Donald Trump to tap Scott Bessent for Treasury secretary, ending fierce battle for key job: sources
President-elect Donald Trump will name hedge fund mogul Scott Bessent as the next treasury secretary, four sources tell The Post, ending a rough-and-tumble race that saw fierce jockeying among power players across Wall Street.
Bessent “got the thumbs up” late Thursday during a meeting with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., one source close to the situation told The Post.
A flurry of last-minute media report have floated a slew of candidates. Late Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that financier Kevin Warsh had met with Trump on Wednesday about the Treasury post — and possibly replacing Jerome Powell as Fed chairman when his term expires in 2026.
Trump also met about the Treasury role with Marc Rowan, the billionaire boss of buyout firm Apollo Global Management, at Mar-a-Lago earlier this week.
Bessent, the 62-year-old founder of Key Square Group, has repeatedly backed the president-elect’s pro-tariff stance in a series of op-eds and media appearances over the past year.
“If you want to bring a genius into that job who is loyal to the president, Scott is the right guy,” one source close to the situation told The Post.
One faction of Trump World had been pushing for Bessent for weeks, trying to outmaneuver Howard Lutnick — the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald and co-chair of Trump’s transition team — in what had reportedly escalated into a bitter “knife fight” for the coveted role.
One insider, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Lutnick, who was a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election, was eventually handed the post of Commerce Secretary “to calm things down.”
After Lutnick exited the Treasury race, sources said Trump continued to do interviews to see out his options. Bessent and Rowan were both spotted at the private members club on Wednesday.
A source briefed on Rowan’s interview, however, said 62-year-old Rowan was “an anti-tariff guy and that was a non-starter for the president.”
Another staunch Trump loyalist and a major donor, billionaire hedge fund boss John Paulson, ruled himself out of the race just one week after the election.
A native of South Carolina, Bessent previously served as chief investment officer for George Soros and was instrumental in the Hungarian-born money man’s “Black Wednesday” trade in 1992.
The bet against the British pound “broke the Bank of England”, raking in an eye-watering $1 billion payday for Soros that cemented his reputation as a titan of global finance.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Bessent said Trump’s second presidential term would usher in “a revitalized economy for all Americans.”
He lashed out at the Biden-Harris administration for presiding over four years of “reckless spending” that has seen Uncle Sam’s debt pile hit an eye-watering $35 trillion this year.
“The Biden administration’s mismanagement has created serious challenges that Mr. Trump will need to overcome,” Bessent wrote on Nov. 10.
He said the 78-year-old “has a mandate to re-privatize the US economy through deregulation and tax reform to spur the supply-side growth that he delivered in his first term.”
Large parts of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts expire next year, giving Bessent the chance to help shape fiscal policy under the incoming commander-in-chief.
The president-elect has already tapped Tesla titan Elon Musk and GOP firebrand Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency and tighten up the federal government’s purse strings.
Diana Glebova contributed reporting.