Someone described Scott Bessent, Donald Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, as a “peace offering” to Wall Street.

I think that’s sort of right in the sense that Trump did need someone who can occasionally run interference. Parts of Trump’s agenda are anathema to the neoliberal world order in which corporate America thrived, bottom lines swelled and bankers banked. Tariffs make everybody in polite circles nervous, and Bessent runs in polite circles.

On the other hand, Trump’s going to cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations and he’s promised sweeping deregulations. The MAGA agenda, for all its populist propagandizing, isn’t inherently unfriendly to Wall Street. Quite the opposite. Tariffs aside, Trump’s avowedly pro-business and views the Dow as a real-time barometer of presidential success. (Incidentally, his affinity for the Dow versus the S&P strongly suggests Trump knows about as much about the US equity market as he does about everything else, which is to say not a lot.)

Suffice to say Trump’s concerned about, and committed to, placating Wall Street, however you want to define “Wall Street.” The question was whether Trump 2024 understood the necessity of underwriting that commitment with a sane pick for Treasury Secretary. Trump could’ve chosen (and for all we know, might’ve considered) Krusty The Clown for the job and no one would’ve questioned whether he (Trump, not Krusty) still cared about Wall Street. The debate was around whether Trump, four years post-Mnuchin, appreciated the risks of putting someone clownish in that post. The Bessent pick suggests he does still have some conception, however vague, of those risks. And that’s a good thing. For Wall Street, yes, but for everyone else too.

Say what you will about Steve Mnuchin, but he did the job, and pretty well all things considered. I don’t like saying that any more than a lot of you like reading it, but if you go back and make a list of top Trump officials from his first term and then remove from that list those who failed or were fired, leaving only those who lasted and were some measure of successful, you’ll come away with a “list” of one: Mnuchin. Laugh at myself as I must while saying this, Steve stepped up during the early days of the pandemic. Really he did. And “big league.” Or “bigly.” I’m not saying Steve gets a pass for his role in covering for, and otherwise propping up, America’s first authoritarian leader, but what I am saying is that he did as good of a job under the circumstances as anyone could reasonably expect from someone determined to stay in that job.

Given the worsening partisan rancor inside the Beltway and the increasingly perilous brinksmanship that bitterness imparts upon the debt ceiling debate, putting a clown at Treasury had the potential to raise the odds of a technical US default materially. In the lead-up to the 2024 election, the term premium widened out in a re-run of the rebuild witnessed following the 2023 Fitch downgrade. At some point next year, Treasury will have to start lifting coupons again. If you thought the long-end selloff that accompanied the 2023 term premium scare was rough, put Matt Gaetz in charge of the QRAs and see what happens.

And that’s just one risk. Others include shouting matches through interpreters at trade negotiations with Xi Jinping’s economic team, Brett Kavanaugh-style exchanges with adversarial lawmakers on the (relatively frequent) occasions the Treasury Secretary’s called to Capitol Hill and on and on. Don’t forget: Treasury runs the sanctions program. That regime is very, very complex and you need a “very, very large ah-brain” to manage it.

So, no matter how badly Trump might’ve wanted to install a gunslinger at Treasury, someone (several someones) impressed upon him the desirability of a stability nominee. Howard Lutnick wasn’t a stability nominee. He would’ve shaken things up — as Elon Musk suggested — and Treasury isn’t really the place where you want a lot of shaking. Don’t feel too bad for Howard. Trump gifted him Commerce, a pretty sweet consolation prize.

Bessent’s nomination means Kevin Warsh lost out on a chance to replace Janet Yellen for the second time in half a dozen years. If I had to guess, he’ll end up getting the Fed Chair job he was considered for in 2018 once Jerome Powell’s term ends.

In nominating Bessent, Trump described a man who’s “widely respected as one of the World’s foremost International Investors and Geopolitical and Economic Strategists.” (Prepare for four years of inexplicable capitalization for common nouns.)

