What Scott Bessent’s appointment means for Trump 2.0

00:00 05:44

Kate Andrews has narrated this article for you to listen to.

How rare it is to be given a second chance. That’s what the American people have handed Donald Trump.

His second shot at the presidency means avoiding past mistakes, which in TrumpWorld means finally harnessing the full power of the state. Even in the last year of his first term, Trump was struggling to fill all the political appointment vacancies he had at his disposal. This was the consequence of never developing a real plan for governing that went beyond chanting ‘Drain the swamp’.

This time round, things are going to be different. Trump is announcing new departments and staffing them before he even re-enters the Oval Office. We are about to see a methodical revolution in Washington D.C., which will involve taking an axe to state spending, as well as announcing a sweeping set of tax hikes, in the form of tariffs, months ahead of implementation.

The world watches nervously. Clare Lombardelli, a deputy governor at the Bank of England, issued a warning this week, suggesting such measures are ‘not a good thing’ for any country, ‘whether they are tariffs or regulatory or others’. Her very political intervention comes as Trump announces plans to impose a 25 per cent import tariff on Canadian and Mexican goods from day one (with an additional 10 per cent on Chinese imports). He has appointed Jamieson Greer as his trade representative to help him do it. Greer, the protégé of Trump’s former trade chief Robert Lighthizer, is committed to returning manufacturing and industry from China back to America at practically any cost.

It’s a cabinet full of outsiders and rebels in practically every department – apart from one. After weeks of deliberating over who would fill the role of Treasury Secretary, the President-elect has chosen the hedge-fund billionaire Scott Bessent.