Summary:
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent may be planning to cut and run after Donald Trump’s disastrous “reciprocal tariff” announcement earlier this week.
During an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Friday, contributor Stephanie Ruhle reported that the key Cabinet member is already looking for an escape hatch.
“My sources say that Scott Bessent is kind of the odd man out here and, in the inner circle that Trump has, he’s not even close to Scott Bessent or listening to him,” Ruhle said. “Some have said to me, he’s looking for an exit door to try to get himself to the Fed, because in the last few days he’s really hurting his own credibility and history in the markets.”
To be sure, Trump’s tariff policy represents a sort of defeat for Bessent, a former hedge fund manager who entered office under the delusion that he might actually succeed in stopping Trump from wrecking the economy. Should he flee the administration now, he would likely forfeit what little credibility remains.
Bessent warned other countries Wednesday not to make any rash decisions in reaction to Trump’s sweeping “retaliatory tariff” policy, which included a 10 percent baseline tariff on almost every country in the world.
“My advice to every country right now is: Do not retaliate. Sit back, take it in, let’s see how it goes. Because if you retaliate, there will be escalation. If you don’t retaliate, this is the high-water mark,” he warned.
Bessent’s warning came off particularly clueless given that democratically elected foreign leaders are likely beholden to their electorate, who won’t take lightly to Trump’s blatant bullying.
Ruhle’s sources told her Bessent must understand just how ridiculous Trump’s tariff policy is because he “actually understands how the markets work, and what’s happening right now is only going to hurt markets,” she said.
And it already has: The Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq Composite experienced their single worst sessions since 2020 on Thursday. Bessent’s nomination had received strong Republican support because of his experience with financial markets.
In this scenario, it may actually good advice - we don’t have one victim here. We have a bully that’s been successfull enough that he’s trying to bully the whole school. While he could never stand up to a united school, you can’t control whether all the victims will stand up.
However bullying everyone is unsustainable. Nobody has time for that. Any victim that stands up too tall will get the bully’s focused attention, while victims that kind of roll with it will be quickly forgotten about and ignored. The most important thing for the bully is to say “I win”, and it doesn’t hurt you for him to say that
I experienced considerable extremely violent bullying at one stage in my life.
Here is what I learned: turning the other cheek doesn’t work. A baseball bat does. Escalation wasn’t a risk, it was the solution. It just depends on who’s doing it and how decisively.
For sure, but all the other vulnerable kids kept their heads down and were just grateful that they weren’t getting the same attention you were