Trump’s praise for Bessent isn’t inaccurate, exactly, but it’s overstated. Bessent’s no legend, and I’m not sure he’s a “geopolitical strategist,” but he’s no idiot either. And that’s saying a lot for a Trump pick.

As most readers are aware, Scott was George Soros’s CIO for four years, after which Soros gave Bessent $2 billion to start Key Square Capital. Soros is the new right’s bête noire and he’s the arch nemesis of Viktor Orban, whose “illiberal democracy” in Hungary is the blueprint for Project 2025.

It’s hard to overstate the irony here: The idea of a Soros protégé in charge of Trump’s Treasury at a time when the right’s hell-bent on a plan to “Orbanize” American democracy in a second Trump term, is about like Kamala Harris choosing Marjorie Taylor Greene for Secretary of State.

Expect everyone in Trump’s orbit — and every right-wing think thank, media outlet and blogger — to assiduously avoid any and all discussion of that exceedingly glaring incongruity.

But Scott does fit the new-right mold in other respects. For example, he’s happily married with two children. The “problem”: Scott’s wife is a man. Or Scott’s a wife. I’m not sure which, but either way, they’re not going to love it in some parts of MAGA country.

That Bessent’s a married gay man is every bit as fine with me as it is with all of America’s other liberals, but I can drive 30 miles down the highway from where I’m sitting right now and walk into a truck stop diner where I can assure you Scott and his husband wouldn’t be welcome. (Guess who everyone in that diner voted for?)

In Bessent, Trump will boast the first Republican LGBTQ+ cabinet member. And you can take “boast” literally. Trump will almost invariably brag about Scott being a married gay man in an effort to further expand and diversify a MAGA coalition that was far broader than Democratic pollsters were aware of prior to this month’s election.

I can hear the exchanges with reporters now. “Mr. President, what do you say to members of the LGBTQ+ community who feel you haven’t done enough to protect their rights?” “First of all, LGBTQ+ loves Trump, but just so you understand, the Treasury Secretary’s gay, ok?” “Sir, that wasn’t the que–” “Excuse me! Excuse me. Scott, get up here and tell these people how gay you are.”

Just to be clear: Trump, who the new American right holds up as a kind of Orban on steroids — and who Orban himself praised as the only man who can save the world — has just nominated an LGBTQ+ Soros money manager to run the US Treasury. I love it. I absolutely love it.

Setting aside all the sweet irony that’ll be a bitter pill for some in the MAGA crowd, I think Scott’s going to do fine in the Treasury role with one caveat: He can’t be a sycophant. And so far — which is to say in his capacity as one of Trump’s top economic “advisors” — that’s what we’ve seen and heard from him.

In a WSJ Op-Ed published earlier this month, Bessent jeered two-dozen decorated economists who had the nerve to suggest tariffs and mass deportations might be a bad idea. “Twenty-three Nobel laureates warned that Donald Trump’s economic agenda would be disastrous,” he wrote. “Let’s hope none of the Nobel laureates adjusted their retirement portfolios; otherwise their 401(k)s may be suffering as badly as their reputations.” (Sick burn, Scott. You should’ve been that writer you wanted to be after all.)

In recent weeks, Bessent garnered criticism in some circles for floating the — self-evidently dangerous — idea that Trump should name Jerome Powell’s successor ASAP so that he (or she) could act as a “shadow Fed Chair” until Powell’s term ends. I assume that was just a ploy to curry favor with Trump. Bessent probably won’t push that now that he won Treasury and if Warsh (assuming he’s in line for Powell’s job) has any sense about him, he’ll explain to Trump why it’s a terrible idea.

Bottom line: Bessent should prove capable in the role, but only if he’s willing (and allowed) to do the job like he knows how to do it. Scott could be the most capable guy in the world, but it won’t matter if he’s just another yes-man. Mnuchin, against all the odds, did the impossible during Trump’s first term: He faithfully executed the duties of a critical US government office while remaining obsequious enough vis-à-vis Trump to stay in charge of that office. Let’s see if Scott can do the same.