Bessent and Freeman in 2014, when Bessent worked for George Soros, and below in the Oval Office with President Trump and Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, this week

PATRICK MCMULLAN

SAUL LOEB/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

He has been a donor to Democrats, including Al Gore, the party’s presidential nominee in 2000, and for much of his career in finance he worked for George Soros, a billionaire sponsor of liberal causes who is portrayed on the American right as a figure slightly worse than the devil.

Bessent is also self-effacing and technocratic by nature, in an administration otherwise packed with people who appear to feel at home in a television studio. Sent out before the cameras on Wednesday to explain President Trump’s surprise decision to pause tariffs on nearly every country that had come into effect hours earlier, he stood erect and stiff, struggling to make himself clear. He speaks from the back of his mouth, as if he is trying to swallow his words even as he says them.

“The markets didn’t understand,” he said. “I think now the market understands that everything they saw … was a ceiling, and now we have a 10 per cent, we have a temporary floor … so I think we have more certainty.”

Bessent grew up in a small town in South Carolina. His mother, Barbara, was married five times. Bessent’s father, Homer, was her first and third husband, and described as the great love of her life. He was an estate agent; when he fell ill in the 1960s Bessent’s mother took over the business, in what an obituary later called “a most unusual feat for the era”.

Barbara Bessent died in 2021

Bessent’s father had “the largest science fiction collection in South Carolina”, Bessent told The Money Maze podcast in 2023. “Not a high bar,” he acknowledged, “but my dad loved to talk about it and we would sit and look at the stars, try to imagine things, [like] are there people on other planets?”

He has also spoken of his father’s financial difficulties, saying that watching people carry furniture out of a house that your family has owned for 200 years focuses the mind on stability and security.

As a boy he considered joining the US Naval Academy, but was unwilling to lie about his sexuality at a time when being gay was still prohibited in the military, according to the Wall Street Journal. At Yale, where he studied political science, he hoped to become a journalist and ran for the editorship of the college newspaper. “I didn’t get it,” he told an alumni magazine in 2011. “I kind of locked myself in a room for a month.”

Then he tried applying for a summer spot with a New York money manager, who said he would allow interns to live in the office too, sleeping on a sofa. It was “the same kind of research you do in journalism”, he said. “My approach is to start with an abstract concept and then look at the empirical data.”

Frequently, in later life, while talking about the hedge fund he founded, he would feel moved to correct the impression that he was running a think tank. He was recruited by Soros in 1991. The following year, he was part of the team that made an enormous bet against the pound, later blamed for causing the currency’s crash and Britain’s withdrawal from the European exchange-rate mechanism.

He worked for Soros until 2000, and again from 2011 until 2015.

He and his husband, John Freeman, married in 2011 and besides raising two children, had a hobby of doing up historic properties, including a grand stucco building in Charleston, a former bank, known locally as the “pink house”.

The “pink house” in Charleston, South Carolina

JEFFREY GREENBERG/GETTY IMAGES

For a long time “in a certain geographic region at a certain economic level, being gay is not an issue”, he told the alumni magazine in 2011. But “if you had told me in 1984 … that 30 years later I’d be legally married and we would have two children via surrogacy, I wouldn’t have believed you.”

Last year he emerged as a prominent Wall Street donor and adviser to the Trump campaign. For several years after the attempted insurrection of January 6, 2021, financiers had shunned Trump. “The Wall Street guys were always coming back,” Bessent told the New Yorker in June. He began talking, publicly, about the benefits of tariffs and warning of chaos on the markets if Kamala Harris became president.

In 35 years in finance, “I have met leaders from around the world and Donald Trump is the most sophisticated politician and leader of a movement that I have met on economics and trade,” he said in an interview on The Roger Stone Show in November.

As Treasury secretary, Bessent was expected to be a voice of moderation and he is widely seen as the man who talked Trump into a 90-day pause on the “reciprocal tariffs”, in favour of a blanket 10 per cent for everyone but China. Standing outside the White House this week, he said Trump had shown “great courage” in announcing his tariffs and then partially rescinding them a week later, in the face of mounting panic in the markets. “He and I had a long talk on Sunday,” he said. “This was his strategy all along.”