Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Senate Luncheons 6/24/25
Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent talks with reporters in U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, June 24, 2025.
When Donald Trump ran for president last year, he signaled that he would not be far-right on social issues. He tried to defuse the issue of abortion rights in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade by saying that it was now up to the states, as if this preserved rights. He refused to say whether he personally opposed abortion.
And on LGBTQ rights, the Republican platform, at Trump’s request, did not propose ending marriage equality. All of this was a classic Trump feint.
Trump’s administration has worked with state officials on vigilante laws intended to punish people who seek reproductive care out of state. He has redoubled the attempt to deny federal funds to Planned Parenthood. Trump’s appointees keep trying to ban medications that induce abortion, the safest and most widespread method.
And the attack on gay and trans people keeps escalating. On Inauguration Day, Trump declared that “only two genders,” male and female, would be recognized going forward by the federal government. He signed an executive order to that effect within hours of being sworn in.
Trump has used supposed DEI excesses to attack gay and lesbian people per se, much as he has used the DEI ruse to purge Black people from senior posts. He has banned trans people from serving in the armed forces. Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth changed the name of the US Navy ship named for Harvey Milk, the gay San Francisco mayor who was gunned down in his office in 1978. Milk was a navy veteran.
That’s only the start. The Trump administration has also destroyed PEPFAR, the global initiative to combat HIV/AIDS, a personal priority of George W. Bush, which used to provide lifesaving medication to 20 million people. The pending Medicaid cuts would deny treatment to the 40 percent of HIV-positive people who now rely on Medicaid for their treatment.
All of which brings me to the case of Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury secretary and the highest ranking out gay person ever appointed to federal office. Bessent is also married, to a man, former New York City prosecutor John Freeman, with whom he has two children.
Trump’s appointment of Bessent was taken as a sign that Trump personally was not a hater. But a great deal of anti-LGBT hate is being carried out in Trump’s name.
So where is Scott Bessent’s Pride? Or his shame?
Scott Bessent leads a very comfortable and secure life. “If you had told me in 1984, when we graduated [from Yale], and people were dying of AIDS, that 30 years later I’d be legally married and we would have two children via surrogacy, I wouldn’t have believed you,” Bessent told the Yale alumni magazine in 2015.
Lucky Scott. Nobody is threatening to take away his children or destroy his livelihood, or deny him treatment for illnesses. He has immense influence as perhaps the most mainstream of Trump’s senior advisers.
Bessent’s advice has spared Trump embarrassment and political damage, on a range of issue, from carrying out self-defeating intemperate threats to raising tariffs to confiscatory levels to declaring war on Fed Chair Jerome Powell. So you might think Bessent would be willing to spend a little of his ample political capital by asking his president to lighten up on gays, lesbians, and trans people who are far more vulnerable.
But apparently not. The assault on LBGT people continues. Last week, HHS eliminated funding for a trans suicide hotline. The administration also continues its pressure on corporate America not to support Pride events.
So where is Scott Bessent’s Pride? Or his shame?
I would ask the same thing of influential African Americans in Trump’s administration. Except there aren’t any.
