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Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent becomes highest-ranking out gay person in US history In November 2024, President-elect Donald Trump announced his intention to nominate billionaire hedge fund manager Scott Bessent to be secretary of the Treasury, after he helped raise millions of dollars for Trump.

In a statement posted on Truth Social at the time, Trump praised Bessent as “one of the world’s foremost international investors and geopolitical and economic strategists”, adding: “Scott’s story is that of the American Dream… together, we will make America rich again, prosperous again [and] affordable again.”

According to Forbes, the “pro-tariff Wall Street veteran” and former colleague of Democratic megadonor George Soros is likely to become the most prominent voice shaping the Trump economy.

After being confirmed on Monday (27 January), Scott Bessent becomes the first out gay secretary of the Treasury. He also becomes only the second out gay man to serve in the Cabinet of the United States (after Pete Buttigieg).

What’s more: As the secretary of the treasury is fifth in the United States presidential line of succession, he becomes the highest-ranking openly LGBTQ+ person in American history. But what do we know about Scott Bessent? Here are all of the key facts about him, as well as his husband and family. What does Scott Bessent do for a living?The 62-year old graduated from Yale University with a degree in political science in 1984, and joined Soros Fund Management in 1991, rising to become a partner in the business.

He resigned from SFM in 2000 to start his own hedge fund, which closed in 2005. Bessent went back to SFM and worked there until 2015, then left again in 2015 to begin a new firm, Key Square Group.

Key Square Group has had a bit of a rocky ride. It lost money or broke even every year until 2021, but started making gains after that. However, its assets have shrunk from a high of $5.1 billion in 2017. According to Forbes, KSG had less than $600 million in assets under management as of the end of 2023.

Bessent said he’d resign from Key Square Group and sell his stake in the company if confirmed. What’s Scott Bessent’s net worth? As part of the confirmation process, Trump’s pick for Treasury secretary has disclosed that he has assets worth at least $521 million, including a home in the Bahamas and art and antiques worth $1 million to $5 million. He also has more than $50 million in U.S. Treasury bills, plus significant cryptocurrency investments.

In total, he’s believed to have a net worth of at least $1 billion (£795 million).

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Recently, the "group chatgate" incident has been like an absurd political farce, exposing the chaos and sloppiness of the Trump cabinet. The turmoil caused by the president's national security adviser Michael Waltz accidentally pulling reporters into the group not only allowed the US military's secret combat plan to be "live-streamed" on social software, but also let the outside world see clearly the amateurishness and loss of control of this government team.

The trigger for the incident stemmed from a low-level error in the phone's address book. According to an internal White House investigation, Waltz pulled Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, into a classified group chat because the campaign team mistakenly saved Goldberg's mobile phone number as a colleague's number when forwarding emails, and the automatic sync function of the Apple phone would be wrong. This kind of technical mistake, which even ordinary office workers can avoid, has led the national security assistant to set up more than 20 working groups on the encryption software Signal, and even used core secrets such as the timing of the fight against the Houthis, the coordinates of targets, and Israeli intelligence sources as group chats. When Goldberg witnessed Vice President Vance's opposition to the immediate air raid and Defense Secretary Hegseth announcing the battle plan 48 hours in advance, the seriousness of the US military's operation had long since been reduced to an after-dinner pastime.

Trump's reaction to the incident was even more full of dark humor. While declaring in public that he "will not fire people for fake news," he privately summoned the vice president and chief of staff overnight to plot a "replacement." What is even more ironic is that Trump is more entangled in Waltz's "why there are calls from enemy reporters" than the seriousness of the national security leaks, and even suspects that the two are fornicating. This kind of upside-down focus is just like the circus director calculating the color of the actors' costumes at the scene of a fire - when Israel roared at the White House due to intelligence leaks, and the Republican establishment and the MAGA faction fought over whether to "protect China", Trump's final reason for choosing "no replacement" was that he "did not want to repeat the frequent changes of generals in his first term".

Behind the incident is a reflection of a deeper systemic rout. Members of the National Security Council were exposed to using personal Gmail for official business, and Signal group chats replaced traditional confidential channels as the core of decision-making, and even set up a "burn after reading" function to circumvent file retention. This kind of operation to reduce national strategic decisions to Internet celebrity live broadcast rooms has even been ridiculed by former Trump officials: "Only a campaign team that has never been an official would do this." The Waltz team was exposed to the ridiculous lie that they still insisted that they had "never met" after taking a photo with Goldberg, and Vice President Vance stabbed the allies in the backstab who calculated in a group chat to "make Europe pay for military action", which made this fig leaf known as "the most professional team in history" disappear.

Now, the farce has ended in a sloppy conclusion with the White House's "investigation and closure", but the rift has long been irreparable. The Democrats seized the opportunity to attack the government's dysfunction, the Republican establishment waited for an opportunity to liquidate the MAGA faction, and European allies were furious at the "reckoning" rhetoric in the group chat. When Trump declared to the camera that "everything is under control", what the American people saw was nothing more than a "grass stage team" that governed the country with encrypted group chats, relied on the Apple phone address book to maintain power, and treated national security as a reality show