How Treasury’s Bessent Went From Soros Employee to One of Trump’s Top Lieutenants

One of the most prominent defenders of the Trump agenda during the president’s second term has been the Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent.

A relative unknown on the national stage prior to being tapped for the post, Bessent, 62, has quickly become one of the president’s most effective communicators. A recent poll found him to be the most popular Cabinet member in the second Trump administration. 

Bessent was born in Conway, South Carolina, to a real estate investor father and into a family that descended from the French Huguenots. Bessent’s pathway to success would take him for a time north although in time he would return to his native Palmetto State.

After graduating from high school, Bessent attended Yale College, where he studied political science and earned the John Proctor Clarke Prize for outstanding service and leadership. 

Indeed, the young South Carolinian’s career in finance was not always apparent. In college, Bessent served as the news editor of the Yale Daily News. It was only after losing the race to be editor-in-chief of the paper that he applied to intern for a well-known money manager and Yale alumnus named Jim Rogers.

“A lot of what you do is the same kind of research you do in journalism. My approach is to start with an abstract concept and then look at the empirical data, as a good journalist would do,” Bessent explained to the Yale Alumni Magazine.

After graduation, Bessent joined the investment advisory and private banking firm Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. in New York City, starting a 40-year investment career. Throughout the years, Bessent worked for several firms, including Kynikos Associates and Protégé Partners, but he probably made a name for himself as a deputy for, of all people, leftist billionaire George Soros. From 1991 to 2000, Bessent led the London office of Soros Fund Management as managing partner. In that capacity, he was a key member of the team that made the firm more than $1 billion in 1992 based on the collapse of the British pound. 

In 2000, Bessent started his own firm with money from Soros. The firm closed in 2005, and Bessent returned to Soros Fund Management as chief investment officer in 2011. He left again in 2015 with $2 billion from the Hungarian-American billionaire to start Key Square Capital Management. 

Bessent has long been a prominent ally and prodigious fundraiser for Donald Trump. He donated $1 million to the president’s inaugural committee in 2017. He also co-hosted a fundraiser in Palm Beach, Florida, that raised more than $50 million for Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.

Bessent has sought to clarify the president’s goals when it comes to his tariff policy. He told Tucker Carlson in a recent interview,

“The Democrats had this strategy called ‘compensate the loser.’ So, first of all, the name of that strategy. I don’t think the bottom 50% of Americans are losers,” he said.

“I think the system hasn’t worked for them. I think that they are winners. It’s just a bad system. So, we are going to fix the system. And look, they want good jobs. They want their kids to do better than they did. They want to own a home. They want to pay down their debt,” he explained.

Bessent insists that the president’s tariff policies are designed to bring back prosperity for many Americans. “This administration cares. And this is the first step toward realigning that,” Bessent explained. 

Bessent is known to have a high net worth with a personal financial disclosure estimating his assets at more than $500 million. While being fifth in line for the succession to the presidency no doubt has its prestige, it remains true that many wealthy Americans take pains to avoid the harsh spotlight of politics. So, in that sense, Bessent takes a page from the Trump playbook, risking criticism and forsaking further fortune for public service. Indeed, the two American leaders follow a long line of wealthy Americans in public service that began with President George Washington and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. 

As he was rising through the financial capital ranks, Bessent became active in philanthropy. Bessent funded the McLeod Rehabilitation Center at the Shriners Children’s Hospital in Greenville, South Carolina. He has served as trustee for Rockefeller University and was an adjunct professor of economic history. Bessent’s Yale connections are such that he was sworn into office by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who also went to the Ivy League college. Bessent taught a class about the Great Recession to undergraduates as the financial meltdown was happening.

Bessent has said publicly that he was motivated to enter public life because of government overspending. 

“The market and the economy have just become hooked, and we’ve become addicted to this government spending,” Bessent told CNBC.

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