provincetown, Mass., the famed gay getaway, in a ceremony overseen by a justice of the peace. The guest list was private, but included Mr. Freeman’s mother, a 98-year-old Frenchwoman who still lives with the couple.

The fact that Mr. Bessent is gay was hailed by some Trump supporters as proof that fears among Democrats — and L.G.B.T.Q. groups — about a second Trump administration were overblown. “I guess Trump isn’t anti-LGBTQ as so many on the left tried to convince us,” wrote Michele Tafoya, a conservative podcaster and former sports broadcaster.

But some of Mr. Trump’s most extreme backers — including Nick Fuentes, an outspoken white supremacist who dined with Mr. Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022 — took issue with both Mr. Bessent’s sexuality and his former association with Mr. Soros.

“Bessent is a homosexual hedge funder manager who worked for George Soros for 10 years,” the pile of human feces known as Mr. Fuentes wrote. “Swamp remains undefeated.”

Mr. Bessent’s mastery of the market has not always been assured: He left Mr. Soros’s fold to run his own fund but shuttered it, returning as Mr. Soros’s chief investment officer in 2011. He began his second fund, Key Square Group, in 2016, making a splashy debut with some $2 billion from Mr. Soros. But he manages far less now, and has had mixed luck in recent years. Mr. Soros has since withdrawn his money, according to Reuters.

Mr. Bessent — once called “reclusive” by The New York Post — declined to be interviewed. His propensity for privacy extends to places like the Hamptons, where he attracts little of the gossip that envelops some of the see-and-be-seen residents. There and elsewhere, he has been a guest at the homes of fellow millionaires like Wilbur Ross, but rarely at galas or other paparazzi-friendly occasions.

“He was out and about, but not to every lit candle,” said R. Couri Hay, a New York City publicist and a longtime society columnist for Hamptons magazine, adding he had never heard of Mr. Bessent “giving pool parties or anything.” Mr. Hay added: “He is a quiet, reserved, conservative figure that doesn’t flaunt his money or his power or his access. And, as such, he has garnered a great deal of respect.”

However, Mr. Hay said, Mr. Bessent’s looming role in the Trump administration may change that. “There’s been some surprise in the community at his appointment,” Mr. Hay said. “Nobody was really expecting that.”

Politics and Property

Like Mr. Trump’s first Treasury secretary, the film producer and investment banker Steven Mnuchin, Mr. Bessent began his ascent at Yale University, where the two men were classmates and both worked at the student newspaper, The Yale Daily News. While there, Mr. Bessent left a pleasant and apolitical impression.

“I personally found Scott to be smart, soft-spoken and a mensch,” said Joanne Lipman, the former editor in chief of USA Today, who worked with Mr. Bessent at The Daily News and served with him on the Yale University Council.

Mr. Bessent captured a series of plum posts during college — including class treasurer and president of Wolf’s Head, one of the university’s famed “secret” societies, but also faced disappointment: He was passed over for the editor-in-chief job at The Daily News, according to a 2015 interview in Yale’s alumni magazine, a failure that seemed to bring both depression and a re-evaluation of his future. “I kind of locked myself in my room for a month,” he said.

The next semester, he went to a career office and noticed that a money manager in New York City “was looking for an intern,” and the job came complete with “a place to stay on the office sofa.” His ascent from the couch to more corporate confines was swift: In the early 1990s, he joined Mr. Soros’s firm, and was central to the attack on the Bank of England and the British pound, urging an even more ruthless approach to the deal than other Soros advisers, according to “More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite,” by Sebastian Mallaby.

“We could push the bank against the wall,” Mr. Bessent recalled in an interview with Mr. Mallaby.

Mr. Bessent’s success with Mr. Soros coincided with the emergence of two of his lasting interests: backing politicians and buying property. He began donating to Republicans — including Senator Mitch McConnell — in the mid-1990s, according to federal campaign records, though he also soon backed Democrats like Bill Bradley and Hillary Clinton. In 2000, he hosted a fund-raiser for Al Gore at his Hamptons home.

But he steadily gravitated back to more conservative politicians, eventually donating $1 million to Mr. Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee, though his close connection with the president-elect — including helping raise funds — was only cemented more recently. In April, Mr. Bessent attended a splashy fund-raiser at the Palm Beach home of John Paulson, a hedge-fund billionaire and an acquaintance of Mr. Bessent.

In August, Mr. Trump, long known for his obsession with personal appearance and with the stock market, brought Mr. Bessent — tall, and handsomely gray — onstage at a rally in Asheville, N.C., calling him “a nice-looking guy” and “one of the most brilliant men in Wall Street.”

