Scott Bessent Is Selling You a Lie

On May 5, 2025, The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed by U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent titled "Trump's Three Steps to Economic Growth." The article masquerades as policy explanation but functions more accurately as political marketing—a glossy defense of an agenda already deep into its demolition of institutional norms, economic credibility, and democratic coherence. What makes it particularly galling is that it's authored not by a party spokesperson or campaign flack, but by a man who holds a central role in Trump’s second administration—a man who was not a bystander but an architect. Bessent is trying to recast his complicity in an administration defined by chaos, cronyism, and constitutional contempt as a serious-minded economic strategy.

Throughout the piece, Bessent leans heavily on the rhetorical contrast between Wall Street and Main Street, using the latter as a kind of moral fig leaf for policies that overwhelmingly benefit the ultra-wealthy.

"The president recognizes the critical role Wall Street plays in financing the American dream. But it’s Main Street’s turn to share in the prosperity."

This is a claim that crumbles under scrutiny. Trump’s first-term tax cuts disproportionately favored the top income brackets and large corporations. The promise that these cuts would "trickle down" to the working class never materialized. Wages remained stagnant for most of the population, and wealth concentration only intensified. By presenting the same policies again under the guise of a "rebalance," Bessent isn’t proposing a new strategy—he's repackaging a failed one.

"Tariffs are an effective tool for balancing international commerce. They reduce trade barriers in other countries, opening more markets to American producers while also bringing back thousands of manufacturing jobs."

This claim contradicts established economic research and the administration's own record. The tariffs imposed during Trump’s first term sparked retaliatory actions, increased input costs for American manufacturers, and failed to produce any meaningful resurgence in domestic industry. In fact, many of the manufacturing jobs supposedly "reshored" were offset by losses in agriculture and export-heavy sectors caught in the crossfire of trade wars.

"Mr. Trump’s tax reforms will improve the quality of life for Americans harmed by reckless trade policies."

Again, the reforms Bessent references—particularly the permanent extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act—are tilted toward the wealthy. The claim that these reforms are aimed at repairing the damage of trade liberalization is intellectually dishonest. Bessent helped craft and promote these tax structures during Trump’s first term. They were not designed to mitigate the fallout of globalization but to reward capital over labor.

"Removing harmful regulations will allay the national debt and result in savings for individuals and businesses."

Deregulation does not "allay the national debt" unless it coincides with dramatic revenue increases or spending cuts—neither of which are present here. More to the point, the cost of deregulation is not abstract. It manifests in environmental degradation, workplace hazards, and systemic risk. Repealing so-called "Biden-era regulations" isn't costless; it externalizes those costs onto communities, workers, and future generations.

"This is how we restore the working class, re-establish the U.S. as an industrial powerhouse, and right the wrongs of lopsided trade policies."

The working class doesn’t get restored through press releases and glossy op-eds. It gets restored through tangible gains—wages, protections, healthcare, housing. Bessent's argument amounts to sleight-of-hand symbolism without substance, an invocation of the working class as rhetorical cover for a playbook that continues to serve elites.

The article never acknowledges the damage done by Trump’s erratic first term: the catastrophic mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic, the undermining of the Fed, the attempts to coerce private companies into political fealty, or the capital insurrection that Trump incited and Bessent now seeks to airbrush out of the economic narrative. Bessent's framing deliberately omits the costs of instability, legal uncertainty, and reputational harm that Trump's governance inflicted on the U.S. economy.

Even more disturbing is Bessent's own role in all of this. As Treasury Secretary, he is not merely reporting policy—he is shaping it. Every misleading claim he makes here is not an error of analysis but a deliberate act of narrative construction. His job, after all, is not simply to implement policy, but to justify it. And in this piece, we see that justification stripped of any serious concern for its downstream effects. He is using the platform of the WSJ to provide intellectual cover for an agenda that is extractive, regressive, and fundamentally dishonest.

The Wall Street Journal's decision to publish this op-ed—unquestioned, uncontextualized, and devoid of any balancing commentary—is a failure of editorial judgment. Bessent's piece is not a neutral description of policy developments. It is a partisan artifact. By treating it as a conventional opinion column, the Journal colludes in laundering Trump's economic narrative into something resembling mainstream credibility. It isn’t. And no amount of glowing statistics about short-term job growth or cherry-picked data points about gas prices will change that.

This is a shell game. A bait-and-switch. And Scott Bessent is not a neutral analyst explaining it. He’s the dealer running the table.