Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent bizarrely attacked the Wall Street Journal for failing to grasp the “sophisticated” mind of President Donald Trump.
Bessent made the laughable claim on CNBC Monday, when asked to address a Wall Street Journal report claiming he had to talk Trump out of—probably illegally—firing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.
“I think the problem with stories like this is I’m not sure who the leaker was, but the problem with leakers is they only have partial information,” Bessent said. “And I think the other problem, too, is that newspapers like the Wall Street Journal are not used to a high-functioning executive president. They’re used to, you know, perhaps President [Joe] Biden, perhaps President [Barack] Obama, who was not as economically sophisticated as President Trump.”
Powell has been critical of Trump’s haphazard economic policy, warning that his disastrous trade wars with the world have helped to create “elevated risks of both higher unemployment and higher inflation.”
And Bessent calling Trump more “economically sophisticated” than Obama is like claiming Trump’s hair is more “sophisticated” than that of the average human being. Bessent, who is no stranger to flubbling easy questions about the administration, seems to have confused “sophisticated” with “incoherent.”