At the rally, Mr. Bessent said he believed that a victory by Vice President Kamala Harris would “start with the Kamala crash in the stock market and then it will be the Kamala crash in the economy.” He then predicted a Trump victory. Mr. Trump beamed. “He is central casting,” he said.

That “Master of the Universe” image extends to his love of high-end real estate. Over the years, Mr. Bessent has owned property at all manner of famed addresses: an apartment in the Dakota on the Upper West Side, bought from the estate of the ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev, complete with 14-foot ceilings and wood-paneled halls; an 11-room duplex at One Sutton Place South, once owned by John F. Kennedy’s sister, Patricia Kennedy Lawford; and a 10-bedroom, 11-bathroom and seven-fireplace manse in the Hamptons known as Wyndecote, which he sold in recent years.

Mr. Bessent’s closest connection with the Trump family is to Blaine Trump, who is godmother to his daughter; both have also sat on the board of God’s Love We Deliver, founded in the 1980s to deliver meals to people living with AIDS. God’s Love is one of a number of L.G.B.T.Q. causes he has supported, including the Elton John AIDS Foundation and the Empire State Pride Agenda, a now-defunct New York lobbying organization.

The pick of Mr. Bessent for a high-level role has led to some guarded optimism from Democrats who are hoping he could potentially mitigate some of the anti-gay rhetoric of some Republican politicians.

“It’s not traditionally a job that sort of migrates into other policy areas that would be of concern or top of mind to the community,” said Jon Reinish, a Democratic strategist who is gay. “That being said, representation matters. And having a very senior cabinet official who is gay, is married and does have children, hopefully his perspective and his experience will be looked upon with respect.” Kelley Robinson, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy group, echoed that, saying that while her group believed Mr. Trump’s previous administration was “a threat to the rights, freedoms and lives of L.G.B.T.Q.-plus people,” Mr. Bessent’s new role could be an important one.

“We need pro-equality L.G.B.T.Q.-plus nominees and L.G.B.T.Q.-plus people at all levels of government,” Ms. Robinson said in a statement.

Mr. Bessent plans to move to Washington if confirmed, and just days before the election, he put another high-end home on the market: a pink-hued, three-story, colonnaded mansion in downtown Charleston that has a pool, a carriage house, four bars and a library. The asking price? Some $22 million.

Mr. Bessent is registered to vote as a Republican in South Carolina, and his connections with the state date back generations. The 2022 obituary for his sister said that the family arrived there in 1672, and included some of the area’s English settlers as well as “several Huguenot families as ancestors.”

He has one living sister, Paige McLeod Bessent; his parents are deceased. According to their obituaries, Mr. Bessent’s father, Homer, was a real estate developer in Myrtle Beach, S.C., and a hunter with a fondness for Carolina shag dancing; his mother, Barbara, helped run the real estate business and had “an affinity for Siamese cats, vodka martinis with ice on the side and beach music.” The couple believed in second chances: They married, divorced and remarried. Mr. Bessent’s father’s bankruptcies seemingly drove his son to work from an early age (Mr. Bessent says he took his first job at age 9, setting up beach chairs) and later caused him to advocate for teaching financial literacy.

Mr. Ross, who served as Commerce secretary during Mr. Trump’s first term and has known Mr. Bessent for decades, said he believed that Mr. Bessent’s background “gives him a personal depth and perspective that people in the hedge fund business who just go from New York to Palm Beach or New York to Miami really don’t have.”

Mr. Ross added: “He has a very calm personality, especially for a hedge fund guy. Many hedge fund guys are truly volatile characters. And I would characterize Scott as being anything but volatile.”

Mr. Bessent’s demeanor may have tipped the job in his favor, observers say, over more divisive figures like Howard Lutnick, the brass-knuckled chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald whom Mr. Trump chose as Commerce secretary. Indeed, Mr. Bessent’s selection was met with surging stocks from Wall Street.

For his part, Mr. Bessent has spoken little publicly since his selection, and when he has, he has kept his focus on discussing financial matters, with little indication of how he would operate inside Mr. Trump’s cabinet. Once a professor of economic history at Yale, Mr. Bessent recently told Bloomberg News he was “boring enough that I could quote the size of government all the way back to Alexander Hamilton.”

But he also seemed to understand that his new boss — like his old one — would expect results. “I think Donald Trump,” he said, “is always going to make his opinion known.”

A little frosty Miranda Priestly over the glasses glare here

LOL at people who think this guy will help the LGBT community. Hitler had gay people working for him. Didn't stop the Nazis from going after gays

Remember...

Not bad looking -one has to admit Trump has picked a far better looking cabinet then his first round or Biden.