What Do Trump’s Potential Treasury Picks Think About Tariffs?
Kate Nishimura
6 min read
While President-elect Donald Trump has been moving at a breakneck pace to staff his cabinet, he continues to mull his pick for Treasury Secretary as of Friday morning.
Tasked with devising and recommending economic and tax policies for the domestic market as well as the country’s dealings abroad, it’s a job with serious implications for U.S. businesses and the economy. That influence will be underscored by Trump’s unconventional economic platform—one that relies on the levying of substantial tariffs on goods from China and across the globe to offset the cost of expansive tax cuts.
Trump’s campaign promises already have some members of the industry up in arms; Walmart, America’s biggest big-box retailer, said it anticipates raising prices if the new duties take effect early next year. As such, the incoming president is likely looking for a steady force who can keep market confidence up and alleviate companies’ impulses to implement panicked price hikes.
But he won’t make a Treasury pick who bucks his international tariff strategy, either.
Trump’s outside-the-box thinking on the issue has undoubtedly added complexity to the appointment process. A number of names have emerged as contenders, but by Thursday, most political outlets were reporting that the president’s roster had coalesced around four options.
Key Square Group founder Scott Bessent has been repeatedly floated as a favorite. The hedge fund manager who notably worked for George Soros’ Soros Fund Management has extolled the virtues of tariffs, penning an op-ed for Fox News last week wherein he referred to the left’s “misleading talking point that tariffs are a ‘sales tax.’”
“Like much of economists’ conventional wisdom, this view is fundamentally incorrect,” he added. “The truth is that tariffs have a long and storied history as both a revenue-raising tool and a way of protecting strategically important industries in the U.S. President-elect Trump has added a third leg to the stool: tariffs as a negotiating tool with our trading partners.”
“Used strategically, tariffs can increase revenue to the Treasury, encourage businesses to restore production and reduce our reliance on industrial production from strategic rivals,” Bessent wrote, signaling his readiness to carry out Trump’s orders if tapped for the role of Treasury Secretary.
Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) is also on the shortlist as of this week. Hagerty, who served as Ambassador to Japan during Trump’s first term, accompanied the president-elect to a SpaceX launch in Texas on Tuesday. The former private equity investor, who’s served as an executive or a board member at a number of corporations, was rumored to be in the running for the Secretary of State position before Trump tapped Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.
He also appears to be on board Trump’s tariff train. “I’m fully aware of the concerns surrounding tariffs, but let me make this point. The United States of America has the lowest tariff barriers of any major economy in the world. The converse of that statement is that our major trading partners do not have the similar tariffs, they have much higher tariffs,” he said during an interview with Bloomberg Television in August.
“We have a real lack of reciprocity. That’s not fair. That’s something that needs to be addressed. Many of these issues date back all the way to World War II, but there’s come a time and a place to step up and address them,” he added. “President Trump wants to see them addressed we want to see more reciprocal and fair trading terms, the time has come to get that accomplished.”
Apollo Global Management co-founder and CEO Marc Rowan has also emerged as a top contender in recent days. The Financial Times reported that the executive is a favorite of Trump’s top Wall Street donors, and he rushed back from a trip to Hong Kong to meet with the president-elect in Florida on Wednesday.
Rowan and Trump share the experience of being alums of University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, but there’s little public evidence to show that he shares his passion for tariffs. Like Bessent, he has extensive experience in the financial sector, but none in government.
While Trump prides himself on being a Washington outsider, the Treasury Secretary role appears to be garnering significant consideration within the transition team. Politico called the Treasury “the one institution that Trump can’t afford to break.”
That may be why Kevin Warsh, a former Federal Reserve board member who served during the Bush administration, has been pushed to the fore this week. Dow Jones subsidiary MarketWatch wrote that Trump may also be eyeing Warsh as a replacement for Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell when his term is up in 2026.
Warsh, who is more mainstream GOP than MAGA, disagrees with some fundamental elements of the Trump doctrine, like the importance of free trade.
He’s been critical of Trump’s 1.0 tariff strategy, writing in the Wall Street Journal in 2019 that the “isolationism” propelled by “auguring new tariffs and trade restrictions the world over” would do “great harm to our economic growth prospects.”
While he’s not angling for a spot on the Trump team, Chinese President Xi Jinping is also lobbying against the tariff agenda.
At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) CEO Summit in Peru last week, he seemed to cast himself in the role of champion for global economic collaboration and prosperity, sounding alarm bells about growing trends toward protectionist trade policies. During a speech delivered by an interpreter, he used the word “globalization” 14 times.
“Unbridled unilateralism and protectionism and an increasingly fragmented world economy threaten to reverse the trend toward economic globalization,” he said, noting that “the world is in a new period of turbulence and transformation.”
“Economic globalization is an objective requirement of growing social productive forces. It is a natural outcome of advancement in science and technology and a mighty historical trend,” he added. “The attempt to block economic cooperation under all sorts of pretexts and break up the interdependence of the world is nothing but backpedaling.”
While he never mentioned Trump by name (or President Joe Biden, who has also levied tariffs on China-made goods), Xi painted the trade policies of China’s skeptics and adversaries as repressive and regressive.
“We must reject the beaten path that a few countries have taken to pursue dominance and hegemony,” he said. “Economic globalization is caught now in a tug of war between driving and obstructive forces, but the driving forces still prevail.”
