Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday morning to do something I had thought was a lost art, like building Stonehenge or making a Marvel movie that doesn’t suck: he told an uncomfortable truth, directly and honestly.
It’s fair if you’re asking why I got so excited about a treasury secretary’s appearance on one of those Sunday news shows that they won’t even pay me to watch anymore, but bear with me and you’ll see why.
The modern standard for White House behavior on the Sunday morning talking head shows was set by Barack Obama’s UN ambassador Susan Rice on Sept. 16, 2012. That’s the day Rice hit all five of the big shows — including Fox News Sunday, to give you an idea of how desperate she was — to repeat One Big Lie about the Islamic attack on our consolute in Benghazi, Libya.
Rice claimed that the attack was a “spontaneous protest” in response to an anti-Islam YouTube video from a no-name rando that virtually nobody had seen, rather than a pre-planned terrorist attack. They had the no-name rando arrested. His name is Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, an Egyptian-born Coptic Christian, and everyone should remember it.
Rice’s pentafecta was the culminating act in the Obama administration’s illegal war in Libya and the lies and short-sighted decision-making it was built on. Since then, it’s been nearly impossible to see that any administration official is about to appear on any of the Sunday shows without thinking, “I wonder what today’s Big Lie is.”
Until yesterday, that is, when Bessent came right out and said the uncomfortable truth that like an addict kicking his heroin habit, there’s no easy way out of the previous administration’s addiction to multitrillion-dollar annual deficits.
“The market and the economy have become hooked, become addicted, to excessive government spending and there’s going to be a detox period,” Bessent told “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker.
“What I could guarantee is we would have had a financial crisis,” he said of the Biden administration’s reckless spending. “I’ve studied it, I’ve taught it, and if we had kept up at these spending levels that — everything was unsustainable.”
“We are resetting, and we are putting things on a sustainable path.”
Bessent even came right out and said there are “no guarantees” there won’t be a recession.
“I’ve been in the investment business for 35 years, and I can tell you that corrections are healthy. They’re normal,” he added. “What’s not healthy is straight up, that you get these euphoric markets. That’s how you get a financial crisis. It would have been much healthier if someone had put the brakes on in ’06, ’07. We wouldn’t have had the problems in ’08.”
Translation: This is going to hurt.
I’m reminded of 1981-82, when President Ronald Reagan gave Fed Chair Paul Volcker the political cover to jack interest rates up to infinity percent, if needed, to finally choke off the inflation we’d spend the ’70s mired in. The gambit was that we’d suffer a terrible recession early in Reagan’s first term but would rebound spectacularly before the 1984 elections. It was a mighty risk they took, but it paid off with 20 years of almost uninterrupted (and spectacular) growth.
Today the circumstances are different but Trump’s political highwire act — and the potential payoff — remains the same. Politically, what Trump needs to pull off is difficult at best and impossible without being brutally honest about the risks and the economic price that must be paid.
Bessent did just that on Sunday, which is as exciting as it is rare.
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