As if Scott Bessent wasn’t angry enough already.
The Treasury secretary, in the headlines in recent days for allegedly threatening to smack one of his colleagues in the face, now finds himself in damage control mode after the release of a brutal Bureau of Labor Statistics report on Tuesday—the latest sign that Donald Trump may not be ushering in the economic “golden age” he previously promised.
On Tuesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics issued revised job-growth estimates, sharing that more than 900,000 fewer jobs had been added for the year ending in March 2025. Much of the time span covered in the report was before Trump took office, as Bessent was quick to point out Tuesday. “President Trump inherited a far worse economy than reported,” he posted. But the ugly outlook is being exacerbated by Trump’s trade war and unpredictability—and runs counter to his lofty campaign promises to “end inflation” and start “saving our economy,” beginning on “day one.”
That’s bad news for the president, whose poll numbers are on the decline as voters express concerns about their pocketbooks. It also puts pressure on Bessent, who has positioned himself as a force of calm and stability in the administration and succeeded, to some extent, in keeping markets steady amid Trump’s threatening of the Fed and firing of the BLS chief over numbers he didn’t like. “President Trump was elected for change, and we are going to push through with the economic policies that are going to set the economy right,” Bessent said Sunday on NBC News’ Meet the Press. “I believe by the fourth quarter, we are going to see a substantial acceleration.”
But it’ll be a new challenge to maintain market confidence as the economic alarms continue blaring. And his fights—perhaps in the literal sense, it turns out—with fellow Trump officials would seem to undercut his self-styled “adult in the room” persona.
The most recent conflict, first reported by Politico on Monday, was with Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, who is leading the charge against Lisa Cook, the Federal Reserve board member whose firing Trump announced over social media. As the outlet reported, Bessent confronted Pulte at a well-attended dinner at DC’s Executive Branch club, with the secretary addressing rumors that Pulte had been bad-mouthing him to Trump. “Why the fuck are you talking to the president about me?” Bessent reportedly asked Pulte at the dinner. “I’m gonna punch you in your fucking face.”
“I’m going to fucking beat your ass,” he threatened, for good measure.
It wasn’t the first clash between Bessent and another administration colleague: Bessent also reportedly got into a fiery shouting match over the Internal Revenue Service with Elon Musk, who at the time was taking a “chain saw” to the federal government as the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. (There was enough speculation that the shiner Musk sported at a White House event was courtesy of Bessent that the Treasury chief went out of his way to publicly deny responsibility. Musk, for his part, said the injury came from playing with his young son.)
The last time Trump got a bad BLS report, he fired the bureau’s then commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, and not long after nominated agency critic E.J. Antoni to replace her. If that doesn’t get him the kinds of numbers he’s looking for, perhaps a visit from his hot-tempered Treasury secretary could do the trick.
