Scott Bessent resorted to unusual metaphors to defend Donald Trump’s floundering tariffs.
The Treasury Secretary offered up his last-ditch defense on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday while discussing the administration’s decision to roll back tariffs on certain food products.
When journalist Kristen Welker asked Bessent, 63, “Isn’t the fact that you’re rolling back tariffs an admission that they ultimately do drive up prices?” he quickly interjected: “Kristen, how much does your arm weigh?”
The journalist chuckled, replying: “I do not know, exactly.”
“But you know how much you weigh, and you get on the scale every morning,” Bessent continued. “Inflation is a composite number and we look at everything so we are trying to push down the things we can control.”
Rather than answer Welker’s question, the former hedge fund manager veered off into a defense of the administration’s broader economic record, arguing that energy prices are flattening and predicting that other prices will follow.
“I think we’re gonna see these other prices come down and again, many of these goods were part of trade deals with countries that have been in the works for months,” he said.
But Bessent stopped short of a firm answer when Welker pressed him on when, exactly, prices would fall.
“Weeks, months?” she asked.“Some are gonna come down in weeks, some are gonna come down in months,” he replied vaguely.
Trump announced on Nov. 14 that his administration was scaling back tariffs on beef, coffee, tropical fruits, and other items amid high consumer prices and growing voter frustration over affordability. The move also came as the Supreme Court expressed skepticism about the legality of his sweeping tariffs.
“We just did a little bit of a rollback on some foods like coffee,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that same day, the Associated Press reported. He then conceded that “in some cases” his tariffs helped increase consumer prices.
Just days earlier, Trump fumed about tariff critics in a Truth Social tirade: “People that are against Tariffs are FOOLS!” before falsely claiming the U.S. was “taking in Trillions of Dollars” from tariffs.
For Bessent, this isn’t the first time he’s offered questionable explanations in an effort to defend the president’s economic agenda. Earlier in November, he was ridiculed for suggesting that skyrocketing beef prices had nothing to do with MAGA’s economic policies—and were instead caused by a supposed invasion of cows crossing the southern border.
“Because of the mass immigration, a disease that we’d been rid of in North America made its way up through South America as these migrants brought some of their cattle with them,” he said on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures. “We’re not gonna let that get into our supply chain.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the U.S. Treasury for comment.
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