Trump Goon Melts Down at Journalist Over ‘Gossip’ Report
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has publicly attacked a journalist for daring to report on him dragging the Federal Reserve into President Donald Trump’s effort to prop up a foreign currency.
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Bessent, 63, melted down Wednesday in a high-brow post that called out Nick Timiraos, the chief economics correspondent at the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, by name.
“One of the highlights of the Warsh Fed has been watching stenographers posing as journalists, like the WSJ’s Nick Timiraos, reduced to reporting Fed backroom gossip because they’re incapable of performing real economic or monetary policy analysis without being spoon-fed,” Bessent wrote.
The former hedge fund manager, worth an estimated $600 million by Forbes’ calculation, was set off by a relatively straightforward report that detailed his request that the apolitical Fed expand a lending program that would allow Japan to prop up the embattled Yen.
It is unclear why the piece, headlined “Why Bessent Is Leaning on the Fed to Help Prop Up Japan’s Currency,” prompted Bessent to accuse Timiraos of being “spoon-fed.”
In fact, Bessent had publicly urged the Fed on X to expand the lending program—a Fed backstop created to address the 2020 dollar shortage—as part of Trump’s effort to help Japan arrest the slide of its currency without disrupting the already-sensitive U.S. Treasury market.
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Bessent may have taken issue a suggestion that the Trump administration could be encroaching on the Fed’s independence—a touchy topic after Kevin Warsh, Trump’s hand-picked Fed chair, took over at the central bank in May.
Timiraos wrote that Bessent’s request that the Fed help the Trump administration in its effort to support the Yen “invites scrutiny of where Treasury’s authority ends and the Fed’s begins—a boundary made more delicate by the change in Fed leadership.”
The veteran reporter also quoted Derek Tang, an economist at the research firm Monetary Policy Analytics, who noted, “The Fed is very cautious when it comes to doing things that look like they’re veering into foreign policy or fiscal policy.”
Tang said that the Trump administration’s joint intervention with Japan in its currency “does seem to be a very political project by the administration, and the question is: Is it the Fed’s role to enable that?”
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The Treasury Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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